Bridget Jones 2

Ghastly, vile, contemptible and, worst of all, badly made, poorly directed and woefully written (four credited names is always a warning). I'm not quite sure which bits were the worst. Near the top (or is it bottom) would be the ENTIRE Thai jail sequence ... ho, ho, ho, how I larfed about heroin abuse and male violence. But the scene with Jim Broadbent, one of the profession's best, cowering in lavender in the department store says everything you need to know about how totally spent this franchise has become.
. 

Arnold or Bruce?

Yeh, right George. 

.

The louse's view: Collateral

It’s very good rather than great but certainly not quite Heat. TC and JF are excellent, which is true for the rest of the cast (although JPS doesn't have much to do). There’s superb dialogue throughout but especially in the taxi, in the Jazz Club and, above all, when Felix tells the story about Santa and Pedro. It loses credibility when they return to the office at the end. I couldn't quite keep my disbelief suspended I'm afraid. I loved the bit with the wolf. Well worth the ticket price.

A bit of perspective on the polls

Ruy Teixeira notes the following:

Today the TIPP tracking poll was a tie; at this time before the 2000 election, it was +5 Bush.

Today the Zogby tracking poll was a tie; at this time before the 2000 election, it was +3 Bush.

Today, the WP/ABC tracking poll (LV) was +3 Bush; at this time before the 2000 election, it was also +3 Bush...where it stayed, with a brief detour to +4, until its final poll, thereby missing the actual popular vote margin by 3.5 percentage points.

Today, the Rasmussen poll was +2 Bush; no information available on where it was at this point before the 2000 election (and it wouldn't be strictly comparable anyway, since Rasmussen has substantially changed their methodology since then), but it seems safe to say that Bush's margin was far larger--their final poll, after all, had Bush winning by 9 points.
. 

Dr Thompson says ...

Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, we had a quick rendezvous on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen, Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet a harem of wealthy campaign contributors. I told him that Bush's vicious goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn't. Kerry suggested I might make a good running mate, and we reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.

That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead rat over a black-spike fence and on to the President's lawn. We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon - which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river. That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.
. 

Dusk, River Clyde

Cloch lighthouse (photo by my brother Joe)

Straight to video

Under Suspicion: Liam Neeson, 1992. Watched it tonight on DVD. Wow, it's humpty!
. 

A safer world, George?

From the New York Times: 

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations. 

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year. 
. 

They may be mad, you know

As written by Ron Suskind in Without a Doubt:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
. 

The Yellow Dog Drag

One day, this louse might wallow in the blues. But not this day, I fear: not this day.
. 

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Hubris is not, I hope, a fault I’m guilty of (too often). So it’s with some trepidation that I set down here a hostage to fortune by recalling the words that William Shakespeare put in the mouth of Mark Anthony in Act 3, Scene 2 of the tragedy, Julius Caesar.

We all know the words that start the speech: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Then he goes on to do a hatchet job on Brutus.

We all die sooner or later and most of us think too soon; too soon. So it’s natural, perhaps, for each of us to reflect on those who die before us. Maybe it’s even necessary that we pause to remember: as Link has done for its founding editor, Jeff Heath; as an article in Link's current issue does for the sorely missed Kevin Byrne; as I have done in this column for my mate Neil.

It’s another man’s death, however, that brought to mind the words attributed to Mark Anthony. And if I pause to reflect for a moment on what has struck me, it is not so much upon the death that I wish to linger but more upon a complex and, at times, contradictory life. To be frank, and unpopular with some readers, I also want to reflect on the sometimes-disappointing responses that I’ve read to the death I have in mind.

What can I say? In places, some responses lacked charity. (This louse is not moved by Faith but see Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, for what I mean by charity).

But first, a disclaimer: I’m an ageing Leftie. I favour certain ideological positions over others. I have a bias of which you should be aware and, therefore, wary of.

That said: how should we assess a man’s life, an activist for thirty years, who dies too young? Shouldn’t we mourn, with charity, the death of one who:
· has been a public advocate since 1976 on what are now known as ‘green issues’ (long before our mainstream political parties);
· joined Amnesty International in the mid-1970s;
· demonstrated on the streets of Pinochet’s Chile in 1987 against death sentences passed on 77 actors;
· received an award for bravery from a human rights organisation working with and for the victims of torture;
· voted Democrat in America and didn’t run from the label “liberal” (seen as a term of abuse by many in that weird political culture);
· helped to bring about the US 1999 Work Incentives Improvement Act, which allows people with disability to return to work and still receive disability benefits.
· is the only quad in history to win an Emmy;
· and more?

