A comparison that may never have been made before

An eerie likeness has been spotted by eagle-eyed Zoe of crazybrave.

Hoist with his own petard

From the Doonesbury site's 'Say What?', a quotation from George W. Bush on the outcome of the Palestinian election:

"I remind people, the elections ... um ... democracy ... uh, is ... can open up the world's eyes to reality, by listening to people."

Teflon is nothing to it

For a giddy minute, until my actual brain kicked in, my heart began to beat a little faster as I watched this morning's email land in the Inbox and saw the subject line in the Age's AM Alert: Letters Link PM to Wheat Scandal.

Of course it was only a rush of blood to the head. He will do what he always, and so very effectively, does: dig his heels in, stick his bottom lip out, and say 'I did not' until it all goes away.

And as we know from bitter experience, even if it is proved beyond all shadow of a doubt that he did, people will vote for him anyway.

A sobering experience

(Image from here.)


Following the sad affair of the doomed New Year kitten (see January 2), I dutifully turned up to the Animal Welfare League first thing on Friday morning for my Volunteer Information seminar.

This was a rather thorough three-quarters-of-a-day session in which those who have registered their interest (as I did a few days after I found the mangled kitten and sadly handed it over to them to be put out of its misery) turn up to be told a few home truths about human nature, infection, danger and cruelty, in order to determine who, knowing what we all knew by the end of the day, was still up for a few volunteer hours a week.

The Animal Welfare League is a South Australian organisation begun in the sixties by a woman called Joy Richardson who saw an injured dog lying in the gutter one day with people walking past and stepping over it, and in that moment, as the sweet and earnest instructor put it, 'found her passion'. The League works in tandem with the RSPCA, doing the same things except for inspections.

Here are some of the things I learned:

* 9,500 cats and kittens go through that place per year. That's more than 25 cats a day, in a city with barely a million people, and with the RSPCA as an alternative. Most of these cats are euthanased. Many of them are brought in by the same people several times a year: 'Oh, my cat's had kittens again, could you take them?' Naturally these people never donate any money, and nobody knows why they don't have their cats desexed. Too much money? Too much trouble? Or are they the sorts of people for whom sex is the main reason for living, and who therefore think it's a destruction of feline selfhood to excise cats' bits, and/or cruel to deprive cats of nookie?

* If your cat or dog goes missing, the first 72 hours are crucial. Most people are on the alert about dogs straight away -- but don't wait a day or two for your cat to come home, either. Ring all the animal shelters in your city as soon as you realise you haven't seen it for a while.

* Collars and tags are good, but microchips are better. Collars can be torn off on fences and trees, and can choke an animal who gets caught on something by a collar with no elastic panel.

* A dog terrified by something, usually fireworks, can escape from enclosures that a calm dog can't get out of. If it's a fireworks night or a thunderstorm, bring and keep your dog inside.

* After I get home from a shift I will have to shower, change and chuck my clothes in the washing machine before I touch my own cats. Because, among other things,

* ... one infected hair follicle can cause a ringworm epidemic. (Am I sure I want to do this?)

* Cats have a double or 'bicornuate' uterus. After multiple matings when they're in season, it's quite possible for them to produce a litter of kittens with up to four different fathers. Take that, you anti-promiscuity abstinence-peddlers.

* The shelter has a 'euthanasia room', from which we were instructed to avert our eyes. Oops, I've written 'euthanasia', and now every raving right-to-life Googler on the planet is going pop up like a rabid meerkat. Go away, please.

* But here's a nice one, running contrary to popular belief: every dog and cat that turns up at the shelter is extensively tested for temperament and health before it's put up for adoption. But once it passes the tests and is offered for adoption, it's kept until somebody takes it.

* "Dogs find out a lot of information about each other by smelling each other's bums. So when they sniff your crutch, they're just using their skill base."

Hooray for Charles Richardson

From crikey.com.au yesterday:

Even cancer's good if it stops kids fooling around

Charles Richardson writes:

'A team led by Australian of the year professor Ian Frazer has developed a vaccine against the viruses that cause most cases of cervical cancer.
But [Senator Barnaby] Joyce and others are concerned about using it in case it "would promote teenage promiscuity." According to The Australian, Joyce "said he would be 'personally very circumspect' about giving such a vaccine to girls who were too young to cope with the potential consequences of s*xual activity."

Just think about what that means. These people are saying that teenage girls need to be scared off having s*x by the threat of getting cancer.
Not just that teenage promiscuity is bad – reasonable people can disagree about that – but that it's so bad that cervical cancer is an appropriate punishment for it.

