Up or Down
After invalidating their own whinging claim regarding the entitlement of judicial nominees to an “up or down vote” by forwarding an unqualified candidate for review to the Supreme Court, subsequently withdrawn, the GOP-dominated Judiciary Committee has now sent the latest Bush ideologue to the full Senate with approval split 10-8 on party lines. As Howard Dean has said, Alito must be rejected. He approves of the Bush violations to the checks-and-balances system established 200 years ago that has worked so well all this time, as well as being a fundamentalist zealot who believes in legislating morality even when the issue at question may be simply medical. With him and Roberts in the Nine, we’ve only got Kennedy to rely upon for nuanced and thoughtful votes, many of which we can expect on a court so constituted to end up as dissents only. If any of the Republican legislators had the true courage of their self-touted “moral values,” the vote on Alito might have gone the other way, and it still might, when the remaining 82 vote. I doubt the utility of a filibuster on this, except as a way to let the Repugnants eliminate the option, but I still hope for a strong fight from Senator Reid and his colleagues.

Tax Cuts
Abolishing the 15% tax on superannuation make sense to me. “Super,” as its called, is the primary retirement fund mechanism for working Australians, and consists of an annualized 9% of salary paid by employers into specially-designated mutual funds. This contribution towards employees’ retirement is treated as part of their “total compensation,” much the way health and welfare benefits are in the U.S., although, under normal “permanent” employment conditions, it’s compulsory. Of course, that’s the idea behind “total compensation” – that employees aren’t simply paid a wage, they cost their employers much more, and those costs, too, are part of what an employee is “worth.” Fair enough, I suppose, to an extent, and in the case of superannuation – unlike the U.S. 401(k) programs, where I’m contributing pre-tax funds matched in part as a benefit by my employer – it’s free money to me for when I’m old enough to make that “sea change,” only costing me that 15%. That’s if I’m not misunderstanding the tax at issue. It’s possible, reading this article, that the 15% is being levied annually against the funds themselves. Since I’m also paying exorbitant administrative fees – me, mind you, not my employer (and again, fair enough), an additional 15% to the government just so I can have retirement funds is 15% more than I’m willing to pay. Tax me when I retire, if it comes to that, not before, so the funds have a chance to develop into something I actually can retire on.

Rogue State
When Will Ferrell did his version of the GWB “axis of evil” speech, I was incapacitated with laughter. “You know who else is in the Axis of Evil? France. How do you like that, France?” Guess what? Well, really, France has long been a member of the nuclear club, and one of the more active ones, too, regularly irradiating Pacific atolls explosively. Like the great hero of the West, George II, Chirac has decided to make his country’s position clear: if you screw with our oil supplies, we will nuke you. (Will Ferrell also had Bush include Cheney in the “axis,” but there’s no hope of France doing the same.)

Resolution
Google Earth is pretty fun, all things considered, and the other day a friend sent a snapshot with our apartment block tagged, leading me to spend a little time on-line, working out from the satellite image not only where home is, but also the office, scrolling along an arm of the harbour as it becomes the Parramatta River until I located the park where I run during lunch. The image below is just a screenshot, so it won't zoom in, but you might use the coordinates and scroll around yourself, if you're that interested.

Women & God
How Julia Bard became the pundit of all things feminist and religious for the Sydney Morning Herald escapes me, especially whenever I read her latest thoughts on either, let alone both. Is she married to someone there or related to some high-ranking clergy[person]? Apparently, feminism isn’t just responsible for abortion, but gay marriage, censorship, and atheism, not to mention, well, feminism. (And I think she means “apocalyptic” not “apocryphal” when she quotes Manning Clark, but given the rest of her thesis, I may be wrong.) Even worse, those feminists who ran screaming from church are also responsible for the patriarchal politicians embracing the patriarchal power structures left behind, as if that hadn’t already been a power relationship well-entrenched and part of what so many over the last 50 years and more have rejected. I’ll give Ms (Miss? Mrs?) Baird one thing: at least she’s trying to think and not an Ann Coulter wannabe like Miranda Devine.

