La chanson des vieux amants

I have been asked to remove the spider from the front page, so here is something much prettier: James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, performing together in 1970 as new lovers when he was 22 and she was 27.

And here, 30 years later, they are at the Joni Mitchell Tribute concert in 2000.

If you're in your 20s and in the middle of a hot love affair, here, if you're lucky, is how you'll feel about each other thirty years from now. And ladies, you may find this hard to believe, but if he's still this attached to you and still singing your songs, you won't mind at all about what's happened to his hair.

They all look the same to him

Today at crikey.com.au, Mungo MacCallum summarises a recent monstrous bingle in the Coalition's Clayton's campaigning:

'Even [Howard's] shameless attempt to duchess the Chinese community went wrong: his staff produced a glossy invitation lauding the achievements of Chinese Australians, but through either blind racism or pig ignorance sent it not only to the Chinese, but to their sworn enemies, the Koreans and Vietnamese as well – after all, they all look the same and they all have funny names.'

Three questions:

1) What does he mean, either blind racism or pig ignorance?

2) Was there really no minion anywhere in the process of formulating and disseminating this message who heard alarm bells? If the answer is yes, then the Rodent has one or more, erm, rats in the ranks.

3) Does anyone plan to point out to Howard that if only he knew a little more about the postmodernism and/or the multiculturalism against which he so tirelessly rails and legislates (or even just about the history he never tires of talking up as though the rest of us didn't know any), he and/or his People would never have made this grotesquely insulting and, one hopes, fatal mistake in the first place?

Ecosystematic: what goes around ... and around ... and around ...

Ever since I realised how many blackbirds, honey-eaters and pigeons make nests in the yard and garden every year, I've been taking the lint from the clothes-dryer filter and leaving hanks of it draped around on branches and bushes instead of throwing it away.

I always feel a bit mad doing this, and it makes the garden look extremely strange. But then in late summer when I haven't used the dryer for months and am cutting back the overgrowth, or in midwinter when I'm doing the pruning proper, it always makes me glad that I did it whenever I come across yet another one of these from the last nesting season, the way I did today:




'Gaston Bachelard, writing about nests in The Poetics of Space, quotes from Jules Michelet's L'Oiseau (1858): "There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird's breast, its heart."

... Although Bachelard writes about the naive wonder we feel when discovering a nest, I disagree when he suggests that a living, useful nest is valid to our set of images and metaphors associated with nests but that the empty, abandoned nest is nothing. ... The delicate structure; the natural, dulled colour of the materials; the shaping; the accidental debris, the memory only, of seasonal usefulness; the architecture, the shaping of the space but not the space itself in Bachelard's philosophical terms -- the beauty that literally takes my breath away sometimes -- have nothing to do with images of home, warmth, security, refuge ...'

-- Gay Bilson, Plenty: Digressions on food