Usual Year-End List Mania
Last night, the ABC aired “Australia’s Favourite Album,” a top-ten publicly voted list of rock ‘n’ roll records, with a panel commentary. The full 100 list has a lot more satisfaction to it, for me, than the top ten, because while I’ve heard at least songs from the albums, I’ve only ever sat down and listened to the entirety of two of them, Jeff Buckley’s Grace and (because I was a college student at the time and every dorm room had a copy) Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Australia’s number 1.

As the panel noted late in the program, not a woman in the ten, not a single non-white person. Carol King comes in at 18, with Tapestry, of course (did she record anything else?), and Prince’s Purple Rain at number 61. If we discount for “Australian Idol” and the “latest release” phenomenon, the list is pretty typical, and it was no surprise that that particular Pink Floyd album was at the top or that Sgt. Pepper’s was included, since the Beatles were sure to be represented. Abbey Road may be a little bit of a surprise, but only because of “Octopus’s Garden”, although at least it doesn’t ever get played, even by Ringo). Still, very few women, very few black people, no Aretha Franklin or any of the soul greats, and the Velvet Underground only edging over the line at 100 despite the undisputable fact that everyone who ever heard their record at least wanted to start a band of their own.

I voted for Brian Eno’s Another Green World, but I’m neither surprised nor disappointed that it didn’t turn up. Even I don’t listen to it that often.

Library Notes
Last night I stayed up a little longer than I’d originally planned, because I had only twenty pages or so left in the book I was reading and I wanted to finish it. This is only the second book by David Malouf I’ve read, the first being Johnno, which is probably the traditional starting place. I wasn’t a fan, but when I was desperately pawing through the office stack of shared books, setting aside the James North Patterson and such, picked up Remembering Babylon based on simply the awareness that Malouf is highly regarded and the blurbs on the cover indicating he’d been shortlisted once for the Booker and this particular book had been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the local prestige award.

The story centers on a small community’s collective and individual encounter with a kind of “wild child,” or, as it was expressed in the American Old West, a renegade; that is, a white man raised by the aborigines. His presence brings to mind the white community’s alienation from its surroundings, at least for some, and allows Malouf to explore the themes still plaguing Australian consciousness, land rights, the “Sorry” campaign, the denialist, revisionist history of colonization being perpetrated by certain academics. Nothing too explicit, nothing too deeply written into, but well-managed just the same, although the renegade’s portrayal is a little on the overly magical side, which is why, ultimately, it isn’t a major work. That, and the rather abrupt forward jump in time across fifty years and only a romantic reminiscence to tie things together.

This is, however, the first Australian novel I’ve read to address the pre-Federation period, so I’m not aware of anything better out there. Still, if what you’re interested in is Australians’ relationship to their past and the place of the aborigines, my preference at this point is Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth, even though there isn’t an aborigine anywhere in it.

Yet Another First-Run Movie
While M. was out for a bit of socializing, I took the opportunity to see Children of Men, a movie I didn’t think she’d like, howsoever much she may have been interested in it. I was right about that, but it shouldn’t take anything away from the movie itself, which, while not great, is very affecting and very good indeed. Julianne Moore doesn’t have a lot to do in it, but then neither does anybody else, really, although I guess that’s kind of part of the point and really they’re all doing such good work that you hardly even notice, sucked into the situation and the characterizations right from the start. There’s plenty of tension, understated exposition, effectively detailed settings, and anti-action sequences that leave you holding your breath. So much hopelessness that even by the end, you’re not sure if there’s any hope left, and that’s kind of the point, too. I don’t know about the original P.D. James novel, but I assume the filmmakers have opted to make it all that much more topical, if only with particular pointed references to Hezbollah-style Islamic militarism, Iraq, and torture. But while such current-affairs touch-points do their job, the larger point isn’t lost to politics. We are so cruel to one another, so devoted to our cruelty; but if we suffer, there’s someone else who suffers more, because that’s who we made them to be.

Oh, Shut Up, All of You
Not really, but I made the mistake of "upgrading" my blogger template, which means that my haloscan.com comments feature has been lost, at least until I can figure out where it goes. I'm putting things back in, but it could take a little while, especially the third party stuff.

On the other hand, I rather like some of this new content management. Look: post labels.

(Meanwhile, I'll switch on Blogger commenting, just in case.)

The Energy Debate We Had to Have
With our PM, John Howard, pretty well committed to the development of nuclear power generation (despite the preference in some states not to have these things foisted off in their jurisdiction – although that concept has been seriously damaged by the recent High Court decision on Howard’s “WorkChoices” override of states’ rights), should it be surprising that we’re not part of the new US$12.8 billion fusion development project? Not really, since it will take decades, and the next federal election is much sooner than that.

Besides, nuclear power, fusion or fission, won’t save us from bush fires - or will it? That’s part of the selling point, after all, that nuclear energy would increase “clean” energy production and thereby reduce global warming contributions in Australia.

Update: Former Telstra chief, Ziggy Switkowski, who headed up the report to his good friend, John Howard, on the viability of nuclear power, says the waste wouldn't be more than would fit in a household bathroom. Ziggy, mate, how's about we put the stuff in your bathroom? Seriously, I get the idea he just made it all up.

National Service
Charles Rangel wants to reinstate the draft? I expected it from the Republicans, but to have the new, Democratic, Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee propose this is a bit of a shock. O.k., he’s been a supporter of registration for a long time and often proposed putting the draft back in place, but c’mon, the draft? Really? And he wants to extend mandatory military service to age 42. Sure, that might catch some of the Fighting 101st Keyboarders, as the on-line chickenhawk brigade are known, but, c’mon, really, the draft? Who’s he working for? O.k., now that Kissinger’s weighed in to say Iraq can’t be won, a bigger troop commitment seems like a good idea now? Not that Chuckie’s proposing the start up conscription right away, but keep in mind that the GOP did activate the Selective Service some time back, just in case. Oh, this sounds bad.

Little Miss Sunshine
We made our first cinema excursion in months yesterday to see this movie, and we’re very glad we did. There isn’t much plot as such, but the dialogue’s terrific, the acting is top-notch, the picaresque occurrences along the way very funny, the characters well-defined and playing off one another brilliantly. It’s all one big set-up for the gag at the end, but the payoff’s worth it, all the dots pretty well connected at last for a painfully funny send-up of all your expectations. What’s that Tolstoy line about happy families?

Politics as Usual
This is no time to be playing politics. While the 2008 Presidential election season is, effectively, already in progress, and so fund-raising matters, governmental ethics are long past due for a serious clean-up effort. Let’s have it, Democrats: let’s go all-out on ethics reforms. The Republicans may block parts, but not if they don’t want to be seen as the party of corruption they let themselves become. But it’s not just about who benefited from the K Street Project or who didn’t. Democrats are just as prone to abusing the loopholes as anyone else. God knows, Murtha’s got a rep for cosying up to the GOP when it suits him, and everybody loves some legislative pork. I’m with Obama: it’s about putting some bite in the rules. Then let’s move on to campaign financing.

R.I.P.
I only got to one game when I was at Michigan, but it was at a time when Bo Shembechler could do no wrong. What a coach.

Environmental Indecision
While fires rage in the Blue Mountains, down in Tassie and Victoria, there’s snow, and more to come, with last night the coldest in Sydney for this time of year in a 100 years, too. Aberrant weather isn’t necessarily a proof of global warming, unless it becomes a pattern of its own, but maybe it’s just as well that our beloved PM has adopted a new(ish) position on the matter.

Justice for All
It's not just about a 'fair trial' or whether he's making use of the appeals process built into the U.S. justice system, as Ruddock and others persist in saying, but whether he is a legitimate prisoner of war or an Australian citizen eligible for repatriation and the benefits of Australian law. Like the British citizens Tony Blair retrieved from their legal limbo, David Hicks deserves the support of his government.



Here’s an Amnesty International video (produced by our friends at Ether Productions).

Rummy Dummy Spit
Rumsfeld’s out, apparently in response to the Democratic majority in Congress (say, wasn’t it just this week that George II was going to “stay the course” with his Defense Secretary?), and Robert Gates is in. What is it with Bush and all these former Iran-Contra crooks? Can’t he bring in anyone to his administration but the worst of the Reaganites? First, Negroponte, now Gates. Who’s next? Ollie?

What an astute move by our lame duck Executive.

(Meanwhile, what can we expect from the first 100 hours? Nancy Pelosi’s agenda sounds pretty good.)

Too Bad, So Sad; But in Other Races, I’m Glad
There are many more returns yet to come in, but while Lieberman may have succeeded in his Senate bid (and I’d have given up any hope for a majority just to see him lose), at least we’ll have gotten rid of that devil’s minion, Rick Santorum. I remain hopeful for Virginia, too, where the Webb-Allen race is still close, with 96% reporting and only a 1% difference between the candidates, and Montana, where Tester's showing an early lead. Missouri looks like it'll go Republican, as does Tennessee, although they could both still swing.