Ah, the penny drops: you mean Christopher Reeve; the stem cell research man; the cure not care man; the quad who said he’d walk before he’s fifty man (but didn’t); the man who some would have us think of as disability’s Uncle Tom. He who is not ‘one of us’. I even heard it said: a traitor.

It’s no secret that this louse and ‘superman’ did not agree on where the stress should fall in the debate about the search for ‘cures’ and the struggles for inclusion. We talked briefly about our different emphases on the one occasion that we met. I told one thousand people I disagreed with him when I was next to speak, after his speech in Sydney last year. I sat next to his wife, his research specialist and other supporters of his view and said as much again the very next day.

But traitor? Uncle Tom? Please!

I watched the world’s media go overboard when Christopher Reeve, 52, father of three, husband, son, actor, movie-maker, Democrat, human rights, disability rights, sustainable ecology and medical research campaigner died. Most of what he believed-in, represented and campaigned for, a movie-loving, un-reconstructed Leftie like me admired, supported and respected. Some of what he did I disagreed with and said so to his face.

But surely charity requires that we, people in a disability ‘movement’ that lays claim to a vision of common humanity and decency, must pause to reflect on the whole man, the complete picture, the life no more or less complex and contradictory than ours.

Not for nothing is it said that charity begins at home. Too many good and decent people have died in recent days. Christopher Reeve is one of them.
. 

Kerry: 311 Electoral Votes

How?
- increased turnout (up to 80% of voters registered in some swing states). New voters break nearly 70/30 in favour of Kerry
- polls don't include people whose primary phone is a mobile phone. That's 6% of the population, predominantly young people who also break almost 70/30 in favour of Kerry
- Bush polls less than 50% satisfied he's doing a good job and no President with less than 50 has ever been re-elected
- Kerry's using Clinton, which Gore should have done
- Cheney and Ashcroft got their flu injections while Bush is asking citizens to forego their shots.
- Incumbents don't have close results. They win big time or lose big time.
Unless, of course, there's an attack on the US or Bush conjures up bin Laden, either of which would make W a shoe-in.
.

almost midnight

troubled by the silent
pause

fall into empty space
hopeful

accepting nothing more
or less

and so remain
forever
. 

Comings and goings

Susi returned from New Zealand this evening, so that’s brought the day to a happier close than its beginning. She's been asleep for hours, largely because their day started three hours before ours.

After dinner I added 1,400 hundred words to my great unpublished novel. That means there are 43,000 down with about the same number to go and all before Christmas, so that’ll be no great challenge. Still, I succeed in killing my main character. I’m glad that’s out of the way because I feared it might be quite difficult to do. The truth is he’s a much more engaging person dead than alive. That’s why I like him so much. I’m not entirely sure what that says about me.
.

Is the tide turning on George Bush?

From http://www.salon.com

Five more papers that endorsed Bush in 2000 came out this weekend in favor of Kerry instead. No one did it more eloquently than the Bradenton Herald, a daily in Florida's Manatee County. Manatee went big for Bush in 2000, but the Herald says its readers shouldn't let themselves be fooled again.

"When the Herald recommended the election of George W. Bush as president of the United States four years ago, we lauded his record in Texas as a consensus builder and expressed confidence in his ability to unite the country after four years of bitter partisanship. We liked his slogan, 'A uniter, not a divider,' and criticized opponent Al Gore's role as point man for Democrats' mean-spiritedness.

"How poorly we understood George W. Bush in 2000. We could not imagine the possibility that, just four years later, Bush would have done just what we feared of Gore -- that the United States would barely be on speaking terms with some of its staunchest allies, and that America would be reviled around the world as a bullying, imperialist superpower. How far we have fallen from the bright fiscal forecast in 2000, with surpluses that offered the promise of debt paydown now replaced with a staggering $500 billion annual deficit and the national debt projected to exceed $9 trillion by 2010.

"As for Bush being a uniter, sadly, the nation is more polarized than it has been since the 1960s. Bush's administration is notable for its lack of transparency, its intolerance of dissent, its refusal to admit mistakes. Under Bush's leadership and Republican control, Congress has become a mean-spirited, partisan body where the vice president is praised for cursing an opposition senator on the Senate floor. The 'compassionate conservative' president has people at outdoor rallies arrested for hoisting an opposition sign.

"But all of this is overshadowed by the two most significant issues in this campaign: the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. In both, Bush has failed as well -- to our country's great peril."