Beachiness
4 nights on the Central Coast, just steps away from the beach (although a deal further from the patrolled section), was everything it ought to be, except longer. Our hotel looked out over the Terrigal Council Lagoon – a semi-artificial body of water where we did a bit of paddling about (but no swimming, because it’s full of rain water runoff after its initial annual refill by the Council, who open a channel to the sea and let the tide do its work, then backfill it until next year) – and a little close to the road, which was not really a problem. We ate well enough, too, at the various restaurants around town, although, opting for a pizza-delivery one night proved to be disappointing. The Break offers “gourmet” pizzas, which they’ve defined as meaning small and expensive. Look, I hate to break it to you, but “gourmet” is defined by the ingredients, their variety if not their quality, and not by quantity. When I lay out $20 for a pizza, I expect at least a 12-inch circumference, not 7. Even 10 would have been o.k., so when M. asked how large a Large is, you might have said something other than “6 slices,” especially since what you sent was only divided in quarters anyway. At least the salad had macadamia nuts. It was fun calling them back and explaining all that to them, although they offered nothing else in satisfaction and we ended up going down to the restaurant attached to the Clan hotel to pick up a bit extra. The Haven provided the best meal of the trip, and I was very pleased with their vegetarian menu, something none of the other restaurants – all naturally enough focussed on seafood – thought to provide other than the usual risottos and pastas. (They also handed me a sub rosa bottle of wine, not having gotten their license yet since reopening a few weeks ago. How that works is a mystery, but I won’t question it.)

The weather wasn’t brilliant, with only Saturday offering the kind of sunshine one requires of a beach holiday, but it only really rained heavily the one day, so while our tans may not be what they might otherwise, since we practice “Slip, Slap, Slop” (slip on a shirt, slap on a hat, slop on some sunscreen, as the jingle goes), we weren’t going to be terrifically browned to begin with.

Of course, not having a car means that we only saw as much of the Central Coast as is visible from the beach or the top of the “Skillion,” a local promontory, except for the first day I went jogging and ended up somehow 10-12 kilometres further from home than I’d anticipated, my sense of direction leading me ever further from the beach (and south) than I’d meant to go, so I got to see Bateau Bay and Forrester’s Beach from the top of the highest coastal hill in the area, but was fully sore for the next two days, having done something approaching a half marathon – not all at a run, of course, since I’m not even ready for a half a half a marathon – by the time I made it back to the hotel, three hours past what I’d planned for or what M. could endure before wondering where to start calling and how to describe me in order to determine what hospital or morgue she’d have to visit.

The train to and from Gosford was quick and the bus rides not too trying, although passing through retirement communities did leave us subject to many little old ladies and men counting out their exact change fares, pre-calculated at pre-fare increase prices, sometimes causing some consternation and usually no little fumbling for change purses for the extra thirty cents. I consoled myself with the knowledge that someday I will be the one doing the fumbling and tripping over my own cane.

The return to Sydney proved humid beyond endurance after the gentle zephyrs of the coast, but we’re resolved not to fail in having another vacation before another four years have passed.

Summertime
Now that we all know that last year was the hottest overall on record, and with this year starting off with a record temperature bang, we’re off to fabulous Terrigal for a quick holiday. As happy as I’d be to simply lie around the beach, there are various sights worth a look, including the lagoon and the Skillion, a bit of headland so named for its shape, resembling a sloping roof with no ridge or peak. Everybody says, oh, yes, don’t forget to go look at the Skillion. So we will, and then lie around on the beach until it’s time for a swim.

Meanwhile, if you need something to read on the web, I suggest Alien Loves Predator

Update: There's a lot of !!!! over sharks the past few days, as a result of a swimmer being killed up in Queensland, but sightings 50 metres from swimmers don't constitute "close" in my mind (and one of the four reported was cited in another paper as being 100 metres away), being more than half a football field (gridiron, American football) in distance. Admittedly, if the fish decides to pick me out, even from that distance he's going to get me before I even know he's there, let alone can swim to shore. But while my post-Jaws instinct is to chant, Cowardly Lion-style, "I do believe in sharks, I do, I do, I do," instead my mantra will be "I do believe in nets."

Free Trade Isn’t
The free trade agreement reached between the U.S. and Australia last year was widely touted as a bad deal, although a lot of the noise, coming as it did from celebrities, focussed on the devastation expected to film and television in this country, something pretty well effectively accomplished long before, at least if you’ve ever watched any of the shows on offer from the three broadcast networks or gone to a multiplex cinema. It turns out to have been worse than that, with imports up and exports down. So Mark Vaile, deputy PM and chief trade negotiator is going to work on selling sugar to America at the expense of access to generic drugs. But don’t worry too much about it: the U.S. is tremendously protective of its sugar producers, famously keeping the trade embargo against Cuba on behalf of cane growers (what, you thought it was about the cigars?), so Vaile will be free to sell out to Big-Pharma without a bad conscience, but with the satisfaction of whacking National Party whipping boy Barnaby Joyce over the nose for ever speaking up. How’s the sugar crop in Brazil?