???? [It's supposed to be Chinese for "Convenience Store", but Blogger don't do that.]
Marrickville will go to a vote on whether shop signs must include English. Apparently, some residents, or Councillors, anyway, are concerned about Asian-language shop signs they can’t read. What? Do they think they’re selling crack? (???? [Again, no non-Roman characters available, so never mind, don't bother contacting the Laowai; you'll have a pretty good idea what it probably said, anyway.]) Now, I’m all for being able to find a tea-smoked duck at the lowest price, or I would be if I was eating duck, let alone wasn’t thoroughly grossed-out by the shop display usual to such places as sell it, but this is forced assimilation and a little silly. It would be indicative of a desire to integrate for such shop owners as are deliberately catering to a particular ethnicity that they include English, and I’m sure delicatessens and bodegas anywhere in the English-speaking-majority world could attest to more success by expanding their signage past Hebrew or Yiddish and Spanish. I couldn’t begin to count the number of “Sino-Latino” restaurants I used to see in NYC, and back when I lived in Queens, it was a multicultural delight to walk into the local Chinese take-out joint and find it was run by Koreans who spoke English and Spanish as well as their native language. But, again, isn’t this just (legislatively) catering to a xenophobic few, already well-serviced by shops providing for mainstream consumers, who are otherwise intimidated by an immigrant presence maintaining their cultural identity through language and custom without otherwise interfering with the day-to-day lives of anyone else? If the shop’s signage puts you off, don’t go in. Or even better, go in and ask questions. What’s this? How much is it? Etc. Buy something. The operators may realize they’re missing out on some income.

How Do You Tuna Fish?
In less than 50 years, there will be no more fish. The ramifications of Dr. Worm’s report extend far beyond whether or not our dining options will become limited, because we’re not the only ones on the planet dependent on the ocean. (We’re better off than the whales and dolphins, obviously, in this projection; they don’t farm.) Meanwhile, the Bush administration denies there’s a problem. Somehow, back in the States, the trend is improving, but tell that to the men in boats hunting cod. Or Australia, where the concern over illegal fishing is a headline-grabber. I’m waiting to hear what Johnnie thinks: it usually sounds like whatever’s just popped out of George’s mouth.

GOTV
If your voting machine is easily hacked and doesn’t produce a paper trail, that’s o.k., but it’s a whole ‘nother story if your software company owners are Venezuelan and started with the referendum to elect Hugo Chavez. Anybody else smell brimstone?

"Whatever they are"
A major highway improvement project is stalled because a colony of platypus is living in a creek along the road. Senator Bill Heffernan wants the road finished, but doesn’t regard the animals as worth holding up construction, although they are a protected species. Maybe he doesn’t think they’re real. Did I mention he’s a Liberal? Of course he is. Do any of them care for anything beyond the expedient?

More Dog-Whistling?
It’s true that here in New South Wales, the government already provides some funding for
But the federal government’s proposal to pay for school chaplains strikes me as requiring a jaundiced eye, if only because of the continuing controversy over Sheik Hilaly and the timing of Mr. Howard’s announcement. Although I’m sure the bill, should it be presented in Parliament, would make no distinction in religious persuasion, there is no more than the mere tradition of freedom of religion in Australia, and even that’s relatively modern. It seems quite clear that this is not much more than an attempt to “get ‘em young” and establish a state-sponsored theology. As one interlocutor on a previous thread expressed it, all religion is a means of repression, or can be at least, and especially when the state inserts itself into matters of faith. Schools have counsellors, but what if they become proselytizers, too? It’s issues like these that make the Greens and Democrats look so much better than the Opposition.

Discontinuing the Constitution
Now that George II can declare martial law anywhere and anytime, should we be concerned for the present restriction on holding the Oval Office to two terms? We’ve pretty much already lost Habeas Corpus, so if the Democrats fail to achieve a majority in either or both houses of Congress, can we expect Bush to resolve his Cheney problem (the guy’s never going to pass muster to run, medically) by opening the way to a third term? How far would he go – would he even suspend the 2008 election? More immediately: how does he keep getting away with this stuff?

Mufti Muff
It’s hardly on the same scale as a global religious leader denigrating the faith of millions, but at what point will the Islamic leadership learn that the world has changed, and women can dress as they please? I don’t care if Al Hilaly was sermonizing about fidelity and abstinence or not: this isn’t a Third World country (not that that matters), let alone the nineteenth century and he needs to get over it. If there isn’t any other more serious problem in Islam as a religious organization, globally or locally, it’s that the rest of the “leadership” can’t make idiots like this shut up and sit down.

Update: Deporting the creep doesn't appear to be an option, unless it can be shown that Al Hilaly has spoken to incite violence against women, and that would take a member of his congregation carrying out such a crime. Even then, it would probably be a stretch to prosecute the cleric. Really, his statement is not much more than the often-heard "she asked for it" vileness still perpetrated by more modern members of societies around the world, though no less deserving of condemnation.

Jiggity-Jig
Even as we speak, Mom & Dad are waiting in the airport (or possibly even on board the plane at this hour) to return to the U.S., although, due to the effects of time-travel, they are also already back in Los Angeles. Isn’t the International Dateline marvellous?

They’ve had a good trip, even if all they’ve seen has been Sydney and a bit of Canberra, and I think Dad feels a bit better than he may have previously about our move here four years ago, now that he’s seen the place. It is a beautiful country, with a fascinating history (that I’ve been pretty remiss in studying properly, at least its post-Federation story) and inexplicable wildlife. Why did Australia get all the marsupials except the North American possum (and why are our possums so different from the o- variety)? Why did the animals develop here they way they have with the absence of any major predators, the former thylacine notwithstanding? Why did Kerr really sack Whitlam? Some things we may never know.

While it’s my turn for an international jaunt, it will be a while yet before I accomplish it, barring any employment changes that offer me that opportunity, an eventuality now forestalled by six months, as I’ve taken up an extension to my contract here. I’d like to go back at some point, though maybe only once the Democrats are back in power.

Bizarre Food/Bizarre Ban
I’m no fan of Vegemite, but the ban on its importation – even going so far as having Customs agents preventing Australian tourists bringing the stuff in with their luggage – is just weird. Only breads and cereals can contain added folate (folic acid), a B vitamin, so Vegemite, which is mostly all about the B’s and high in folate, is illegal. What will Howard do? Can he get his mate, Bush, to rescind the ban? What will the ex-pat Aussies do? Hollywood better watch out, since they stand to lose a substantial amount of top talent when Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, et al. all decide they can’t work without their yeast-extract breakfast spread.

Damn Tourists
It all goes well so far, with Mom & Dad safely ensconsed just up the road and having a fine time. We've been walking them off their feet pretty much daily, sometimes letting them have a bus tour to let them rest a little. We hit the foreshore first, of course, and down through the Rocks, and later in the week joined them for a Hunter Valley vineyard trip that really was very good. You never know, but Boutique Wine Tours went to a couple of good wineries, from which I brought home a couple of bottles of chardonney (well, I am a leftie, after all) I'm looking forward to with relish. Today, Dad and I did the Bridge Climb, which, regardless of the price, every tourist to Sydney ought to do, and probably most Sydneysiders, for that matter. We'll send them down to Canberra, soon, on their own, and I know they'll enjoy it, but most importantly, they went to the Blue Mountains yesterday. Now, apparently, Blue Mountains Cultural Tours" are relatively new, but we chose them because Mom made the trip west last year and we thought something different from that tour would be a good idea, and these guys did the Jenolan Caves as well as the usual Three Sisters stuff. But now I can never allow them back in the country. I've been here four years, and they're in the country for four days when they see a platypus. I haven't seen one, and it's been a goal of mine from the day I first heard such creatures existed. It's just not fair. After they've gone, I'm going to have to head up to the Blue Lake and spend as long as it takes. I can't let them get away with it.

Making Water
Are we really on the verge of running out of drinking water? Years of drought and wasteful utilisation practices and other forms of mismanagement suggest it’s true. More dams won’t help, but conservation will. There are studies, there are recommendations, which, if implemented, would improve the situation, if not resolve it. We hear about these things only occasionally, and usually as exceptions, such as this or that farmer who’s managed to defeat soil salinity or the city that’s implemented a wetlands rainwater purification catchment system. There’s plenty more that could be done, products and systems installed to directly conserve water as well as indirectly. Energy production isn’t just a matter of petroleum, you know. Water plays a significant role. Everything every ordinary person can do to reduce energy consumption and water utilisation is worth doing. Year by year, the world goes into “ecological debt” sooner and sooner. I once heard it speculated that the next global conflict would not be over land or oil but water, and even considering the present conflicts in the Middle East, there’s a good deal of truth in it. Who controls the Jordan, who controls the Tigris and Euphrates? Major sources of fresh water in specific regions of desert, and the nations in conflict with one another and themselves. Will Tasmanian exports do the trick?