There's much more where that came from, and it's all at http://www.salon.com
.

Spreading freedom

from http://www.truthout.org 

American soldiers carry away the remains of someone killed by a bomb attack inside their 'Green Zone'. And President Bush still asks us to believe that the Mission Accomplished will result in elections within three months. (photograph: Washington Post)

Bush says ... things are getting better in Iraq

From http://www.salon.com

According to family members, the convoy was being asked to go much farther than usual from its southern base -- on a more than 200-mile trip through and around the extremely hostile Baghdad area. The tankers lacked bullet-resistant armor and, lumbering along at 40 miles an hour, would have made an easy target for insurgents lobbing bombs or grenades. The supply trucks are in disrepair and prone to breakdown. Many of the soldiers hadn't had enough sleep. And – astonishingly -- no armed escort or air protection was to be provided, the family members said.

Most absurdly, though, the jet fuel that these members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company were risking life and limb to transport wasn't even usable. It was contaminated with diesel and had already sensibly been rejected by one base and would undoubtedly be rejected again in Taji -- if the convoy managed to make it to its destination at all.
. 

Dr Who?

I blink, therefore I am
turned on, attuned

you think, to laws of man
burned on, galvanized

with zinc; hot wired
off and on, binary code

to link the three great laws
built on the works of Asimov.

Or do I wink, because I can
lead on, beguiling readers

who still think the laws of man
seized on a truth, not fiction?

Lyp sinc on this robotic rule:
count on the carbon life-form fool.

This Dalek says: I cannot wait.
This Dalek says: EXTERMINATE!!!!
.

Moldova?

It is bad enough that the louse faces a second day in bed while his paralysed arse recovers from its small scrape. For Scotland to draw with Moldova in the World Cup qualifying competition just piles on the misery. I'm afraid that Mr Vogts has to go.
. 

Life is a pain in the ass

There's a small piece of scraped skin on my bum apparently. So that'll be the next few days decided. When you've been paralysed for twenty years you take note of such small damage or it becomes big damage. And if you want to understand just how serious the damage can become, ask Christopher Reeve.
. 

Wimbledon

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There is a law of diminishing returns operating here, isn't there? Not even the best efforts of thoroughly watchable Paul Bettany could prevent this from trudging with too few laughs to its inevitable conclusion. The poverty of imagination on display is breathtaking. I imagine the film-makers will be laughing all the way to the bank. But how many times can they re-shoot 4W&AF before we get totally bored by that original conceit?
. 

Christopher Reeve

We spoke at the same conference, in Sydney, last year. We placed the emphasis in different places on the spectrum between what has become known as 'cure or care'. The common ground that we shared, however, made our differences pale into insignificance. A decent human being died yesterday, much too young as always.

Australians vote

We're still not happy, John! If you're a louse, like me, it was ghastly to watch the results come in last night. I feared the bastards would win but watching them triumph beyond everyone's expectations is not easy.

What can we make of the result, I wonder? They have an increased majority in the House of Representatives and look likely to take control of the Senate too.

It's too easy and comforting (if falsely so) to fall back on the Labor Party line that a big lie won the victory for the Right. It's true that people in the marginal electorates are anxious about their huge mortgages and big debt. But the ALP needs to start winning hearts and minds, not just fighting too little and too late over voters' bank balances. Unless they do some paradigm shifting the Left here is always going to lose out until the economic cycle of boom and bust starts to do some busting. And who would want to inherit an economy going to hell in a handcart?
.

Three hundred years later ...

Scotland's Parliament Chamber, which was formally opened today.

Chemin de Jerusalem

To walk, as pilgrims walked,
the labyrinthine way
of virtual penitence
before their understanding God,
our Lord and Maker,
an architect’s precision
marked the hallowed ground
with immaculate asymmetry:
one route in and out,
beginning with the end;
a single path traversing
quadrants north and south,
east and west; eleven circuits
leading inward to the six-leafed core
of contemplation.

In Chartres,
eight hundred years ago,
repentance on its knees
and hope upon its quest
commenced modernity:
worship in the Gothic age.
The road of Jerusalem
became a metaphor
in stone for pious men,
too poor, too rich
or too pre-occupied
with daily bread
to walk the holy walk.

Today that path is trod
- infrequently. Perhaps
we take a photograph
or wonder at those masons,
crafting work that stood
the tests of times long gone,

or it may be we lay down
good intentions on a road
now much less travelled.
. 