Sold Out
Remember John McCain’s principled bill against torture and abuse of prisoners? He had to fight Cheney tooth and nail, but won against the White House in the end, didn’t he? Except every (uninformed) Democrats’ fantasy of the savior of the GOP sold out all prisoners in Guantanamo in exchange for avoiding Bush’s veto. It’s unclear from the news report if this is only the existing set of prisoners or all future “illegal combatants” sent to Cuba, but for a man who experienced the depredations of the North Vietnamese, this would be a surprising and disappointing concession.

The Fire Every Time
The bushfires started early this year but seemed to stop well before Christmas, leading me to foolishly believe that we might have the holidays without any big outbreaks. Instead, we’ve got extreme conditions, big fires up in the Central Coast, and even record temperatures - 44° in the city for New Year’s Day, higher by far than any previously recorded.

The dry conditions of Australia naturally give rise to fires, although surely the numbers deliberately (or even just stupidly) set could bring significant relief. Nobody’s burning off great swathes of grassland just to hunt kangaroos anymore, so other than lightning strikes, it seems most fires are the result of arson, which I wouldn’t limit by excluding idiots tossing their cigarette butts around. (I remember reading a 19050’s Ross MacDonald detective story featuring his hardboiled successor to Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, where he drives a client up through the summer hill country and has to stop the car to stamp out her carelessly tossed cigarette, making quite a point of the nearly sociopathic nature of the thoughtless gesture. This impressed me greatly at the time, not least for the environmental awareness it evidences as a significant part of Californian public conciousness.)

Last year or the year before or the year before that, back in Arizona or New Mexico, there were cases of wildfires set by seasonal firefighters looking to get a little extra work, and while I can’t recall any such incidents here, there are enough other instances of kids and adults deliberately setting fires, more often than not never to be caught out. Unless they are, they can do it again, and we’re left unable to understand their motivation and work to prevent future occurrences, which is, of course, one of the things we need to do.

The Rural Fire Services do a magnificent job under highly dangerous conditions, suffering injury and even death, such as the ambulance driver last week, but it shouldn’t come to this, despite years-long droughts. Maliciousness and ignorance need more than a few public service television ads to be defeated.

Update: Turns out there are known arsonists, all under surveillance by police. Good, but are they arsonists, or bushfire arsonists, because I'll bet there's a difference.

More Movies
We hit Broken Flowers over the last weekend before I returned to work, because other than Brokeback Mountain, it’s about the top movie of the season we wanted to see (and Brokeback doesn’t open until Australia Day). I’ll pretty much see anything Bill Murray’s in these days, but maybe his understated acting set within the understated context of a Jim Jarmusch film is pushing things. We enjoyed it, sure, but most of what I enjoyed had little enough to do with the plot or the performances as such. The places he travels all look like parts of America I’ve spent a lot of time in, i.e., upstate New York (which isn’t itself a bad thing, just familiar and a little nostalgia-provoking and therefore a bit of a distraction; it would have been that anyway), and the music on the soundtrack is terrific, and the camera-work is excellent, but in the end, the movie’s main accomplishment, I think, is to leave you feeling the emptiness of the character as an emptiness of your own.

Note to Self: 2006
Happy New Year, any and all who might venture here now and then. M., back from the hospital last Thursday, and I spent the evening watching a minor entry in the Billy Elliot school of Britsh film, Millions; cute enough, I suppose (and I rather liked the whole visitation by saints motif), but so thoroughly unfeasible as to rather deflate the thing in the end. Once it finished, we headed off the bed and slept through the fireworks and other moments of revelry in order to be revitalized for today's 40+ heat. The air conditioning is making a mockery of any other devotion we have toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Before the heat hit, I managed a quick trip out to Coogee for a dip in the ocean. It'd be a shame not to indulge our easy access to the beaches before the end of the year, and since M.'s responding well to the antibiotics, I took advantage of the weather for a bit of refreshment in the Tasman. The water was very warm, but diving down a little you could reach cooler temperatures, although immediately upon exiting the water, the sun would bake it right out of you.