This Has Been a Test . . . in the Event of a Real Emergency. . . .
We’ve known that North Korea had nukes for a long time now, so the test they conducted shouldn’t be a surprise, any more so than their previous ballistic missile attempt. Everybody treats North Korea like they’re the village idiots: unpredictable, probably dangerous, but not terribly bright. A recent Robert Kaplan article in the Atlantic Monthly outlines why that kind of thinking is what’s dangerous about North Korea and takes a more forward-looking view of the eventual, inevitable collapse of the Pyongyang regime. Validation of their nuclear capacity does make the situation more immediate to the world, if no more destablising to the region than Pakistan and India trading tests was not so long ago. China does need to take more of a hand than they’ve been seen to do up to now, but in the end, North Korea seems less likely to launch a war than to leverage foreign aid and an increased period for the Kim family to hold power. We should, however, keep our heads as we work out what to do in response to the test. North Korean claims must be assessed with as much accuracy as possible. Already there appear to be reports that seismology reports are conflicting. While that doesn’t make the prospect of their atomic weapons capacity any less, it does raise some interesting questions about their claims in general and in some specifics. Was it a “neutron” device, designed for high radioactivity and a lower blast, for example.

Wringing It
O.k., so, not in the air. It seems somebody gained a day instead of losing one, and that, along with perhaps some additional math problems, have left the parental units still at home, peacefully regarding their impending departure, while I paced the bloody airport wondering what Qantas had done with my parents. No harm done, of course, as luckily the itinerary we'd planned for them had some flex. I guess I might as well go to the office tomorrow and finish one or two things I'd put on hold.

Winging It
Mom and Dad are in the air and on their way to Sydney. For Mom, it's her second trip, but Dad's coming because her first trip sounded good enough to endure the 20+ hours in the arms of Qantas. Plus, he can't let her have done a Bridge Climb and not have done it himself, so I'll be on my third go. It's a lot of fun, and I never remember the answers to any of the quizzes. Is it a million rivets or ten million? (I don't think the Bridge Climb staff really know, either.) There are a few things they have to see and I hope we can make them happen: a platypus (or platypussery, anyway), a kookaburra, and, of course, kangaroos in the wild. You can't come to Australia and settle for zoo 'roos, can you?

Let Loose the Dogs of Culture War
Earlier this week, Prime Minister John Howard gave a little speech commemorating the start-up of Quadrant, a dull, vapid opinion journal dedicated to the proposition that conservative values are only those that serve a reactionary agenda and in full opposition to any suggestion of merit in more inclusive government policies because those are only ever communism and we know about Joseph Stalin, don’t we? Now, while it’s true that from the time of the Soviet revolution and on into the ‘fifties and ‘sixites, many far-left opinions were supportive of a regime that didn’t deserve support, that ignores other, more majority-representative opinions on the left, that the arms race, for example, endangered us all, or that a policy of open engagement rather than punitive sanctions and sphere-of-influence interventionism would better (or at least equally) serve to bring about positive change in Eastern Europe, as Gorbachev’s own policies toward the end of the Cold War proved. But never mind all that, because it’s too late. School funding, Mr. Howard not long ago proposed, should be based on schools having a flagpole and flying the national flag. And teachers are evil ideologues because they oppose Mr. Howard’s policies towards the elimination of the social safety net and the gutting of Medicare. Socialist policies from a previous government driven from office by its inability to get a budget passed to pay for it, and socialism is really just communism that’s been run through the wash. And universities are hotbeds of communism, all those Red professors with tenure left over from that now discredited era still peddling their pernicious ideas like “think for yourself” and equality for women and homosexuals and ethnic minorities. Even worse, some people have the unmitigated gall to suggest that we ought to consider the institutional abuses of the past as wrong, that we should apologize for them – because they didn’t really happen, as has been proven by revisionist historians (on the basis of incorrectly cited footnotes in the work of a few other historians claiming such abuses did indeed happen). So the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, now proposes that the Federal government should take the responsibility for setting the basic educational curriculum away from the states and territories. Really, it’s all part of Mr. Howard’s strategy to eliminate federalism in Australia, which is a petulant reaction to the fact that the states and territories are governed by the opposition party. That there are – if there are – first-year law students taking remedial English (and if that’s due to some failure from their primary or secondary school years) – is not a result of ideological pedantry “straight from Chairman Mao”, as anyone familiar with the educational system can tell you, but that the system is overwhelmed, insufficiently funded, and as a result allowing kids to slip through. It’s not the curriculum, and it’s not the teachers, it’s the system, as we lefties have often had cause to point out, and unless the system is fixed, it will continue to happen. It doesn’t matter if you teach revisionist history or accurate history, whether you teach British literature or internationally sourced books, or even if same-sex parenting gets a look-in on Playschool: if the system can’t supply sufficient funding so that students get the support they need, kids will continue to progress without learning. Better pay for teachers, and not fatuous merit schemes, and more school funding (so that teachers aren’t paying for supplies from their own pockets, for one thing), would do more to attract better teachers and to keep them in the system, first of all. More and better teachers would allow more and better attention to the children. Let’s stop pretending that the curriculum is controlled by the politics of individual teachers, when what you really object to is the governments running the schools. More dog-whistle politics, whipping up the forces of division.

Abuse
Mark Foley has plenty to be ashamed of, apparently, including his lawyer, who is now offering his client’s own history of childhood abuse and sexual orientation as something like an excuse. Frankly, the latter is largely irrelevant, except in which pages would have been subjected to harassment, and the latter is only relevant insofar as it underscores why such abuse is so serious. It seems, however, that Rep. Foley wasn’t so much a perpetrator of abuse as just a creep, although that doesn’t make his actions any less improper or potentially harassing. And there’s the real issue to be addressed.

Guidelines for addressing sexual harassment are well-established in the States at this point. Most large businesses (and many small ones) have set forth policies and procedures for handling complaints, and they’re based on laws and regulations and court case precedents and EEOC-issued policy papers. For any Federal government body to fail in its duty is indicative of a serious failure of oversight. It was bad enough that we had the embarrassing admissions of the Lewinsky affair, but there’s considerable room in that incident for it to have been a matter of censure rather than a full-blown case of workplace harassment. No such leeway is evident here, particularly in the actions of the Speaker of the House.

If it’s true that he knew of Foley’s actions in 2005 and did nothing, then he would be at fault, just as liable to redress as Foley himself. Although Congresspersons are essentially independent contractors, that they identify with a party and work therein according to party directives and discipline under the supervision of the Speaker makes them functionally employees, and their employers have a responsibility hierarchically to ensure they act according to ethical standards.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert will have violated those ethics by failing to take the matter with due seriousness to the same degree and in the same kind as Foley’s actions have done. He should step down immediately pending the outcome of a properly conducted DOJ investigation.

Colossus
Independent bookstores struggle, and it’s no surprise. But for all the convenience of and discounts from the on-line retailers, sometimes a bookstore is the only way to get what you want, especially if what you want is the experience of searching for an unspecified something to read, or, as the soon-to-close Coliseum Books did for me, when you need something that only an overstuffed store will allow to stay on its shelf. That’s how I ended up with a complete set of the Martin Beck mysteries years after I’d first encountered >The Laughing Policeman. It was also my bookstore, while the rest of my NYC family had Scribners or Brentano’s or (before it was a chain) Barnes & Noble. My first job in the city was just a couple of blocks away, so I spent many more lunch hours there than was good for my take-home pay. I’m sorry their shutting up, and I’m sure there will be others who are, too.

Despicable
The new torture laws passed by the Senate will surely go down in history as one of the most heinous acts of legislation ever perpetrated by the United States. The 12 Democrats who voted in favor of the new law are bedwetters and don’t deserve their seats.

Carper – Delaware
Liberman (of course) – Connecticut
Lautenberg – New Jersey
Landrieu – Louisiana
Johnson – South Dakota
Menendez - New Jersey
Nelson – Florida
Nelson – Nebraska
Pryor – Arkansas
Rockefeller – West Virginia
Salazar – Colorado
Stabenow – Michigan

I’d vote for a Republican before I’d vote for any of these fools, but only Lieberman, Carper, Menendez, the Nelsons, and Stabenow are up for re-election in the mid-terms. Now that Lieberman’s running as an Independent, Connecticut has the chance to vote Democratic anyway, but it’d be a shame to lose the other four seats, when we need to gain six to re-take the Senate. Nevertheless, if you’re in favor of torture, you’re no friend to America.