And they have the gall to call themselves "pro-life"?'

****************************************************

When I was at high school, my two best mates and I were referred to by most of the teachers as the Terrible Trio. After we left school we stayed in touch, meeting once a year or more, until the winter that one of these two women was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer. Surprisingly it responded to massive (and massively debilitating) radiotherapy, but less than a year later she developed secondary tumours in her lungs and elsewhere.The third friend and I sat with her in the oncology ward every Thursday afternoon for six weeks and reminisced about our school days to take her mind off the evil useless chemo. She died a few weeks after the last of these sessions, at 46, when her kids were 15 and 13.

I wonder how those kids are feeling this week about the suggestion floating around in the public domain that their mother's death was simply her punishment for having been a naughty girl.

An Australia Day post

This map of Sydney Cove, from the National Library of Australia, was drawn by one of the transported convicts in April 1788.

My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Jane Langley, a wild girl and no mistake, is on one of those little boats, pregnant to someone other than five-greats grandpa Thomas Chipp, a Marine on one of the other little boats, whom she was yet to meet.

And this is a bit from The Timeless Land by Australian novelist Eleanor Dark, written in the early days of the Second World War and published in 1941 as borders and sovereignties were shifting all around the world. The novel is a landmark in Australian literature; the quotation is dedicated to Dr Sigmund Freud, who escaped from Vienna just in time to die of cancer instead of in the gas chambers. He died while Dark was writing this novel. She was a fan.

It's 1788 and a 'winged boat' full of strange-looking people has arrived on the beach at Port Jackson; the Aboriginal people are watching from the cliffs, including Bennilong, who's only six:


'Bennilong was particularly interested in the doings of a small group of men who were carrying a tall, slender sapling down to the eastern shore of the cove. Here they set it upright in the ground, embedding it firmly in a deep hole in the ground, which had been made ready to receive it, packing stones and earth about it so that it stood at last as if rooted. Could there, By-gone demanded, be wisdom in the minds of people who felled a tree for the express purpose of setting it up in a different place? But suddenly there fluttered out from its top an object so bright and beautiful that Bennilong, who dearly loved splendour and gay colours, felt his heart lift and turn in an anguish of admiration and covetousness. A rapt silence fell upon the watchers. They had never seen anything half so beautiful as this thing which was red as blood, and white as a cloud, and blue as the sky above it; they could not tear their eyes away from its brilliance, the lovely way shadows ran and coiled along it as it flapped in the afternoon sunlight, the gaiety and cheerfulness of its fluttering corners.

They were not at all surprised when they saw that it was to be worshipped. All the people assembled beneath it ... and then suddenly a noise shattered the silence.

Bennilong and his friends never knew how it happened, but they, who a moment ago had been lying or sitting on the ground, were now on their feet, strung to a desperate tension ... Far down in the harbour, curling round the distant headlands and away into the hills, went the echo of that appalling sound, and above the strange weapons of the invaders a little smoke hung, and then vanished.'

Past modernism

Oh for God's sake it's too hot for this kind of nonsense.

Have just seen the PM on ABC TV evening news, banging on in his Australia Day address about how Australian history, 'along with other subjects in the humanities', is being taught in that nasty amoral po-mo relativistic way and a stop ought to be put to it at once.

Now, I would be willing to bet a biggish fraction of my extremely modest assets that Howard couldn't give you an accurate and detailed definition of post-modernism even if you offered in exchange to put Costello and all the Nats on a slow boat to Easter Island. I wonder which heroic RW culture warrior wrote the speech for him, or provided the notes to his speechwriter. Whoever it was, Howard was reading very carefully from his script at this point. Postmodernism was clearly not a theme on which he felt confident to extemporise.

He is absolutely correct in his claim that history in this country, and the history of this country, should be taught better, and taught more. But he and his speechwriter are completely wrong in blaming an abstraction called 'post-modernism' for the fact that it isn't. Maybe he should, for example, have a look instead at the relative amount of funding going to private and public schools, or at the workplace conditions under which dozens if not hundreds of teachers a year collapse into an extended period of stress leave. Postmodernism is the least of anybody's problems.

Whoever wrote the speech needs a bit of a lesson in clear thinking, too: there's a doozy of a mixed metaphor in there. Australian history, said the speech, is taught as a 'fragmented stew of themes and issues'. A stew is not fragmented; on the contrary, the point of a stew is to combine things.