This is a difficult time of year for a variety of reasons, not least being that the entire country appears to go on holidays, which is especially frustrating for M., since she'll have to get some tests done, and all the doctors are away. Some may be back on Tuesday, but it's possible it'll be another week yet before they'll actually be doing anything more than making appointments. Of course, the tests must wait on the complete cessation of the inflammation that was the immediate cause of her distress last week, and even with the antibiotics having successfully removed the infectous agents causing the inflammation, it will itself take its own time to reduce. Nevertheless, it's very hard to be patient under the circumstances, although M. is bearing up surprisingly well for all that.

And thus we enter the new year, trying to remember to write '06 on cheques and correspondence and so forth and mainly looking forward to medical interventions more so than anything else, at least initially. But once we've got those out of the way, who knows? This may yet turn out to be a very good new year.

So This Is Christmas
We headed into the weekend well enough it seemed, for a little while, but M., who's had a problem lately with acid reflux, complained long on the first day of the holiday, Friday, being the first full day of school holidays, of intestinal pain. Naturally, since it's only just over a year or so ago that I had my appendix out, we initially assumed she was only jealous of my vestigial organ-free lifestyle, but it was really too severe, too painful to be ignored or glossed, so in the end, at about 6 p.m., we headed over to St. Vincent's emergency room with a presenting appendix. Or so we assumed.

Of course, appendicitis wasn't all we went with in our heads, given the new complexity of acid reflux, but after about four hours, the consultation suggested only two things: (1) not M.'s appendix and (2) we don't know what else it might be; and thus we were admitted, if just to the casualty floor beds.

A day later, now Christmas Eve, we soon found ourselves having to face the fact that M. was unlikely to be released in time for our celebratory plans and made the call to Mark & family that we were forced to cancel. M. spent the night in the Emergency Medical Unit (EMU, which leads one to wonder if there are any other fauna-related acronyms in use at the hospital, but I'm not going to speculate on what KOALA might stand for), with an early call for a scan in the morning, which, upon duly completing the 2-hour ingestion of the contrasting solution, was not conducted until nearly ninety minutes later.

And there we were: Christmas Eve and no more information than that her colon showed some inflammation down near where the appendix would present itself if that had indeed been the cause of her distress. Over six hours later a surgeon finally turned out to discuss the diagnosis and our plans for Christmas Day, neither of which was particularly pleasant, although they weren't by any means catastrophic either. Most probably some kind of viral or bacterial infection, M. would spend the next couple of days on intravenous antibiotics and we'd unwrap our pressies in the ward.

Note on Christmas Morning: M. & I received most excellent gifts from overseas; notably subscriptions to the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly - bye, bye The Monthly, not that you were ever particularly worth the cost of the subscription - and a gift card each to Barnes & Noble, that paragon of on-line booksellers (because they don't have the same Red/Blue political donation ratio of Amazon, who favor the GOP), which I already know what I'll spend it on. Betweeen ourselves, however, I came out ahead, at least in the immediate context: M. got a promise of the 30th Anniversary edition of Horses, the 1975 Patti Smith album which may be one of the most perfect rock 'n' roll records ever, but also Joan Didion's new memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which in a variety of ways may have struck more close to the bone than otherwise. M. got me Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America, which I've been pining for, and the latest UQP edition of the Best Australian Poetry annual (not the Les Murray version, since although his own verse is good, we find his taste, at least as expressed in Quadrant, questionable). Presents were of exceedingly high quality this year. Now to sort the health issues.

Happy Christmas
I learned that "Merry Christmas" is frowned upon in some circles under the apprehension that it promotes drunkenness.

Never mind: Merry Christmas, just the same.
(Holly via Botanical.com.)

The City Won’t Stop
There’d been threats for every year I lived in the city, but outside of a few breakdowns and other, unexplained delays (and the 5-year renovation of the 7’s elevated line), I never had to endure a strike. Well, it’s on now, the first since 1980, and in the middle of winter, just to add insult to injury. The city is dealing with the problem by imposing a car-pool minimum on vehicles travelling in Manhattan below 96th Street that extends even to taxis and the usual screaming invective against the unions, who are acting against a preliminary injunction and now facing fines of $1 million per day, while residents and commuters simply endure as best they can.

I’m sympathetic to the pension plan changes at issue. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid only go so far, and the burden of caring for yourself after retirement is tremendous. While raising the retirement eligibility age to 62 sounds reasonable, it’s important to keep in mind the nature of the work and to query the ability of workers to maintain employment those extra 7 years. The 4% rise in employee contributions toward the pension also sounds reasonable, but the difference to your wage between 2% and 6% is bigger than you’d think without actually doing the math, especially since you’re already also contributing to other health and welfare benefits, as you will post-retirement.