Webtools
Every now and then something comes up on the internet that makes me think: Wow. Map My Run may not be flying car-cool, but it is a terrific tool. I’ve just had a go at mapping a couple of areas here in Sydney, one being the Parramatta Park Runners Club route, and I’m so impressed that I may spend altogether too much time planning out training runs. (If any of my job prospects come through – and they’d better do it soon – this could be a great resource for working out distances for lunch hour programs.) But the coolest feature of all is the Play feature, using Google Earth (which, if you haven’t downloaded it yet, you should), which tilts the map about a third or so and navigates along your plotted course, beginning to end, displaying the satellite images along the way. Genius.

Thirty Years Gone
Back at the Bicentennial I left behind that supposedly experientially iconic condition: High School. “Supposedly,” because it’s really only in certain boys’ lit and Hollywood output that it marks some magical coming-of-age transition, whereas real life isn’t often like that at all. Sure, some – and no small number – have high school as the end of schooling and thus their entry into adult life, but it’s reasonable to say that their passage will be more often fraught than not and of no less duration than for those going on to university and then moving into family and jobs and all such responsibility therein entailed. What’s still remarkable to me, however, is that anyone would bother me with an invitation to attend a reunion. The fact that I live now in Australia has nothing to do with my surprise, but that I had only a few friends, none of whom appear on the reunion committee list, and, if generally regarded at all, was probably generally regarded as a social waste of time, much as I saw my classmates, for that matter. Sure, they’re all “different” now, as am I, as the Counsellor pointed out in our email correspondence on the matter, but I’d contend that we’re also still likely to be very much the same people, carrying some of the same attitudes and behaviors we were forming then. High school was a trial, mostly, a torturous endurance test with just enough educational benefit to keep me from losing interest altogether. Once I left, I pretty much never saw or heard from any of the other 400+ classmates again, and have only ever occasionally wondered as to the fate of any of them. I’m certainly even less interested now. I have nothing in particular against the school I attended, the students, or even any of the teachers, or at least not much in that last category –some of them were at least trying to keep me and everyone else interested and were themselves fairly passionate about what they were teaching. Yes, there were some I’d rather not have had to contend with, but that’s true of people in my adult life since, so maybe it was good training. If nothing else, none of them left any scars as such, and the others left some worthwhile datum or another. And although I was graduated from one high school, my secondary education started at another institution, a boarding school I was asked to leave after one year, and they’re the ones with whom I credit the skills that carried me through a post-graduate tertiary degree. The study habits inculcated in me there, whether in rote-learning exercises or for more analytical applications, were trialled through more intensive testing than I’d spend the next three years having to contend with, and both the habits and the test-taking skills have proven their worth ever since. And while I never later met or even much thought of any of those classmates either, it’s less of a surprise, since they were drawn from a much broader geographic area than my graduating high school class, and if any of them successfully made it through the four years and the intended tertiary program thereafter, would have likely been spread even further yet (although not as far as this end of the earth). Few of them would have, and many would not be looking back there now, but whether the one school or the other, they can keep it.

Ministerial Mysteries
Does John Howard want to create a Ministry for Water? Maybe not yet; after all, while years of drought may mean we have a problem getting enough fresh water, there isn’t any problem with global warming, so the problem is sure to fix itself eventually.

But why be so cagey? Why is this such a bad idea? Water is a big issue here, and we’re likely to have to do something about it sooner rather than later. A ministry to see to the development of conservation and management on a federal level sounds like the kind of planning that would be worthwhile. Or should we wait until it’s time for a War on Water?

(Meanwhile, there had been some news reports that Bush was planning an announcement of a major turnaround on global warming policy, with speculation it was being done to disrupt a potential Gore candidacy in 2008. So what happened, did somebody convince him it would disrupt oil sales?)

Season Well
Maybe it’s one of those cases where I just don’t remember from year to year, but this seems to be the earliest bush fire season start since I got to this country, and it’s certainly been one hot, dry Spring. Yesterday, out on the awning cleaning the front windows, there was a distinct scent of fire in the air, and not that barbeque cooking smell or the pleasant odor of a woodfire in winter. With a fresh El Niño forming in the Pacific, this could be a very difficult summer. And still everybody mocks Al Gore.

What’s that Smell?
Let’s see: Bush makes a speech at the UN. Chavez follows with a speech where he calls Bush the devil and says the podium smells like sulphur. Customs detains Venezuela’s foreign minister at JFK on his way out of town but doesn’t have an explanation. Cause and effect? You decide.

Our Duty
Of course a deal was made, look at the participants. On one side, President Torqumada , and on the other Senators Warner, Graham, and – of course – McCain. “We did our duty,” says Warner, but their duty consists of backing down to Bush. It’s McCain, in the end, who most infuriates me. Here’s a man who knows what being a POW is about and what can happen if your captors are not bound by quaint treaties, like the Geneva Conventions. And yet he’s happy – again – to sign off on allowing secret overseas prisons and the use of abusive interrogation techniques – torture, in fact. McCain signed off because the legislation, as he previously waffled over, turns the responsibility onto the CIA, keeping the military out of it. That doesn’t really cut it, John. Do you think anyone on the other side cares if their people are being tortured by spies versus soldiers, or that having a soldier in their care they would act differently than if they captured a CIA agent? I think we already know the answer to that. To say that secret detention and torture are less reprehensible when conducted by or under the aegis of the CIA makes the agency separate from the rest of the government, leaves them out from under the cover and the legal requirements of the Constitution, and puts every American at risk, as if things weren’t bad enough already. Either the CIA is part of the federal government or it isn’t. McCain is serving a very narrow class of American by caving in on Bush’s legislation and dog-whistling to the Bush constituency. It’s craven, immoderate, self-serving politics, and it’s no surprise at all.

Inexpert Opinion
Judge Richard Posner of the 11th Circuit, is a well-respected jurist and well-received public commentator on matters of law, and has now weighed in on the limits of power under the Constitution in the so-called War on Terror™ in his book, >Not a Suicide Pact. But the latest review of his position suggests he’d have been better sticking to matters of administrative law or the economic analysis of law, his area of expertise, and given the outline of his arguments, I’d have to agree. Somehow I always expect senior jurists to come down in favor of a robust support for civil liberties, despite Scalia et al., but I guess that’s unrealistic. Is it Nixon’s fate that so weighs on the judge that he can’t see the validity of limits on Executive power? I wouldn’t have pegged him for a bedwetter, but if he’s that scared, maybe he should retire so he can stay home.

Another Velvet Morning
The Velvet Underground are often touted as both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to rock ‘n’ roll. (It’s also frequently said that everyone who ever heard the Velvets immediately went on to start a band of their own, part of “best thing,” maybe.) They’re not included in this list, although some far better examples of “worst things” are. I have to agree with number 25: tribute albums, in particular, with the possible exception of I’m Your Fan, the Leonard Cohen tribute, that has the best version of “Hallelujah” you’ll ever hear (in your face, Rufus Wainwright). O.k., M., yes, the >Jeff Buckley version is very good. The rock poet entry will be somewhat controversial at home, too.

Apologies & Retractions
So the pope makes a speech in which he makes some fairly insulting comments about Islam in the course of quoting some medieval bigot and has to apologize for causing offense. It takes him awhile to do it, too, initially relying on spokesmen and then having to come out himself and say he’s sorry. It wasn’t much of an apology, and it didn’t do a lot to calm anyone down, but the Muslims burning him in effigy and issuing fatwas and the like are a minority and should really consider whether they care so very much about what the leader of somebody else’s religion has to say about theirs. Whether or not the pope was really trying to make a point about an open dialogue between Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam – and it sounds like a stretch to me – or was name-calling or whatever, God or Allah or whatever deity you worship doesn’t need nuns murdered or street marches or anything else to defend it. However, Cardinal Pell doesn’t have to make things worse for his boss by essentially retracting the apology. There is a modern history of mass violence among Muslims that isn’t paralleled in the global Christian community and that ought to be addressed. Islam, doesn’t have the structures in place to achieve a Reformation or to broadly adjust matters of doctrine, but that doesn’t make it less necessary to do so. The fact that this religion is such an integral part of the identities of its adherents culturally, the single defining element of the lives of millions upon millions who are otherwise entirely distinct from one another, and that Islam has essentially mired itself into a nearly unreformable static condition, in no small part by making Arabic the language of God, also seems to make Muslims rather sensitive to the interpretations of others, and those others might want to take that into account in making public pronouncements. We would all, indeed, do better with an open dialogue between the factions, but that doesn’t preclude being polite.

