@#$%& feral mongrel doorbitch

Profuse apologies to anyone who is having as much trouble with the Blogger Word Verification Thingy, whenever you try to leave a comment, as I am having myself -- it keeps telling me the letters are wrong even when I know perfectly well they're right, and it takes me two or three tries to get into my own comments box.

Blogger reckon the new version is 'out of Beta', but I think they're having themselves on.

Late Australia Day Meme

In response to popular demand, ie two people have said it would be kind of nice, and as a late gesture to Australia Day, I here reprise the Australian Literature meme I made up and posted over at A Fugitive Phenomenon shortly after I took up blogging. It's been tweaked a bit, but most of my answers are the same as they were in December 2005 -- nice to think there are some things I'm consistent about.


AUSTRALIAN LIT MEME

1) Which Australian poem are you most confident you could recite from memory?

Gwen Harwood's 'Suburban Sonnet' -- only because Robyn Archer set it to music and I used to have the album ('Wild Girl in the Heart', title taken from a Dorothy Hewett poem). We're talking vinyl here.

2) Which of the Seven Little Australians are you?

Bunty. No question.

3) Which is your favourite Patrick White novel?

The Eye of the Storm.

4) Which is the best Patrick White novel?

Gah. Um -- A Fringe of Leaves or The Tree of Man, I think. [UPDATE: I don't know what I was thinking about here. Clearly the answer to this question is Voss.

This week.]

5) Which Australian fictional/dramatic/poetic character do you fancy most?

There's a sailor in a Dorothy Hewett poem called 'Go Down Red Roses' that I always rather liked the sound of.

6) And which do you identify with most?

Shannon in Ride On Stranger.

7) If you had to read five Australian poems to a heterogeneous unknown audience, which five would you choose?

John Shaw Neilsen's 'The Orange Tree', Gig Ryan's 'If I Had a Gun', all of Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells', all of Les Murray's 'The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle', and all of Judith Wright's 'The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals' ("There's altogether too much I know nothing about.").

And I'd allow breaks for meals.

8) Which five Australian books would you take to a desert island?

Voss, Come In Spinner, Carmel Bird's Penguin Century of Australian Stories, David Marr's bio of P White, Nadia Wheatley's ditto of Charmian Clift. This is about memory -- these are the books that would elicit the greatest breadth, depth and variety of memories to contemplate as I sat on the beach getting skin cancer.

9) If you were a guest at Don’s Party, would you be
(a) naked in the pool
(b) upstairs having sex
(c) outside having sex
(d) sulking with a headache
(e) huddled round the TV
(f) crying
(g) more than one of the above (please specify)
(h) other (please specify)

(g), namely (d), (e) and (f) -- I'd be huddled round the TV with a headache, sulking and crying.

10) Tim Winton or Christos Tsiolkas?

Gotta be Christos.

11) Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson?

Gotta be Henry.

12) Henry Lawson or Barbara Baynton?

Gotta be Barbara. The blacker of two options, every time.

13) What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen at a writers’ festival?

Edmund White saying to a fellow-panelist as they climbed onto the stage to do their thing: 'What is it that we're supposed to be talking about?'

Yet another missed opportunity

I don't know. Reahlly I don't.

I bought a digital camera for a very specific reason: to enhance and improve this blog and have even more fun with it than I already do.

So far, so good. What I have to do now is remember to actually take it with me when I go places where I might see things that would make good blog posts.

Things like the sign in the supermarket this afternoon that said

BANANAS $1.99 PER KILO

Doesn't think much of his fellow Australians, does he?

Tony Abbott, the Minister for Forcing Everybody Else to Fall Into Line with His Own Personal Belief System, appears to believe that many of his fellow Australians are potential murderers:

'"If euthanasia were legalised there's a whole range of old people who would suddenly be at risk of being bumped off," Mr Abbott told The Age.'

Has anyone noticed him applying that sort of bogeyman-on-the-slippery-slope argument to, say, nuclear power? No, I thought not. He's also wilfully ignoring the fact that voluntary euthanasia is the only kind that anyone is advocating -- that is, he's assuming he can control the populace by playing on their ignorance and fear.