There were no weapons of mass destruction

As written in the UK's The Independent;

Now we finally know what we had long suspected. When US and British forces invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had no chemical weapons; he had no biological weapons; he had no nuclear weapons. In fact, he had no banned weapons at all. That is the considered judgement of the Iraq Survey Group, set up by President Bush to prove his case for removing the Iraqi dictator, and released in Washington last night.

The ISG report proves precisely the opposite. The much-maligned international regime of weapons containment had functioned exactly as it was supposed to. After his failed effort to annex Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was progressively disarmed.

Establishing this truth has required half a dozen top-level inquiries on either side of the Atlantic, the spending of millions of dollars and pounds, the dispatch of hundreds of UN weapons inspectors over the years, and - since the removal of Saddam Hussein - the work of 1,200 inspectors who scoured the country under the auspices of the US-directed Iraq Survey Group.

Oh yes, and it took a war, a war in which thousands of Iraqis, more than 1,000 Americans and more than 100 British and soldiers of other nationalities have died. Iraq is a devastated country that risks sliding into anarchy. And what has it all been for?
. 

Rumsfeld lifts the lid again

The BBC's web site reports:

Donald Rumsfeld has cast doubt on whether there was ever a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The alleged link was one of the justifications used by President Bush for the invasion of Iraq.

Mr Rumsfeld was asked by a New York audience about connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," he said. 
. 

... resigned

19. ............ dxe5
20. Nxe5+, Kb5
21. c4+, Ka5
22. Rd-a1+, Na2
23. Rxa2+, Kb4
24. Nd3+, Kb3
25. Nc1+, Kc2


First win
. 

Restless

I have been this way before
(too many times before)
when everything I sought to say
seemed immature and juvenile,
wasteful of energies, which,
when used by other hands,
electrify the soul
sent searching for a meaning,
for a purpose or an explanation,
at least an answer to the question
that we all must ask, one day,
when truth descends
upon our consciousness
like dusk falling at the end
of long and lazy summer days,
when cicadas irritate the sun
until it sets into the silent night’s
still air,
apparently immovable,
fixed and weighing heavily
on the minds of restless sleepers
asking why?
. 

Grasping at straws

Partick Thistle 2
Raith Rovers 0

something short of inspirational.
. 

The life and death of Peter Sellers

It felt like a bit of a con job. The cast are excellent: Geoffrey Rush especially but also Emily Watson and Miriam Margolyse(?). Very dodgy script, I have to say. It defines characters in part by showing us how they act when they're alone. And that's often when they're shown at their most dislikeable. The problem is: if they were alone at the time, how can we know? (Pete’s mum watching TV news of her son’s heart attacks is the clearest example of characterisation maybe written to fit the plot rather than truth). None of us are better off for this film. It's a waste of superb talent. Who has a right to care (except his family and friends who actually new him) if Peter Sellers was a shit from time to time or all the time? That’s their business, not mine. I’m a movie watcher and I love (most of) his movies. They'll last long after this dubious piece has vanished from the screen.
. 

A tin man's joy

Is Australia on the brink of change?

Two perceptive friends sniff a change in electoral mood. Glenn hears reporters use more positive adjectives and verbs when describing the ALP. Digby watches marginal seats prepare to tumble. Elsewhere the bookies increase ALP numbers by six percentage points. Please let them be a sign of better days ahead.
. 

Check ...

1. e4, e5
2. Nf3, d6
3. Bb5+, Bd7
4. a4, Bxb5
5. axb5, b6
6. d4, exd4
7. Bg5, f6
8. Bh4, c5
9. Na3, g5
10. Bg3, h6
11. Nc4, a6
12. e5, fxe5
13. O-O, Nf6
14. bxa6, Nxa6
15. Qd3, Nb4
16. Qg6+, Kd7
17. Ra-d1, Ne4
18. Qf7+, Kc6
19. Nfxe5+, 
. 

Learning by numbers (part 3): When the saints go marching in

234 345 -345 456
234 345 -345 456
234 345 -345 456 345 234 345 -234
345 345 -234 234 234 345 456 456 456 -45
345 -345 456 345 234 -234 234
. 

Business is booming at the Baghdad morgue.

Before the war, before the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, seven or eight bodies arrived each day at this nondescript building in northeastern Baghdad for autopsies. Most deaths resulted from car crashes or other accidents. Killings were rare, and gun violence rarer still, a testament to the monopoly that Mr. Hussein held on the use of force.