Visa Vie
Why opposition leader, Kim Beazley, has proposed a visa issuance signing statement should be incomprehensible, but really only highlights that under his leadership, many of the differences between the ALP and the Liberals have been eroded, unfortunately by making the ALP more rightwing than left-. While it is entirely reasonable to require entrants to this (or any other) country to agree to abide by its laws, it’s a different matter to have them explicitly sign up to abide by its “values.” How do you define these? What is “mateship” or “a fair go”? What other values are to be included? Values aren’t the same as ethics, morals, or laws. They’re more aspirational. If the ALP can legislate the conditions of “a fair go,” then fair enough, I suppose, but I still think it’s silly, at best, and another failed attempt by Mr. Beazley to co-opt the dog-whistle politics of the PM to benefit his own party, one that’s supposedly more committed than Mr. Howard’s is to precisely such values as he wants immigrants to sign up for, even if such signing statements serve an opposite principle. (Besides, there are clear indications we don’t value our values as much as we used to, anyway.)

Peter Pays Paul?
If the FA-18 radar upgrade doesn’t work, then spending AU$200 million on it certainly should be stopped, but I wonder if the money won’t just go for the controversial Joint Strike Fighter program, a defense-budget blow-out itself, and what will become of the Hornets if they can't go into a "hot zone" as is?

I was talking to M.’s elderly cousin, Don, on the phone last week, and he mentioned watching some of the programming that’s been on about the events of September 2001, and his voice was full of anger. He didn’t rant about Muslims or “them” or anything like that, but he was working his way to it, building up a head of steam, and I had to cut him off. We hadn’t watched any of it, didn’t go to United 93, won’t go to the Oliver Stone movie, and didn’t watch last night’s Part 1 of the Disney neo-con exploitation of that day’s death and destruction. It’s still too close. It may always be so.

Everyone is asking now, do you feel safer? Is the world different? For me, the answer to both questions is, no. But that’s too simple. I don’t feel I’m in any more danger, not to death or injury in a terrorist attack, than I ever was. The world is just as dangerous as it was in 2000 or in pretty nearly all the years I’ve been alive, and the U.S. going to war in Iraq hasn’t made any difference there, unless it’s been to have inflamed who started out aggrieved over injustices, perceived and real, inflicted by a system the U.S. has long since come to represent, a system of exploitation and dehumanisation on behalf of profit.

It doesn’t matter how true any of it may be, but it does matter how much people believe it. Hearts and minds – right? Well, that’s part of it, anyway.

The main thing, right now, is that today, five years on, the biggest change is the world is in us, Americans, Australians, British, etc.: the West. There are a lot more of us a lot more aware than before of the rest of the world, and that ought to be a good thing. It’s unfortunate, then, that so many of us have simply bought into the hateful rhetoric and cowardly principles being sold to promote more death and destructions. Clash of civilizations? Give me a break. Threat to the free world, the freedom-loving world, that democratic way of life? Please. The only threat we face to the progress of freedom in the world is the ease with which a few of our own leaders are willing to subvert the principles by which we live for just another day’s political leverage, just another percentage point of profit.

Today, my greatest fears aren’t from terrorism, but of more Diebold voting machines, more cronyism and more Swift-boat politics. My greatest fears come true when governments act to undo the good work of previous administrations or when they lie, promote lies, or just cover up the truth and hope they’ll get away with it.

It hurt a lot when the towers came down, and I’ll never forget what I saw, what I could smell in the air for days afterward. But it didn’t make me hate anyone and it didn’t make me want to foster hate in others and it didn’t make me afraid. And the only thing that’s really made me angry is everything done since to exploit that day.

Crikey
What else can you say upon hearing that Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is dead? I guess he was always going to go out this way, killed by a wild creature he got too close to, although stabbed through the heart sounds more like street crime than something that would happen swimming with stingrays. (Growing up on the south shore of Long Island, we always heard about stingrays and were told to be careful about where we stepped to avoid getting a painful slash on our foot or leg, but clearly these are stingrays of a different order.) He did a lot of good work in conservation and for the protection of endangered species and may have been a somewhat cringe-inducing face of Australia to the rest of the world, but endearing just the same, for his enthusiasm and sincerity.

The Long, Hot Summer
There’ve been indications that this past winter may have been colder than last year’s, and, meanwhile, back in the northern hemisphere, the same period had extended periods of excessive heat. So when I hear warnings of a fresh El Niño and a subsequent extension of the current drought, which has been persisting for a few years now, already, and which has led to Sydney tapping deep reserves and other regions’ water systems, I have to start thinking about what I can do to decrease my own utilisation. This is a puzzler. We live in an apartment block, and our water rates won’t decrease just because I use grey water on the plants (not to mention that even during the height of summer, with two of us, there’ll be more than enough to keep the few plants well irrigated for the duration). It’s more of a moral imperative, than practical application. I’d like to have a rainwater tank, perhaps especially because we live in the city, so all our runoff heads pretty much straight into the harbour, rather than being caught in the catchments or otherwise feeding into and replenishing the ground water. Of course, it doesn’t do much good even in the Western Suburbs, where there’s at least as much storm water management wastefulness as not, but here there’s more room for single family dwellings and thus a greater possibility for recycling. Mostly I don’t like the idea because last summer was hot enough, and while I may have acclimated (negatively) to winter, I haven’t yet to summer. The idea of spending my summer commuting to Parramatta has no appeal, given the higher temperatures, and even if they’re only a degree or two or five. Those centigrade degrees can cover a lot more ground than Fahrenheit.

No Job
I mean, the one I was after, which didn’t pan out – four interviews and three hours of psychometric testing, and I didn’t get the job because I wasn’t “passionate” about consulting (whatever that’s supposed to mean). I’m left thinking it was a personality problem with the boss, whom I didn’t meet until the final interview, and that I ought to send them a bill for the time spent with them. Since I’d get $60 per hour in consulting fees, approximately, and I could charge travel, it’d be worth about $450. Since I spent preparation time, too, let’s just round that up to a mortgage payment and call it even. I mean, if Qantas can charge its applicants for testing fees, why can’t I charge prospective employers for the time they force me to spend with them to no purpose. Bah. Passion. I’ll show you passion: I’m passionate about getting paid.

Here Comes the Sun
Once upon a time the sun came up and it was morning and the sun went down and it was night. Then, supposedly to get more daylight working hours in a day for the farmers, we changed how time works, so that now, every Spring we move our clocks ahead an hour and every Fall we move them back. Except in Indiana, where they rely on more primitive reckonings of time, I guess, and in the Australian states, where one state’s Daylight Savings Time is another one’s not-just-yet. Unless Victoria Premier Steve Bracks can convince the rest of eastern Australia to adopt a uniform change-over. I’d prefer we just stick with one and let the earth rotate as it pleases without reference to whether or not farmers can manage to work out what time it is. It’s pretty easy, really: in summer the days are longer; in winter the nights are. Sun’s up, plants grow; go thou and do likewise. Or something. Look at England: they used to shut the pubs so the Germans wouldn’t have all those lights on to guide their bombers. Now everybody gets to stay out really late and don’t have to drink eight pints of lager as soon as the barman calls, “Time, gentlemen.” Although that does mean there’re lots of bombed people bombing around between the pubs and home in the dark.

It was Mom & Dad’s 50th, back in NC, and I had a nice bouquet lined up to arrive as a commemorative from M. and I in our absence, necessitated by 12,000 miles between us and them, when the first email arrived and announced a devastating death in the family, Dad’s cousin Eileen. I called as soon as the sun was aligned properly for all of us to be up, but missed them. Then I went in to check email, as I do each morning, only to discover that on the same day, Dad’s brother had also died.

Eileen was definitional to me of my father’s generation. Dad himself, you’d say, would be, but he’s too close to see with that kind of perspective. Eileen, on the other hand, was an imposing, iconic figure, even while she was also immensely fun: witty, urbane, dismissive and sharply deflating of pomposity, I developed an association with her of cocktails and elegance and style. Her presence was always an occasion and made any occasion an event. Younger Brother, T., credits the food she served at her holiday parties with an early interest in cooking and why he became a chef. The Counsellor was always close to Eileen’s daughter, R., and that would be in no small part due to the fact that her character was so deeply reflective of her mother’s. Most of all, I recognize that Dad’s lost a person who was for him a foil, much as he was for her, the two of them brightening the other whenever they were together.

Hardest of all for Dad, of course, is losing his little brother, Roy. I suppose my memories of Roy are always going to be colored by those early encounters. I’ve never forgotten how he’d play with us, engaging us on a level that most adults wouldn’t have been bothered stooping to, but always interested, always a figure of humor and kindness. He was an entertainer, someone to be relied upon for music, even if his greatest accomplishment in that regard was the ukulele. In later years we didn’t see as much of him or our cousins, even though they lived not very far, but separate families grow their own ways and often grow apart, regardless of proximity. It was a source of frustration for Dad and for us all that Roy so limited contact between them, but none of us ever doubted they loved each other.