On the other hand, the PM obviously relished the phrase and had lots and lots of fun saying 'fragmented stew', so maybe that's the most important thing.

What the PM wants, as one exasperated-looking history teacher pointed out when asked to comment, is to wind the clock back several decades: to reinvent, as with the wheel, the time when Australian history was taught as a triumphalist grand narrative of grand middle-class white male triumphs.

Which is, after all, like, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. As everybody knows.

Giving the game away

With a link to the press conference in question, here's a sharp-eyed response from crikey.com.au today:

'Look at [the Prime Minister's] response to a question on Julian McGauran's future: “that pre-selection won't come up for another four or five years, ask me then.”'

Four or five years?

Ask him then?

Couldn't you just cry

Filled yet again with despair (ever noticed how purging oneself of despair using sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, alcohol, conversation, exercise or an excellent movie has the downside of leaving newly-created room for fresh despair?) at the state of the world, the overflowing washing basket, the absolute dominance over men's tennis of Roger Federer, and the abysmal ignorance of history (mainstay of the despised 'humanities' and therefore on the slide interest-wise, except in the rabidly reactionary and denialist paws of the Keith Windschuttles of the world) that has our masters at local, state, federal and global levels reinventing the wheel over and over again, round and round as you might say -- filled, as I say, with despair at all these things, I turned to my favourite online community for some intelligent and well-informed discussion of an era other than our own.

VICTORIA is an online community of 19th-century scholars and other interested folk, covering mainly literature and history but with lots of other input, of which I've been a grateful listmember for something like 15 years. Established, maintained, and run with a light hand by the wonderful Patrick Leary, VICTORIA has been characterised all its life by the courtesy, intelligence, literacy and erudition of its posts and threads, so it should be needless to add that I mostly lurk and admire in silence, but these days its civilised qualities make it a quite unusual online place to be.

So, turning to it this morning for some badly-needed perspective and quietness of mind, I was rudely reminded by this post from Bob Lapides of what the 19th century, especially in its early days, was actually like. The phrase 'blacking days' refers to Dickens' stint, at age 12, at work in a boot-blacking factory after his father had been imprisoned.


When his father was arrested for debt in 1824, Charles Dickens
(then 12) had to appear before an appraiser to make sure his
personal property had a value of less than twenty pounds. In a
piece of autobiography he wrote some years later, he described
his anxiety about a silver pocket watch his grandmother, Lord
Crewe's housekeeper, had given him:

"I recollect his coming out to look at me with his mouth full, and
a strong smell of beer upon him, and saying good-naturedly that
'that would do,' and 'it was all right.' Certainly the hardest creditor
would not have been disposed (even if he had been legally entitled)
to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or corduroy
trowsers. But I had a fat old silver watch in my pocket, which had
been given me by my grandmother before the blacking days, and I
had entertained my doubts as I went along whether that valuable
possession might not bring me over the twenty pounds. So I was
greatly relieved, and made him a bow of acknowledgment as I went
out."

And then, light-headed from the heat ...

I got this irresistible bit of craziness from Kate who got it from Ampersand Duck who got it from Ladycracker who doesn't say where she got it from. But the footnotes are all my own work.

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Pavlov's Cat!

1. The average duration of sexual intercourse for Pavlov's Cat is two minutes.
2. Pavlov's Cat can squeeze her entire body through a hole the size of her beak.
3. You should always store Pavlov's Cat in an airtight container in the fridge.
4. The horns of Pavlov's Cat are made entirely from hair!
5. Pavlov's Cat can drink over 25 gallons of water at a time!
6. It takes 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun's surface to Pavlov's Cat.
7. All shrimp are born as Pavlov's Cat, but gradually mature into females.
8. The opposite sides of Pavlov's Cat always add up to seven!
9. Pavlov's Cat is the only bird that can swim but not fly.
10. If you lie on your back with your legs stretched it is impossible to sink in Pavlov's Cat.

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

1. Depends on who ... oh, never mind.
2. I wish.
3. In the current weather, this is correct.
4. There are some who think I have horns (to say nothing of the forked tail), but whether they are made of hair is a moot point. On any given day there is enough cat hair in this house to knit another cat, so it's more than likely.
5. See 3.
6. See 5.
7. I'm going to ignore the slur here and simply point out the tautology implicit in the phrase 'gradually mature into females'.
8. Opposite of what?
9. I can swim but not fly, but I'm quite sure I'm not the only chick of whom this is true.
10. See notes #1 and #2.