Still, it’d be hard on everyone else, working men and women, business owners and operators, even for those living in Manhattan, let alone the thousands upon thousands who come in by car, bus, and train every day, many of whom only get as far as the middle of Queens before being left to their own devices. There are only so many cabs, after all, and if you’ve come to Jamaica via the LIRR, I’ll bet you didn’t bring your bicycle.

If CityRail went out here, I’m 27K from the office. I could walk, but at, say, 20 minutes a mile, I’m looking at a 6-hour commute each way, not to mention a shower when I get in.

It’s About the Oil
There’s a standard practice in Congress of attaching unrelated riders onto bills expected to have an easy passage that’s long been a source of great frustration to the public, but to the House and Senate themselves, as well, especially when bills of great seriousness are subverted to some partisan pork-barrelling, or worse, as is the case now with the defense spending bill being hijacked to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil.

We need the $453 million for the miliary, for obvious reasons, but opening up ANWR needs a debate of its own. Often these riders slip through because they’re just small-change pork, but this issue is huge, it alters the environmental trusteeship balance nationally, something the Bush administration has been trying to achieve incrementally elsewhere since the man first swore the oath of office 5 years ago, and it’s unacceptable, not just in implementation, but also in subverting the ability of Congress to examine the implications and act reasonably and responsibly. This is piracy of the process. Harry Reid’s got a big fight on his hands, now, and not just because of this, but because Bill Frist is going to push every issue he can into a face-off from now on, looking to eliminate any power the minority party could ever again wield in opposition to the radical agenda of the extreme right. Frist will plunder the nation to achieve his goals in service to his corporate masters. It’s time for the Democrats to pull out the stops. Republican ruthlessness cannot be deterred by just waiting for the next election.

Fair’s Fair
Ian Harper’s failed business owes its workers $700,000 since March 2001. After the Federal Reserve fiasco, does the Howard government really need another creep-appointment?

Fair’s Fair
Ian Harper’s failed business owes its workers $700,000 since March 2001. After the Federal Reserve fiasco, does the Howard government really need another creep-appointment?

Oils and Water
I don’t know much about art, but doesn’t Rolf Harris’ portrait of QEII look like she’s about to sprout vampire fangs and attack? Perhaps that crazed look in her eye is just a result of internet photo reproduction, but if it was my 180th birthday portrait (oops, I mean official portrait, on for her 80th birthday, not that she doesn’t look a little, let’s say, haggard in it), I’d hang the thing facing the wall.

'Tis the Season
One thing about working where I do is that they take Christmas very seriously, well, that is to say, they're serious about celebrating. Friday was the office mass and Christmas lunch, complete various baked foods, lots of beer and wine, and a themed trivia contest (my table did not win, but we made a decent showing; maybe next year). Today there's another party, just the department, and Wednesday yet another. On Saturday we'll have one at home for family, so that by the time Christmas has actually arrived, we'll be well worn out and looking forward to a bit of quiet time.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, M. & I attended the traditional gathering of Michelle's friends, this year in Pyrmont, a suburb we don't spend much time in, but which is really very nice. There's not much there beyond the Powerhouse museum and a few pubs and cafes, so I don't expect to be going there any more often. Michelle's very nice and takes her responsibilities as hostess seriously, including the planning, which ran to a $5-value "Kris Kringle" gift exchange. Most people took the price limit seriously, although M. & I insisted that there was nothing worth giving at that level (and we were right, although the chocolates I got were nice enough). The main point was, of course, the company, and there were a couple of other of our friends there and some new people to meet and chat with, so all-in-all a nice enough event.

Yesterday, Astrid arranged an evening picnic at Neilson Park, a lovely harbour beach M. and I rather like, and which is also very accessible via public transport, although the ride can be complicated at this time of year by holiday traffic, especially if you get stuck behind a Salvation Army marching band. (They might have used the footpath, but we made our connection with time to spare in the end anyway, so all is forgiven.)

The director and the producer of Meera's short (shameless plug: Upskirt) were there, of course, being family and friends, but also various others, some we've met and others new to us, and it was a lovely evening in the cool by the water in the last of the sun, perhaps the best way of all to finish a weekend.

Yes, that is a shark net across the beach in the photo at the bottom.