Strange they should go on the same day, and hard to bear. It alters the family landscape more than I can express, although it’s changed so much in the last five years or so I’d hardly managed even to take in those alterations. When Mom’s brother, John, died, that was a blow, but one we’d been prepared for, as he’d kept us involved with his terminal illness throughout the course of treatment. When Roy’s middle daughter, Jane, died, we only learned of it afterwards, and to be honest I still haven’t fully learned to exclude her from my familial reckonings. I suppose it’ll be much the same now with Eileen and Roy, so much a part of so much of my life that I cannot do anything but to have them with me always.

Signs
Since moving to Australia, I’ve heard a lot about the wonderful economic results of the Howard years, mostly, of course, from the PM himself and his front-benchers. As is usually the case, this government inherited an economy that was on the upswing and benefited and was able to claim the results as its own. But the real estate market and various other indictors – bananas and fuel prices, if you were listening to Peter Costello and Mr. Howard these past few weeks – show we’re headed for a downturn. How bad it will ultimately be is impossible to know, and the Reserve Bank is doing what it can with inflation by raising interest rates. (All well and good for the economy, but for actual people, it’s a killer: mortgages jump, credit cards jump; only people who managed to have investments outside property are going to see anything out of this, oh, and the banks, of course.) But we still get the jobless rate and so forth trumpeted as signs of how well the Prime Minister and his Treasurer are managing the economy.

Like the President, there’s no real power inherent to the PM, or, for that matter in government overall to manage the economy. Governments manage the spending of tax money, and their spending can impart some measure of health into the economy, whether or not it’s at any given time more or less artificial, such as was the case in the wartime economy of the Vietnam era or now that we’re in the perpetual War on Terror years. Business, as a monolithic entity in and of itself, is irrational, reactive to perceived trends and world events as managed by government, but that’s because capitalism, as administered by individual businesses, is competitive, and everyone takes their advantage where they can and bunkers where and when they feel they must.

But if you believe the economy is doing so well, then why is it that both the companies I’ve worked for since my arrival have undertaken massive layoffs? That can’t just be chance. Sure, I’m glad I’m relatively safe this time: fixed-term appointment due to expire before the next school year begins, job search already underway and two good prospects in hand; that doesn’t mean I got lucky. No, the economy is tanking and companies that are heavily reliant on the spending power of ordinary people are immediately affected and will take immediate cost reductions in response. Ordinary people can’t afford private schools when they can barely afford their mortgages, let alone a tank of petrol, and they can’t afford pricey security systems. Bread-and-butter land is being hit in the pocketbook, and that’s bringing down profits elsewhere. It’s only just begun. We’ve been living in a false economy for some years now, and its hollow nature and the hollow claims of the Howard government are being tolled like a funeral bell.

Maxima Culpa
So, Gunter Grass was an SS Nazi. And this comes out just after I bought a remaindered copy of Crabwalk, his most recently celebrated novel, so I am faced with finally getting around to reading this celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning, anti-Nazi author’s work just when his reputation blows up. I suppose if I’d read The Tin Drum or something back when I first encountered it (or even had seen the movie), I’d have something to work with in coming to terms with what it all means, but instead have to contend with Mr. Grass’s past’s effect at the same time as I come to assess his work. Looking at his time in the service of the monsters of Europe, he doesn’t present a history entirely different from that of another former SS soldier, one more recently elevated to a position of even higher moral authority than a literature prize: Pope Benedict XVI. Well, except for the fact that Grass actually volunteered and believed in the war up until the Nuremburg trials showed him the reality. And both men kept their past pretty well covered up, though one by silence, the other by, well, not lies exactly, but not the full truth. Is Grass discredited then? Or can we say, in making this revelation, he finally has come to admit his sins and repent them even while he has long been attempting to atone for them?

Travel Plans
As things progress with this whole consulting opportunity, I have to think about whether this job really is right for me. I’m about to undergo psychometric testing, a common pre-offer assessment here in Australia, and, assuming I pass (and I have pretty much always tested well, except for that time back in the 80’s when I was evaluating an on-line psychometric test and it told me I needed professional help), an offer would indeed be forthcoming. They know I can’t travel right now, but the Sydney office is the resource for the Asia-Pac region, and they’ve got a big project going on in the Philippines, so it wouldn’t be long before I was getting on a plane.

There are people for whom that’s a daunting prospect, but I’m not one of them, except for the inconveniences presented these days. No liquids. No books or magazines (in England, anyway, and that won’t last). No mp3 or CD or tape players. No nail clippers (but who clips their nails on a flight?), etc. Take off your shoes, and all that. Such nonsense. I just don’t want the hassle.

More importantly, however, I’m not 25 years old and single. I have responsibilities at home, and this job would send me out of town for weeks at a time. Sure, it’s just an independent adult person and a couple of cats and an enormous apartment, but saying “it’s just” glosses over a lot of detail that needs due consideration.

That’s balanced, to the degree that compensation is balancing, by the money, which promises to be plenty, although they are inevitably going to low-ball me. Even so, I can expect a substantial increase over what I can expect to earn staying put, and can hope for performance bonuses now and then, an added incentive I wouldn’t see elsewhere. And we really need a reliably substantial income.

Which is another factor: reliability. How reliable is consulting work? Granted, this is an international practice of long-standing and high reputation, but these kinds of outfits aren’t above the old last-in, first-out staffing methodology, and any diminution of the practice or failure of it to grow according to “strategic” plans would see me on the street sooner rather than later. That’s not true where I am now, although anywhere else I may go is going to see me less safe rather than more, regardless of the nature of the business. Meanwhile, I’ve always been an “in-house” employee, never a “hired gun.” I don’t know what the demands really are or how they’d affect me beyond the obvious issues of travel vs. home. I’ve never even looked at being a consultant, never been head-hunted by one of the big consulting practices, never had to make a choice that wasn’t obvious.

Maybe I won’t pass the psych profile. I’m a little more eccentric than not. Look, I still write poetry. I keep a ‘blog. I’ve got cats instead of children. But I probably will pass, and then I’ll have to choose.

That’s One Thing I Don’t Want to Catch
Say, whatever did happen to the anthrax investigations?

Norse Mythology Needs an Upgrade
There will be twelve planets to learn about in schools, following a bonanza decision for textbook publishers by the International Astronomical Union. I only read about “Xena” a week or two ago, but I didn’t recall anything about Charon and Ceres. (And Ceres, o.k., she was a Roman deity, but wasn’t Charon just some other variety of supernatural being? There’s still Janus, Vesta, Juno, Minerva, and Vulcan, after all – although, yes, o.k., we’ve got to leave the Vulcan’s for later, don’t we? Given that we’ve already broken the pattern by going with Uranus, the Greek sky god, couldn’t we break out some other Hellenic names?)

77:07
That's the offical result, adjusted for the gun delay, and a little less than a minute more than what I did last year. I'm going with my watch on this one, because that means I was faster. But their time is the one to use for the video clip tomorrow.

Leave Your Shoes Home
The increased level of passenger inspection requirements and restrictions to carry-on luggage are George Bush’s fault. Yes, that’s right, and the Republican Congress. If, instead of blasting their way into Iraq, they had spent some of the billions and billions of dollars (no small part of which, by the way, has actually been stolen or is otherwise unaccountable) on actual homeland security – you know, that whole new cabinet post responsibility post-September 11 – we might not have to take our shoes off or leave our shaving cream and portable CD players at home (or at the mercy of the luggage handlers, and you can imagine what’s happening to hundreds of laptops right now, as they’re thrown across a room and otherwise banged around a lot more than those vaguely padded briefcases are designed to manage). We could have proper and effective baggage screening, both for carry-on and checked, but instead, we’re making the world safe for oil companies and putting the burden of preventing terrorism on the many millions who actually aren’t terrorists instead of on the law enforcement personnel and processes that really work. The London plot wasn’t uncovered because somebody discovered an airline passenger with some suspicious Gatorade™, but because of surveillance work by the police. George doesn’t want the travel business to have to install new equipment at the airports, so you’ll have to do the work for him.

80:40
Official clock time. My watch put me in at under 5:30 per K, just, which is about what I expected, and about a minute faster than last year. We’ll see what the official discount is on the start (just 2:55 on Group A last year) and adjust accordingly. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the video on Wednesday.

Grabby
The practice of colonial and imperialist dispossession of indigenous people never ended, at least not in Australia, where the Prime Minister is moving the nation away from every progressive action towards Land Rights and Native Title and furthering the nation’s distance from any possibility of reconciliation. The present land grab instance is legislation designed to covertly include acts of dispossession within a cloak of more positive actions and is being pushed through the House and Senate with an absolute minimum of debate. The government relies on the public being uninformed or distracted by phantom terror squads paddling across from Indonesia or retrograde labor laws or interest rate increases, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Join the Get Up! Phone campaign, and let’s have a real debate and positive legislation for a change. It doesn’t always have to go Howard’s way.