Now the paper-and-cardboard ledgers where the autopsies are logged are torn from overuse. On an average day, the morgue receives 20 to 25 bodies, the human cost of the post-war wave of crime and insurgency engulfing the city.

"The unexpected change is an increase in bullet injuries," said Dr. Abdul Razzaq al-Obeidi, one of the morgue's chief doctors. "Mostly vengeance." In the first eight months of this year nearly 3,000 people in municipal Baghdad, which has about five million residents, have died from gunshot wounds - nearly all homicides, Dr. Obeidi said. A surge of killings in September has only increased the pressure.

By Alex Berenson The New York Times
. 

Chemin de Jerusalem

Mutant poppy

Scientists have discovered a poppy that does not produce addictive drugs - and are using it to make safer painkillers.

The Terminal

I thought it was rather sweet (in a pleasant way) and fun for the most part. It fell apart for me as soon as Victor stepped outside the hermetically sealed world with which he's forced to negotiate: the terminal. CZJ is as gorgeous as ever but her part seemed regrettably slight for the good actor that she is. Victor is nothing like that ghastly Gump creation, which was just plain, old-fashioned insulting to intelligence. I thought TH gave us a finely nuanced comic turn. With a stronger script it could have been up there with his best comedy work but it didn't quite hit the spot. I’m afraid I wasn’t at all persuaded by Stanley Tucci’s Dixon. He can phone-in such characters, he’s so good at them, but his reasons for being the bastard of the piece are far from convincing. I did like the three stooges: Gupta's juggling drew spontaneous applause from the crowd in which we sat, all of whom seemed to go home with smiles on their faces. Looking for anything more profound than that effect seems to me to be asking too much of a vehicle like this.
. 

Two wrongs make nothing right

The war in Iraq is unjust, unlawful and indefensible. But nothing in that sentence justifies a decision to cut off the head of a fellow human being. Neither approach results in the liberation of Iraq. We're all damaged by both.
. 

What do you mean, junk?

Hidden, perhaps,
in a small, brown paper bag,
half-heartedly sealed
with the crumpled expectation
that renewed interest
in its contents would emerge
at some unspecified time
and place in a future
that no one can guess
with any possibility of accuracy,
or even an approximation
that comes close
to being correct:
a memento of another
time and place, from a past
that none of us can re-create,
gnaws at the current contentment
of this ordinary life.

And when we move house again
the chances are that I will not know
the answer to the same old questions,
asked each time we pack our lives
inside some borrowed boxes: what is it
that you keep this old junk for? Does it
really have to come with us this time?
. 

Happy Birthday, Leonard Cohen

Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried, in my way, to be free
. 

Sacrificed to the doctrine of 'pre-emption'

Flowers decorate a pair of combat boots in Federal Plaza (Chicago, USA) representing the death of Army Pfc. Shawn C. Edwards of Bensenville, Ill. The boots are among 1022 pairs representing all of the U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the war began. The American Friends Service Committee has displayed the exhibit in over 30 cities around the country since its debut in Chicago last January. (Photo: M. Spencer Green / AP Photo)
. 

I Robot

I, BORED ... U, BORED ... EVERYONE, BORED ... The 3 Laws of crap movie making.
. 

Not, in all his glory, like one of these

And today's word is ... tenuous

According to the BBC:
"US officials have acknowledged the existence of a secret intelligence report on Iraq offering gloomy predictions for the country's future. The report - a compilation of assessments by intelligence agencies - puts forward three possible scenarios in Iraq by the end of 2005. They range from what the report calls tenuous stability to political fragmentation and civil war. It was prepared for President Bush before a recent escalation of violence. "
.

Bit of a worry

It is not in the louse's nature to be gloomy. It is difficult, however, not to believe, or perhaps I mean fear, that voters in Australia and the United States of America are about to return incumbents who have traded on fear, speculating that their futures are best served by making others worry about their futures. It's a ghastly prospect. I hope that I am wrong. 

Anyone but Bush? Anyone but Howard? Those are insufficient ideas upon which to build a better future for everyone. But answering yes to both would be a good outcome to begin renewal.

Oh, yes, lest we forget, the UN Secretary General reminded us again today: the war in Iraq was unlawful.
.

Condolences

What can anyone say
to make sense of it?
“God takes his own”
and “the good die young”
in idiot recompense for loss
we do not understand,
dare not accept
and cannot reconcile
in an ordinary world
that keeps on spinning,
though we are hurled
in an abyss of duties
fraught with danger
for our fragile hearts,
which bleed
as innocence departs,
taking with it all
our certainty and youth
and everything we took
from you as truth.
. 