Not fit for human habitation

For the third day in a row, the temperature here in sunny Adelaide today went over 40 degrees. The tender new leaves on the lemon tree have crisped and blackened, the cats lie sprawled on the bathroom floor gazing at me reproachfully as though it were my fault, steam came off next door's outside wall when I hosed it this evening while watering the garden, the water from all the cold taps is permanently tepid and I've nearly run out of Gastrolyte.

Hot day drink:

1) find your biggest glass, and put in it
2) one slosh of Buderim Ginger Cordial (half an inch or so), then
3) half fill the glass with Berri's 'Apple juice with a hint of green tea' from the Harmonics range,
4) fill up the rest of the glass with soda and ice, and
5) sip slowly

You will feel much better. Especially if you drink it while dripping wet and standing under the ceiling fan.

Mystic Mogg

I liked Tim Dunlop's predictions for 2006 so much that I have decided to put on my amateur astrologer's hat, the pointy one with the planets and spiders on it, and see what lies in store for us all star-wise.


ARIES
You people are such children it won't really matter to you what's happening in the wider world. You will be too busy chasing after shiny things, courting applause, and twirling around in your red satin threads trilling 'Look at moy!!' Some people will indeed look at you, but probably not for the reasons you would like.

TAURUS
We Taureans are good with money, so will probably be able to find an up side to this year's combination of rising costs and falling wages. But if deprived for too long of the silk sheets, Veuve Clicquot, handmade Belgian chocolates and individually hand-fried wedges with imported Thai sweet chilli sauce and gourmet sour cream that our souls crave, our legendary rumbling-volcano tempers could erupt into a full-on china-shop situation. You have been warned.

GEMINI
Ah, the intellectual bling of the zodiacal department store. There's nothing you love better than a mixed metaphor, and most of you can come up with a much better one than that last sentence. This year will provide an unprecedented smorgasbord of opportunities to theorise, analyse, philosophise and opine rings around friends, colleagues and family, which will annoy the bejesus out of all of them and probably lose you a promotion. Hah.

CANCER
Oh, get over yourselves. 2006 is going to be dangerous and depressing, so suck it up. Sulking will not help, and neither will passive aggression or hysterical sobbing. And for God's sake get out of the house occasionally, even if it does mean you have to dodge the shrapnel on your way to the milk bar. Pull yourselves together.

LEO
John Howard is a Leo, what can I say. You get to spend the year making Peter Costello's life a living hell, along with the lives of countless other Australians. You may even get to watch some of them being stomped on by the much-vaunted Elephant in the Room, the one that your fellow Leo the PM's good buddy Dubya had lowered into the room by crane after he had the roof blown off the house specially. Enjoy the spectacle while you can, since an elephant will avoid a lion if there are other things to step on. The rest of us are the spectacle.

VIRGO
Virgoans will be in their element this year. So much to be censorious about, so little time. Your obsession preoccupation with health will be well-founded as an epidemic of clinical depression looms in tandem with a bird flu ditto, while petrol prices rise so high along with the unprecedentedly outrageous cost of life-saving pharmaceuticals that the possibilty of buying food and clothes as well will retreat into the middle distance, where it will sit staring at you sullenly. If things get as bad as they well might, the expression 'nit-picking' (a favourite Virgoan pastime) could take on a new, less figurative meaning.

LIBRA
Even those Librans most determined to pour oil on troubled waters and make peace come hell or high water will be defeated even more often than usual this year. With any luck you will still have a bathroom vanity or well-lit dressing-table and make-up mirror to which you can retreat, and where you can spend the year trying to make up your mind which of your many lipsticks tones in best with your hair. Female Librans, your year will be even more exciting than that.

SCORPIO
No Scorp understands that the reason why the stage is always littered with corpses by the end of a Shakespearean or Jacobean revenge tragedy is that revenge is rightly the prerogative of the gods, not of men. Nor do you get it that the only route to redemption in Greek tragedy is to break the cycle of revenge. If you try to read Anna Karenina you will not get past the epigraph: 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay.' The universal Scorpionic failure to understand this basic truth is the reason why it's a bad idea for any of you to enrol in a degree in literature this year. Or any other year. Now get away from me.

SAGITTARIUS
The state of the world this year will give you an unprecedented number of choices for adventure, good works and triage. Since what you call your cheerful honesty and everybody else calls your incredibly hurtful tactlessness will alienate many of your friends, this makes it an extra good year to travel, especially since your freakish luck will keep you safe while all around you succumb to personally invasive legislation, religious martyrs in all their manifestations, and up-themselves customs officials. You will be able to write your second-higher-degree dissertation in airports, bus stations, bomb shelters and yurts in the lulls between the exciting things. Tuck a jumbo box of condoms, a surgical mask and some Tamiflu into your luggage just in case; even Saggos get unlucky once every trillion years or so. Bastards.