Bound for [Anywhere but] Botany Bay
Isn’t this how Australian settlement started: criminals held in prison barges and eventually shipped to the antipodes? What “fatal shore” do we plan to send these illegal immigrants and fishermen to? England?

I’m still not prepared even now when images from that September morning run on t.v. (or, as happened over the weekend, when M. and I went to see Jindabyne, as a preview for United 93, and the Vanity Fair article isn’t nearly as inspirational as that moment when I saw the fighters overhead as I made my way uptown, perhaps because now I know that they were pretty nearly as confused by the events unfolding as I was. The books and movies and songs have been increasing lately, and I’d like to find some way of engaging with it myself, but haven’t reached that point of Wordsworthian “recollection in tranquillity” to allow it, if that isn’t too old fashioned or even possible. Art may indeed have power to transform and even to help heal trauma, so maybe I’m holding on too tightly to that day and the what it changed in me. Maybe delving into these materials is the right thing to do. Certainly the on-line article is an opportunity, with every posted snippet of communication posted as an audio link, but not one I can bring myself to take advantage of. When we saw those two minutes of dramatization, neither of us could entirely contain ourselves, even though, having seen the lobby posters, we were, in part, prepared for the fact that there would be a preview. I guess, like in that Gothamist report, where someone in the audience calls out hopefully in the opening moments of the coming attractions, we might have still hoped for it to be a different trailer, but that was just wishful thinking. Needless to say, I suppose, is that we won’t go see United 93 or the Oliver Stone movie.

16 Miles
When I took this job I never gave a thought to future job searches. If I had, being sited (approx.) 25 kilometres from the city center might have occasioned second thoughts. Well, not really, since when I took this job I was getting pretty desperate. (Not that I regret it or there’s been anything wrong with the job or the employer, just that I needed a job very badly.) Now that I’ve re-initiated contact with my “network” – i.e., the recruiting agencies who hadn’t gotten me a job last time I was looking – I find myself having to schedule trips into Sydney far more frequently than is reasonable for getting my work done here. It’s about a forty- to fifty-minute trip, so that plus the time spent chatting means I spend a quarter or more of any day out of the office. If I was actually in Sydney, it’d just be a matter of popping out at lunch, more or less, but unless lunch starts at 11:00 and runs ‘til 2:00, that’s not really working for me here in Parramatta – and I don’t even get the traditional martinis such a lunch period would normally entail. It would be handy to find someone here to interview with, but that’s not going to happen unless I want to get a job clerking at the local supermarket. Even though Parramatta is often spoken of as one of the “other” city centers (along with Chatswood, for example), there aren’t a lot of major businesses located here. Now Chatswood, to continue to use that example, does have some large IT companies located in the vicinity, and others big enough for my purposes, but Parramatta is another city center, I think, mainly because of two other factors: population and retail. There are a lot of ethnic minorities in the area and a lot of giant shopping complexes, making it a kind of outlying hub. A bit closer in to the city than halfway to the mountains, it serves as a kind of frontier post, although one to be supplanted by Penrith and Blacktown, probably sooner rather than later, or even Richmond, none of which are places I’ve spent much time in, but where my impression is of much more traditionally suburban conditions, by and large.

I haven’t talked openly about my job search to my employer yet. I don’t think they’d fire me or anything, and there’s a hiring freeze on, so they can’t replace me until next year anyway, but I don’t want to be in the position of not having a new job while being known to be spending my time looking. It puts me in a dishonest position, because I’m taking advantage of the company’s very liberal, family-friendly policy of pastoral care to its employees. I’ll have to own up before too long, but I’d like some more solid sense that there is a new job ready before I do.

Plastic Fantastic
I’ve got a couple of hundred LP’s and EP’s and a fair few “select” 45’s, but this database of vinyl auction results isn’t likely to do me much good, if a cursory survey of artists comprising the bulk of my collection is any indication. With (only) 250,000 listings, it probably isn’t terribly comprehensive, especially given that it encompasses every recording classification: Classical, pop, jazz, etc. Still, someday I might find out there’s something in my collection that would put the cats through college.

Don’t Be a Moon-Calf
This professor’s essay on being an English major rings true, although I’m too old to have experienced Dead Poets Society while still deciding on my educational path. I guess the part that resounds most dolorously is that of why undergraduate literature majors fail to complete a Ph.D., as it represents, superficially, my own experience. I didn’t fall to politics, but to a dissatisfaction with the purpose of a post-graduate degree.

(Mom, no, listen, it wasn’t wasted; I still credit what I learned at grad school – or, anyway, how I learned – with much of my success in the world beyond the academy, just as I can credit earlier stages in my education with my success within it.)

And I don’t have to practice what I love so much in secret or as singing along to Barry Manilow.

Work-Life
Once upon a time I thought I’d be a writer and support myself working in publishing. What a cliché. The publisher I worked for taught me to use PC’s, back when PC’s were only just entering the business market and were just past the stage where floppy disks were seven inches in diameter. This translated into a much different career, one I’ve enjoyed a lot over the years, even though I’ve ever been as technically skilled as many people assume I am. I’ve always known just enough to get by, but always learned just a little more as the jobs or job requirements have changed over the years. But one thing I’ve sort of been (perhaps unduly) proud of is that I’ve never worked on a failed project. Now I’ve worked on two. Do I feel a little like a Jonah? Yeah, but I shouldn’t.

The job before this one, the project failed on a number of counts: we ran through a five-year budget in less than two years; we weren’t allowed to have the kind of client contact necessary to understand their specific needs or to persuade them that the project would succeed let alone be of any benefit to them; the company got taken over and the new upper management team were sceptical of the benefits and aghast at the waste. The entire project team got canned, and we flooded the market, leaving me and others of us unemployed for some months thereafter, a personal financial debacle we’ve yet to fully recover from.

Now it’s happened again. At least this time I stand to keep my job for a while yet, because the project was actually successful, and we’ve been paying employees on the new database for two years now. Only because some of the payroll staff are dissatisfied with having to do business differently than they used to – well, and because there are some real functional problems with the software that aren’t going to be resolved anytime soon – we’ve decided to revert to the previous software. I’m not particularly technical, even now, after over fifteen years working on this stuff, but the old product – even with the upgrade it’s undergone and the development being undertaken by the vendor – is so old-fashioned that I’m appalled at the decision. I don’t get to do anything more than that about it, though, just sort of gape in awe at the decision and then get on with the work of helping put things back the way they were. Nevertheless, the project can now only be said to have been a failure, so that’s two.

And hence the job-search. The old database is, essentially, non-commercial. As such, working on it puts me into a bad position. I can only continue to present a valid hiring profile to any prospective employer if my c.v. reflects a background in commercially viable product implementation and development. In-house stuff can’t ever do that, even if I’m using MS-Access, because the business world has moved beyond that kind of data handling solution. Even Microsoft is moving away from supporting the use of Access as anything more than a way for home PC users to catalog their CD collections. And IBM? Well, they haven’t been much of a player in the software market from a very long time ago now, and that’s were we’re heading, so it’s even further off the mainstream.

I’ll do what I can to help, because I’m a good boy, a committed employee in a organization that fosters positive relationships with its staff, but the first good prospect that comes along is going to get a hard sell from me. Meanwhile, I’ll work on my disgruntlement.

Culture Clash
Here’s a question: is it better to travel the world – well, the Asia/Pacific region – and make some serious dough, work on a variety of projects (still within my overall skill set) or continue in my present job for another year or two, working at a place where I feel like I’m part of an organisation dedicated to doing good in the world and where I won’t ever have to do more than ride the trains back and forth between the office and home, won’t learn anything new particularly, but where I’ll always have the kind of work-life balance everyone else only ever talks about supporting? I suppose it isn’t just a question of one or the other; there may be another option later, although it still would fall on the opposite side of the sweet ride I’ve got going now. Next week, in addition to pursuing the job that’s come looking, I’ll interview with another outfit, this time for an in-house leadership role, but one where I’d also branch into other business functions as well as taking up more responsibility. But is that what I want? Ambition’s a funny thing, a drive I can’t say I’ve ever much experienced, preferring safer choices over the last twenty years or so. It’s more been the case that loyalty, that company-man entrenchment, has been my mode: everybody treats everybody right. It doesn’t hold up, if it ever did, really, but I’d still preference a permanent position over being a hired gun. At this time of my life, and with the advantages long-term employment provides in Australia – long service leave, for example – and the disadvantages of short- to mid-term – again, long-service is a good example, which is a stay-10-years-or-give-it-up perq. in many cases (5, where I am, at least in that I’d get paid out for it) – doesn’t sticking it out make sense? Plus, I’m in an “industry superannuation” fund program, which traditionally returns higher rates with lower fees towards my retirement, and that’s not nearly so far off as it seems.