Learning by numbers (part 2): Bridge over troubled water

5 -5 5-4 4 -5 6 5
-6 -6 -6 6 7 -6
-6 -6 6 5-4 4
5 -4 4 -4 6-8
6 5-4 4 5
6 8 -8 7 -8 -8
8 -8 7 -7-6 -6 6 5 6
-6 7 -8 8 -8
-8 8 7 -7-6 -6 6 5 6
-6 7 -8 8 7
.

Vale Kevin Byrne

Dear PDCN Member, colleague and friends,

Many of you may not have heard the profoundly sad news of the untimely and sudden death of Kevin Byrne on Saturday, 11th September.

At a time like this, and in these circumstances, words seem wholly inadequate.

We mourn the loss of a leader in disability advocacy, a shining example of compassionate humanity and a truly remarkable man. Among his many contributions, Kevin was the first President of PDCN and remained on our Management Committee until his death. Indeed we expected Kevin to be making his usual wise, witty and perceptive contributions to our Management Committee when we gather for our scheduled meeting this evening. It will be impossible for members present not to reflect on the loss made painfully evident by Kevin's absence from our lively discussions. For our part, we will do our best tonight to honour Kevin's life and legacy by re-committing ourselves to advocacy in action in favour of people with disability.

Finally, for the moment, on behalf of everyone involved with PDCN I express our deepest condolences to Pat, Kevin's wife, whose loss and pain must be almost unbearable. There could have been no finer man than Kevin with whom to share one's life and love.

Dougie Herd
Executive Officer
Physical Disability Council of New South Wales
St Helen's Community Centre
3/184 Glebe Point Road
Glebe NSW 2037
Australia

Tel: + 61 (0) 2 9552 1606
Fax: + 61 (0) 2 9552 4644
PDCNSW Inc is funded by the NSW Government's Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care. Views expressed by PDC NSW Inc are not necessarily endorsed by the NSW Government.
. .

Some may call this folly

(for Jeff Heath and now, it's sad to say, Kevin Byrne)

In the last week I’ve rejected offers to pick up riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Not once, I might add, not twice, but three times. In one week.

Firstly there was 15% from Mr Odongo, son of a multi-millionaire who died in a plane crash in some quiet corner of Nigeria. On Wednesday, according to Mrs Jackie Paeta (no return address) I won US$1,000,000 in El Gordo Sweepstakes. That came as a surprise because I never bought a ticket. But hey, you know what they say: stranger things happen at sea.

Today I received a tragic tale from Samuel Nguessan. His dad was assassinated recently, in Sierra Leone apparently. Sammy wants my help to claim US$5,500,000 stuck in a bank vault somewhere. And because I’m helping Sam, he tells me, I get 20%.

So it seems that in return for giving those people my bank details and date of birth I will receive about US$5,000,000. I have already ordered the Ferrari. There’s a four-cabin yacht I’ve had my eye on for a while. And do you know that absolute waterfront palace that’s been advertised in the property pages? You guessed it … sold to the man who cornered the market in easy money.

But wait a minute. There are a couple of things wrong here.

Firstly: the Ferrari. I use a wheelchair. Have you any idea how hard it is to transfer out of a Ferrari? They’re four inches off the ground. And where would I store the ‘chair? Better think again about the prancing pony.

No, I’m joking. The Ferrari aint the problem. (I’ll just get a trophy blonde to help me transfer … sorry, I’ll be serious!)

The problem is this. What do I do about my own cynicism?

Oscar Wilde wrote, “a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. He was correct.

Despite the behaviour of George W Bush, I try hard not to be cynical. But even I have limits, which makes me say to Mr Odongo, Mrs Paeta and Sammy Nguessan - I don’t think so somehow. Many may suggest that’s hardly cynicism. Rejecting those offers to get rich quick hardly requires a brain the size of a planet. They are scams - stupid, obvious, shallow scams inviting vulnerable, naïve, silly people to connect with their baser instincts and greedy impulses.

Gimme, gimme, gimme – me, me, me.

My more fundamental questions go beyond the Nigerian e.mail scam. In a land where every pub, it seems, has more pokies than paying customers, where ten squillion lottery games are drawn every evening on television and public services that are underwritten by taxes derived, in no small part, from roulette tables, one-armed bandits and scratch cards, who am I to castigate those who dream of getting rich as quickly as possible. As the man is reputed to have said, once upon a time, “let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone.”