As long as voluntary euthanasia isn't legalised, Minister, there's a whole range of old people who are not just 'at risk' of acute physical and mental suffering, but are experiencing it 24/7, sometimes for years and years on end.

But you, no doubt, would just say that suffering was good for their souls.

It's a fail, but it could be worse.

And it's a hell of a lot better than I was expecting to do on Geoffrey Chaucer's Medieval Trivia Quiz, let me tell you. Stephanie will be proud of me. Well, proudish.

Ye are 43% proficient in medievale trivia.

 

A pretty good attempte. Peraventure ye knowe much of the middel ages, but nat of thes topiques. After al, thys quiz is fairlye specific. It hath no thing concerning Germany, for ensaumple. Cursid be my ignorance!

The Gret Quizz of Medievale Trivia
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Thanks to Christine Keeler via Barista.*

*I'm trying and failing to imagine what a non-blogger might make of this sentence.

Winners

Australian of the Year

Tim Flannery. Gotta love it.


Australian Open First Men's Semi

Roger Federer, who humiliated Andy Roddick in straight sets in less than 90 minutes, and who during his on-court post-match interview with Jim Courier was not even sweating.

For the record

Word has it that I am being traduced and misrepresented at various points around the blogosphere. How excitement!

But as I seem to have upset several people with Tuesday's post on the implications of the PM's re-naming of the Department of Immigration and Citizanship (DIC, formerly DIMA, formerly DIMIA), and it has resulted in libellous misrepresentations of my views in ways and places I can't control, let me make a couple of things clear.

I did not call John Howard 'a racist'.

I did not claim, nor did I imply, that he had actually used the word 'assimilation'.

What I said was

(a) that his policy was assimilationist, which it is. Short of stopping immigration altogether, assimilation is the only thing left, by a process of elimination, after you erase the alternative, 'multicultural', from the name and the policy of the department in question,

and

(b) that assimilation was essentially a racist policy, which it is. 'Assimilate: to absorb, to become absorbed, incorporated ... to become or cause to become similar'. What this means is the erasure of cultural difference, and cultural difference sometimes, though not always, includes racial difference. A desire to erase racial difference would seem to me to indicate a negative attitude to it.

A quick look at the post in question should confirm the accuracy of both (a) and (b). But I do admit, with shame, to having optimistically assumed that these things were understood without me having to spell them out, and that people would be able to follow the argument. One would hope that the people reading one's blog can, in fact, read, but it seems this isn't always the case.

UPDATE: Oh and another thing: I would be very interested to see any of the people who called that post 'drivel', 'stupid', 'prejudice', 'nonsense', 'wankery' or 'deception' (deception? que?) explain clearly and in detail just exactly what they think Howard's reasons were for the last two changes in this department's name. Go on. As the PM himself would be proud to say, have a go.

Thomas Harris, eat your heart out

This is a frilled shark.

SMH/Reuters

It is, say the news reports of a recent sighting and catch of one of these creatures, rarely seen. This is because it lives in the deepest darkest depths of the deepest darkest bits of the deep dark ocean.

Half-shark half-eel, the frilled shark is a cannibalistic bottom-feeder that eats other sharks.

It has evolved very little since prehistoric times.

"Rarely seen", eh? These people clearly don't spend a lot of time in the blogosphere.

Prime Minister kills two linguistic birds with one stone

John Howard has always hated the word 'multiculturalism' and has grabbed his chance to erase it from the country's vocabulary:

The PM also announced he would rename the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Yes, the former Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs -- product of an earlier erasure in which the word 'Indigenous' had been likewise obliterated --- was most recently known by the acronym DIMA (pronounced DIMMER, at least by me). It has been replaced as of today by 'Department of Immigration and Citizenship' and I am quite sure is already being referred to as DIC.

And, as I've said over at LP, I am sure that they will proceed to wave it, along with the flag.

Could this have been a deliberate longterm two-step plan to bid a symbolic good riddance to formal acknowledgement first of Aboriginal people and then of any reference to any culture other than Australia's narrow grey outgrowth of 1950s Anglo-Saxon dreariness, to which the PM has been systematically attempting to return us for eleven years now?

But wait, there's more:

The whole purpose of immigration is to recruit more people to the broader Australian family,'' Mr Howard said.