The choice may not, in the end, present itself. These things don’t always pan out, as I learned during my 5-month unemployment stint before landing this job, and sometime fall through even after that all-important second interview. But we’ll see.

Personality Crisis
Is this a trend: Qantas’s Jetstar subsidiary wants applicants to pay for the security and personality profiles required to get a job, a cost of AU$89. How about a little something for the HR guy, too? Do you think if palming a fifty across in a handshake will get you a job as an in-flight waiter? I suppose the security clearance is a bit more thorough than just a police check, which is nothing to speak of, but personality tests are, by many accounts, pretty common in Australia, although I’ve yet to have to go through one. Behavioral interviewing is more common, in my experience, and usually conducted by a panel, once you get past the agency recruiter, anyway, and makes sense, more so than the usual 13-question method; where do you see yourself in 5 years isn’t nearly as helpful as eliciting responses to problem-solving scenarios. But paying for it? Do you get the money back if you take up an offer, like when you have a repairman charge for an estimate?

Surprise, No Surprise
Paul Simon’s latest, Surprise was something I think I heard about first from Jason Kottke and had been simmering away as something I had to hear for a while now, mainly for what seemed, after Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, a natural collaboration with Brian Eno. But while Eno provides well-integrated “soundscapes,” the songs are (just) Paul Simon pop songs, with little of the world music expansiveness of those other albums. Yes, the lyrics are, as always, high-literary, if not outright poetic, and that line about the Golden Retriever poster in “Father and Daughter” made me smile outright, as I’m sure it was intended to, and the music is very good, but that doesn’t make it the same kind of breakthrough Graceland was, but more of a return to form with Eno-ambiance. What I really should have done was listen more carefully in the first place over at paulsimon.com, or, if an Eno project was really my goal, explore more of The Long Now. But I don’t really regret the purchase; Paul Simon’s in good form, and I’ll enjoy listening to this again.

Dirty Deeds
Once upon a time, the Liberal party leader made a stink about backroom deals over who would lead the Labor party, Bob Hawke or Paul Keating, and when. Hawke took the leadership first and was Prime Minister, and when the time came, he handed the reins over to Keating, who was (by many accounts) a better PM. Having been caught out on having made the same deal 12 years ago with his Treasurer, Howard now says there never was a deal, which makes sense, since he broke it. Howard denies it, of course, but that’s just semantics. Power-sharing deals are made all the time at all levels of government. I know someone who was promised a turn at being mayor of his local council (although, like Liberals at the higher level, apparently, such deals aren’t worth the slimy handshake their founded on, since as soon as the guy he was to replace decided to run for State office, the deal got broken; what’s Howard’s excuse? He was the best candidate to beat Menzies record?) There was a deal, but there was no hard promise, nothing that had to be lived up to. Why Costello has remained loyal can only be guessed, although I’d go with the idea that Howard would have to retire eventually and Pete could be pretty well assured that the rest of the mediocrities on the front bench wouldn’t present much of a challenge to him even then. The Treasurer inevitably has a leg up on the rest in a succession because he’s the one responsible for taxes. Health Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Attorney General Philip Ruddock don’t hold anything like a position with the profile of the Treasurer, and by keeping the front bench alignment the way he has, Howard has effectively assured Costello of the starring role whenever he’s ready to give it up. The only ways that won’t happen, even now, is if the federal party decides the present “scandal” is enough of an embarrassment as to deny primogeniture or if Howard chooses to disinherit Costello.

Cat Flu
Are viruses getting stronger, or am I getting weaker? Late last week I came home with a bit of a sore throat, and it escalated into full on like-swallowing-a-scouring-pad-past-a-golf-ball and then proceeded through a head full of cotton wool and I’m still only just back to work. Watching the news over the weekend, an announcement came through to warn me of a tough ‘flu season. Right. Tough enough already, and it wasn’t even ‘flu. I suppose it’s too late to get the shot now, but I may have to think about it next year.

Dr. Strangelove Rising
There are reports that Iran isn’t so far from developing long-range missiles, even intercontinental, and given North Korea’s potential for selling its offensive WMD technology to anyone who’ll pay, I admit to some trepidation over their tests today, although mainly because threatening George Bush with nukes is as bad a plan as going swimming with an opened artery. The White House has been looking for a good excuse to use America’s nuclear weapons, part and parcel with its calls for the development of an entirely new range, the replacement of the existing equipment, and their use in conventional warfare situations, so it’s just as well the tests were a bust. Nevertheless, in an age we’d thought to have seen the end of the nightmare scenarios, this isn’t helping matters. The calls will be stronger, they’ll be listened to more seriously, and the threat of a bomb being dropped somewhere is now closer than ever. Unfortunately, I think it’ll be us before it’ll be “them” that does the dropping. (Maybe I’m just getting old.)

See? That’s Why I Don’t Gamble
It could have been a draw, I suppose, in which case I guess the rules would have sent Italy into the Quarterfinals anyway, but the end of Australia in the World Cup, however much it might be attributable to gout, isn’t really unexpected, whether I was hopeful yesterday or not. Look, it came down to a last minute penalty shot, so it wasn’t the debacle that was being predicted by some, and after more than 30 years, just getting out of the first round has got to be worth something. And in four more years, who knows?

Take a Deep Breath and Suck It Up
The spectre of asbestos haunts much of the world, something I heard about with some frequency back in the States, given A.’s involvement over the years with the prosecution of those who knowingly directed employees in mishandling the stuff or who were otherwise caught up in the years-long clean-up that sometimes seems it will never end. (And it may not, since leaving it alone seems to be the best policy, whenever it’s an option.) That James Hardie after long years of litigation finally achieved a settlement was a great positive development here, and the promised fund would surely go a long way to help those suffering from abestiosis, now and in the future. Except they want the fund to be treated as a “charity,” so that funding it could be written off their taxes. When I first heard the news, on the face of it I thought, well, why shouldn’t it be a charity? But that was just a “headline” understanding, premised on the charitable status being applied on behalf of the victims, which didn’t make sense once I thought about it. I’m with Peter Costello and the rest of the government: Hardie’s has a duty to its victims that shouldn’t be paid by the public at large through some backdoor tax shenanigans. The fund isn’t a charity; it’s compensation. The ATO may yet come up with a ruling that allows the company to more easily manage the accounting trick, but it’s Hardie’s cost, not mine, not the government’s, not the victims’.

Quarter Finals
It’s still a long shot, but I like our chances for making it into the quarter finals. Italy’s got a statistically better win-loss-tie record, having beat the Czechs and Ghana (both of whom beat the U.S. although only Ghana advanced to the second round), and tied the U.S. The ‘Roos beat Japan and lost to Brazil, only advancing because they managed to tie Croatia. So can a 1-1-1 team beat a 2-0-1 team? Why not? Italy’s actually got some key players out, and while they’ve probably got a pretty good bench, I wouldn’t wonder if ours isn’t staffed with players just as good as the ones we’re putting on the field. It’ll come down to which team is more motivated: the Socceroos, with so much negative history and public expectations and such a terrible nickname weighted against them, or the Italians, freighted with so much European ennui (or its Italian equivalent, anyway). So far, the quarters are going to the favorites – no surprise – with only Spain vs. France presenting much prospect for a tight game. Under the circumstances, picking Australia to advance over Italy is counter-intuitive, but one underdog’s got to make the cut, and Ghana doesn’t stand a chance against Brazil, and Switzerland and Ukraine are both underdogs, which doesn’t count. So in the part of my brain that I recognize as the same part that lets me buy lottery tickets for their value as wallpaper scraps or sit in on a penny-ante poker game and walk away $50 lighter (it only happened once; that was enough), I’ve weighed the chances and come out Green-and-Gold.

Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!

How to Combat Terrorism
Investigate, arrest, prosecute, convict.

Nobody had to be “indefinitely detained” or tortured or abused or invaded or bombed or shot or rendered to any foreign power for extraordinary purposes at all in any way. The proper police powers were employed and the verdict properly returned.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
What, that had to be the title (although, now that it’s come to this, I’d rather get away from post titles completely), because we went to see The Break-Up. It’s about the best romantic movie I think I’ve ever seen, even though it’s not a comedy and especially because it’s not a “relationship” movie. Yes, it has its Odd Couple middle, and it doesn’t exactly break new ground in probing the nature of romance and relationships, but it does present these things with more honesty than you usually get outside of those very serious movies where somebody dies or is killed or something unusual happens to make everyone stop and think. This time they have to come to think about their lives, separately and together, just because that’s the point they’ve reached in their lives, separately and together. So except for the stripper-party, it’s even more realistic than the ultra-serious stuff. Oh, and except for how the two characters meet. That just wouldn’t ever happen. Jennifer Aniston is better in this than anything else I’ve seen her in, and Vince Vaughn is always good. I understand, however, that this movie was in some way his idea, so now I also think he’s a genius.