We all dream, don’t we? Or maybe it’s more accurate to write, we fantasise. We speculate on the idea of being a winner. We price the rewards: X thousand on a car, Y thousand on a house, Z thousand on a world cruise. A, B and C thousands in trust funds for the grandchildren. No big sin there.
But what does that tell us about what we value in life?

Do the roads of Australia, urban speed limit 50 kph, truly need another Ferrari? Do I actually want to cross the ocean on the QE2 or the new Queen Mary? And, you know, if material wealth is all its cracked up to be, how come after 500 years of Capitalism and 220 years of European domination, large numbers of affluent people in our communities feel stressed, alienated and dissatisfied?

But do you know what annoys me even more than all this price of everything / value of nothing rhetoric? It’s this. We manage to have constructed a pattern of self-absorption in our public and private lives that means we say little about what we truly value. Then one day, usually too late, someone offers up a platitude: we never knew how good she, he or it was until she, he or it was gone. What a tragic glorification of inattentiveness.

So I try. I try to value everything about us that money can’t buy. I don’t think Mr Odongo wants to hear that from me. But, as Rhett Butler once said: frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
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The Stepford Wives (the remake)

Objectionable crap. Woeful script, tedious direction, pitiful (over) acting, no humour, no tension. Nothing: nada, not a single redeeming feature.
. 

Get the truth out

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 18 months ago. And 'regime change' is against international law. Check out what's truly going on at Truthout.org
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Route 32

slightly less than half the kicks? 900kms from home.
(~ photo by Susi)
. 

The Bourne Supremacy

The Anti-James-Bond. It's so enjoyable to find a cold-blooded, remorseless, amoral killer you can root for. Matt Damon and the crew from the first one were very good again. Joan Allen was brilliant. Like lots of others I'm kind of over the wobbly camera stuff of pseudo-documentary style. Good use of music, though. Excellent car chase in Moscow (shows Matrix 2 how to do it, without building your own motorway). Pure hokum but very superior hokum. Worth the ticket price and enough loose ends for a third outing some time.
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Weekend shower

Photo by Scott Turner in the Sydney Morning Herald

bookies' favourites

automaton hares
fixed forever
to the inside rail
now electrified

dashing neck to neck
over four-forty
or five-twenty
to elude the hounds

bolting from traps
timed exactly
for a pointless pursuit
of the unattainable

and mug punters
down on the night
but running again
at the bookie’s call


(A small group of us went to the dog-racing at Wentworth Park earlier tonight. There was me, Halimah Simpson, Sharon Smith, Holly Stewart and Ed Sutton. We took $50 to bet with, taken from the office 'corporate bet' fund … a collection of coins we've thrown in a jar. We left with $97. I came home then wrote bookies' favourites to remember our triumph by. I don't think we'll be going back, somehow. It's a bit of a sad place, past its sell-by date, and very sparsely populated by anxious, usually disappointed men who drink too much and throw too much away.)
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Learning by numbers (part 1): Blowin' in the wind

6 6 6 -6 6 -5 6 5 -4 4
5 6 6 -6 6 -5 6
5 -5 6 6 6 -6
6 -5 6 5 -4 4
5 6 5 -5 -5 5 -4
5 -5 6 6 6 -6
6 -5 6 6 5 -4 4
5 6 6 -6 6 -5 6
5 -5 -5 5 -4
-4 5 5 5 -4 4
5 -5 -5 5 -4 -4 4 -4 4


~ Bob Dylan
. 

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.


~ Marianne Moore
. 

Hellboy

I saw it in the back of economy class at 35,000 feet so some of the scale might have been lost. But what a fun romp it is. Oh, if only Hulk had been half as credible. There's a truly fine piece of acting by the big red fella. And unlike other offerings this year, such as Van Helsing, Hellboy shows what can be done when the director 'borrows' ideas but tweaks each borrowing just enough to make them new. So, Raiders is here and Blade and Escape from New York and Superman and even Dr Zhivago but it's all done from a slightly different, not quite parallel, universe. The plot is silly to the point of daftness but the movie's delightful with its cornball, lovable cynicism and genuine escapist nonsense. Loved it. Go see. Good value.
. 

Bread

Some people, perhaps a multitude,
will swear blindly that a man
called Jesus, fed five thousand of us
with just a few loaves and some fishes.
Or they’ll tell us that their brother’s
sister in law has an auntie who knows
someone at work who has a friend
who is married to an older man,
who ate a salmon sandwich once
that came from a picnic hamper
that a friend was given by a mate’s uncle
who might have been in the area at the time.
If you ask me, that would be a fucking miracle
if it wasn’t one of those urban myths.
. 