CAPRICORN
Capricorns are dour, earthbound folk, not unlike Taureans except less sensual, more ambitious, and surgically scarred by the humour bypass. Lighten up, people, it's only the most multivalently dangerous period in living memory -- there's the revival of the Christian Right, for a start. No, scrap that -- most of you are probably central figures in it. Anyway, with any luck you will be so focused on getting your foot onto the next career rung you won't even notice the screams.

AQUARIUS
Earth to Water Carrier, do you read me? Over. Hello? Um ...

PISCES
Just keep on taking your meds and everything will be all right.

Oh, he's good

Another really distinguished post from Alex Ross, on the reasons why 'emotional truth' -- invoked as a defence of non-truthful non-fiction -- is actually a furphy, complete with its very own slippery slope.

If it looks like a language Nazi ...

I really love watching the tennis. I love watching the tennis so much that I have now missed several deadlines and we're still less than three weeks into January. But given how much tennis commentators get paid (actually I don't know how much they get paid but I bet it's a lot more than anyone will ever pay me), I really do think it behooves them to get a little polish, pronunciation- and usage-wise. So here are some things I really, really want the tennis commentators to do:

* Learn how to pronounce the name of every player in the tournament, preferably before the tournament begins. There are usually rules for these things, like the Slavic women's names that go almost universally mispronounced.

* Stop saying 'bundled out', forever. This idiotic expression is overdue to be bundled out of the language.

* Stop calling Mark Philippoussis 'Scud'. Scud missiles were a popular feature of a now-almost-forgotten conflict in the Middle East, the one that started over the summer of 1990-1991. That's fifteen years ago, folks. Time to move on. (God, is the Poo really that old?) (They may call him the Poo if they wish. Roy and HG rule.)

* Stop saying 'back-to-back' when they mean 'consecutive'. 'Back-to-back' is not only inaccurate but sounds kind of rude. So does 'the Poo', I know, but in a nicer way.

* Stop saying 'parochial' when they mean 'partisan'. What do these people think the OED is for?

* John Alexander: you need to stop raving about Lleyton Hewitt for long enough to draw breath occasionally, especially when the other bloke is the one making the shot. We know you're a Hewitt fan but you need to tone it down. People will talk.

* Mark Woodforde: you're a champ. You've got a lovely voice. You say really, really interesting and intelligent things about the tennis. But 'anything' and 'something' do not end with the consonant K. The word for the letter H is not pronounced Haitch. And the given name of Xavier Malisse is not even pronounced 'Ex-Avier', much less 'Egg-Zavier'.

I feel better now. Thank you.

Colette's French household hints

I'm working my way up to a patch of full-blown food blogging, where I shall divulge not only the recipe for Home-Made Fresh-Cherry and Toasted-Almond Ice Cream but also a 'fragrant and magical' cantaloupe ice cream recipe adapted from Jane Grigson. The beauty of these two is that (a) neither requires an ice-cream maker, and (b) they taste fine, and look utterly spectacular, when served together, one scoop of each on a white plate. (Or more, of course.) In the meantime, though, here's a little jewel from one of the more oddbod books on the cookbook shelf: Laura Fronty's Aromatic Teas and Herbal Infusions.

The French novelist Colette, says Fronty, was writing for Marie-Claire during the harsh winter of 1940, with provisions in short supply and the Nazis moving inexorably towards the occupation of Paris. For this issue of the magazine Colette provided a herbal recipe for violet cough syrup: violets have been used for respiratory disorders since the Middle Ages. She added a tip about how to gather the flowers that sounds just a tiny bit on the Weird Sisters side -- one is tempted to reply 'Well, eye of newt and toe of frog to you too, old girl' -- but at the same time is oddly compelling and memorable. It might be something as simple as Colette's matchless gift for sensory, and sensual, imagery:

"Pennywise housewives who gather medicinal flowers and leaves properly at the right time of the year, do you know why you find that your violet infusion is so bland? It's because you picked your violets in the sun. They must be picked in the shade, when they first begin to bloom. Pick only the blooms without the stems and dry them in the shade, on white paper and not a cloth. Here, we say that the cloth drinks the perfume. Also, beware of marble tables: when they are cold, the chill 'shocks' the flowers, causing them to fold up and lose part of their soul."