Oh, that's clever. Propose assimilation, a fundamentally racist policy that has been comprehensively and internationally outdated and discredited, and then dress it up with the 'family' reference, by which, as we all know, the PM means hubby, wife and 2.4 children, in that order. Two bits of reactionary rhetoric in one sentence.

I wonder whether it's all his own work.

Saturday Cityblogging: Adelaide Central Market

This is one of the places I drag interstate and overseas visitors to. I remember it from the time I was in high school, when the dominant cultural influences in South Australia, other than Anglo-Celtic, were German (a huge influence in SA since early settlement, when the state, founded by idealists, was a haven for religious refugees) plus Italian and Greek, by far the two biggest ethnic groups to end up in Adelaide in the postwar wave of immigration.

The Central Market in those days was where you went for imported groceries. There was an ornately fronted continental-cake shop run by a Viennese woman with whom our German teacher had an arrangement: every now and then for our German lesson we'd walk down to the market from school, which was less than 100 metres up the street, and buy a cake each. We had to ask for it in perfect, polite German before she'd hand it over.

It's got bigger and bigger over the years. Adelaide's Chinatown now kind of melts into it. There's a stall that sells Russian food. People queue up in droves to buy Asian greens. You can buy artisanal cheeses from the Adelaide Hills, or really seriously stinky cheeses from France at $86 per kilo. You can buy everything from bottom-of-the-range mega-shoddy mass produced statuettes of Ganesh the Elephant God to black pearls and unique gold jewellery of great beauty. You can buy fresh roast turkey and cranberry sauce baguettes, that morning's field mushrooms, corn-fed chicken, organic beef, giant chocolate crackles and still-warm wood-oven bread. The noise is overwhelming. The smell is fabulous.


Part of the car park is an old warehouse ...



... and when you get out of the lift, you see this.



These are the people with the gold, but their amber is even better.



I wonder where they keep the Mundane Fruit and Veg, and what it is. Parsnips, chokos and cabbage?

Meteorological intrusions

Apparently this demented weather pattern we're being subjected to down the nation's central strip is called a tropical intrusion.



This part of the paving in the back yard is not supposed to be under water. God knows what that seeping tobacco-coloured stain is; the mind boggles.




This (colour) photo was taken from under the verandah of Quince (top cafe, Quince; fab toast) in the upscale shopping strip down Unley Road in the genteel well-to-do Adelaide inner suburb of Unley at about one o'clock this afternoon.


We're having an intrusion
A tropical intrusion
The temperature's falling
It's slightly appalling
Cos we're having an intrusion

And as the hearts of moderate, reasonable Australian Muslims sink even lower ...

Radical sheikh (yeah yeah, I know) Feiz Mohammad -- who only looks about seventeen himself -- in Sydney, addressing Muslim parents, via a surreptitiously circulating DVD, on the human sacrifice of their children:

"Teach them this: that there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a Muhajid."

O RLY?

Why doesn't he, then? Think of all the young Muslim lives it might save.

"Big retirement payouts for former AWB executives"

Ah, that'll be because they did such a fabulous job.

This is my favourite bit: 'Mr Lindberg received $3 million for less than five months of service last year.'

That's about $30,000 per working day.

What could you do with $30,000 a day?

What could 100 drought-ruined wheat farmers do with it, if they shared it around? Or the Smith Family? The CFS? East Timor?

Put the telly on

11.30 pm (CST) on Monday night, and if you want to see a bit of sports history being made and a new tennis star coming streaking up over the horizon, put the telly on and have a look at the bloke who's belting Marat Safin all over the court -- one B. Becker from Germany (no relation). He's 25 and the reason most of us have never heard of him is that up till recently he's been off studying, which is why he got the late start.

He seems to be making up for lost time.

Bloomblogging

Top to bottom: lavender, morning-glory, plumbago and bougainvillea. All already here when I bought the house nine years ago; all very good for covering up unsightly sheds, unattractive wide white PVC pipes, falling-down fences, and next door's ugly Dodgy Brothers extensions. And all what my Scottish grandma would have called common as muck. They're very pretty in their full effect, but I've never looked at any of them so closely before.







And the Gestalt of the Garden is rather good at this time of year. Summer Blues, I call it.