History teaches us

John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, says the Federal Election is about trust. History is not on his side:

In 1768 Lieutenant James Cook set sail from England for the South Pacific with instructions to find the Great South Land. There he was to make friends with the Indigenous people and investigate the potential for trade in goods and resources. He was explicitly ordered not to take possession of any territory without the consent of the inhabitants.

In 1770, Cook claimed to take possession of the whole east coast of Australia by raising the British flag at Possession Island off the northern tip of the Cape York Peninsula - claiming the land as "terra nullius" (empty land). After an encounter with local people in Botany Bay, Cook wrote: "all they seemed to want was us to be gone".
~ NSWALC
La Perouse

which we abhor

my words
fill up the void
creation’s vacuum
which nature and its laws and me
abhor
. 

Life

"The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood."
~ Freya Stark


Sunflowers, by my brother Joe

Life: a fate worse than death

What can I tell you? I’m a middle-aged man trapped inside the body of a middle-aged man. At best, I fear, the situation can only get worse. One day, if I live long enough, I’ll be an old man trapped inside the body of an old man. Such is life.

But let’s not dwell on that fate for too long. You see: we’re doomed to live squalid, deceitful lives. Our bodies betray us.

Our eyesight fails and we make spectacles of ourselves reading the back of cornflakes packets in the supermarket to check if they have harmful ingredients that will make us even more overweight. But what’s the point about worrying about weight? Once, when we were eleven years old maybe, we were slim, svelte supermodel material. Now we’re in what some people call a persistent vegetative state and others call a total couch potato. And, of course, our hair’s gone to hell in a handcart. The truly tragic among us try to comb over the one last strand of cat gut that’s left. It’s about twelve centimetres long but it fools nobody. Wake up and smell the coffee: you’re bald.

It’s ghastly, isn’t it? You wake up in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror then you think: where did I go? What happened to me? Who is this old person I see in front of me? Who is it?

You see: the tragic truth of life is that life’s simply a fate worse than death for many of us. This damn human condition of ours is a never-ending cycle of decline. Until it ends, that is.

For a short period we grow, develop and (some of us) even mature. Then the biological clock starts ticking loudly. Before you know it, the rellies are carting you off to the nursing home on the Central Coast so they can sell off the block in the Eastern Suburbs, divide the proceeds among them and not worry too much, maybe not worry at all, that some shark is putting up 15 tiny units that not even a town mouse could swing a cat in.

Thinking about it, I don’t know why someone doesn’t just put me out of my misery! I ask you, what kind of quality of life is that? And look, I’m only trying to ensure we grant the right of vision impaired, heavier than average, hair-challenged citizens entering their twilight years to find peace and rest with dignity. After all, their suffering has incapacitated their thought process, decision-making skills and manual dexterity. It’s only civilised that we should allow loving friends, neighbours, maybe the local postman, the right to assist the old, bald farts to drop off the perch.

You know, I don’t think so somehow. Not this louse.

Here’s a thought that persists in my tiny wee brain, which is about all that functions properly in this crippled, fat, middle-aged body of mine: I’m not dead yet, just not dead yet. Get it?

I know what it’s like to watch a loved one suffer in the last few days (moments too) of life. Believe me I know. And I want to believe that, if just one of those I’ve known who died in pain had asked me to assist them to ‘leave the building’, I would have helped. I hope I could have helped because, if I ever find myself needing to follow Elvis into the universe of celestial petrol pump attending, I want to know how to leave or how to ask my loved ones to help me leave.

But there’s a world of difference between the realisation of how slender is the thread that holds us in this place and the rush to deem the lives of people with disability, our lives, as somehow not of sufficiently high quality to warrant intervention, support or what Australians call a fair go.

Me? I say let’s give life the benefit of the doubt.

That means, in my book, giving the benefit of doubt to the life in babies who are just days old but seem unlikely to survive the week; to ‘victims’ of road traffic accidents in long term comas who some folk say are in that persistent vegetative state (how do these people come up those terms?) and giving the benefit of doubt to former Presidents and little old ladies with advanced stages of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Civilised societies need to get this right. It’s simple. Here we all are. And we’re not dead yet. 
. 

Déja Vu

Travelling in the unknown
with nothing
but hope

which might simply be
an optimistic word
for inexperience

I often wonder
if a time will ever come
when I ask questions

I’m not the first
to ask

isn’t this familiar

have I been this way
before?
.