Four hours before the fight home

picture by Susi

Palm Cove just after dawn

picture by Susi

Sydney artist Ana Pollak has won the Dobell Prize for drawing: Mullet Creek

To contrive a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, then shit on it, ah that was me all over. (Samuel Beckett)

From the BBC

"Fourteen US soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash overnight in northern Iraq, the US military has said. The Black Hawk helicopter, carrying 10 soldiers and four crew members, crashed after experiencing a mechanical malfunction, a US statement said."

and

"At least 15 people were killed and 50 injured when a suicide bomber rammed a fuel tanker into a police station in the northern oil city of Baiji."

Meanwhile, in The New York Times ...

Bush Takes a Step Away From Maliki

"The White House is trying to distance itself from the Iraqi prime minister before President Bush’s troop buildup is re-evaluated."

Do we laugh or cry?

INDIAN Dr Mohamed Haneef has won his bid to have his work visa returned in a stunning victory in the Federal Court in Brisbane.

Dr Haneef was successful in his court appeal which was handed down at 12.20pm.

Federal Court Justice Jeff Spender made orders quashing Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews decision to cancel the former terrorism suspect's work visa on character grounds.

He also made an order in the nature of a prohibiton and/or injunction restraining Mr Andrews from acting upon the cancellation of the visa, and ordered he pay Dr Haneef's costs.

Justice Spender said that contrary to some media commentary which he described as "almost scandalous", the case wasn't a contest between the judiciary and the Howard Government.

He described remarks making claims of tension between judges and the Federal Government as ignorant and grossly misinformed.

Justice Spender said Mr Andrews fell into jurisdictional error by applying the wrong test when determining whether to cancel the visa.

"It follows that Mr Andrews decision must be set aside," he said.

From today's Australian (and it's one of Murdoch's!!)

The beginnings of an idea

We have a Sri Lankan friend, Uma Raj, who returned to work in Tamil Eelam about three years ago. She’s a young woman with a vision impairment that will continue to deteriorate until she becomes totally blind. Uma wants to help other Tamil people with vision impairment. She has written to friends in Australia asking for help with equipment and materials provision, with training and policy development as well as other capacity building tools. A few of us who worked alongside Uma for a few years in New South Wales disability organisations want to see if we can help. We’re not really sure what or how. We realise it might be difficult to provide aid to people living in a war zone. We want to provide support but to do so in a way that fosters some kind of purposeful two way exchange because we’re not interested in perpetuating neo-colonialist dependency relationships. We do want to transfer helpful resources from our rich society to the poorer circumstances of Sri Lanka but to do so in ways that change and benefit us somehow, just as we hope we may help people in Uma’s community to change for the better their own circumstances. And, of course, we want to be ‘right on’ (to use a very old and self-deprecating term): carbon neutral, gender balancing, capacity building, local resource and skill developing, sustainable. Are we bleeding heart liberals and do-gooding busy bodies? Probably. We hope to do good (and there's nothing wrong with that) but we’ll plan to do good well. Let's see what happens.

Aletsch glacier

Naked volunteers pose for US photographer Spencer Tunick on the ice-cold Swiss glacier of Aletsch, the largest in the Alps, for an environmental campaign about global warming on 18 August 2007.

Source: Fabrice Coffrini, AFP

Published: Sunday, August 19, 2007 6:33 AEST

I climbed to the Aletsch glacier when I was a 16 year old Boy Scout. We wore clothes. No one had heard of global warming thirty-four years ago.

Link to Live Earth

More about Cheney, 1994

From Salon

If you've logged on to your e-mail this week, you probably couldn't avoid seeing a link to that 1994 video clip in which Dick Cheney explains why it would have been a bad idea to overthrow Saddam Hussein as part of the Gulf War.

"Once you ... took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?" Cheney asks on the tape. "The other thing was casualties ... The question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was, 'How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?' And our judgment was, "Not very many," and I think we got that right."

So, 13 years and 3,706 dead Americans later, what does Cheney's office have to say now about what Cheney said back then? Only this: "He was not vice president at the time, it was after he was secretary of defense. I don't have any comment."

Shooter

DVD and a Thai take away. Woeful movie, woeful.

Bananas

Odd factoid of the day: Spike says banana is an herbaceous plant. That’s hard to believe but the world contains much that is considerably more strange.

Checked with Wikipedia: turns out it's true.

My friend moves on

Former first minister Jack McConnell today resigned as leader of the Labour party in Scotland following his party's defeat at the hands of the SNP in May's Holyrood election. More ...

Jack didn't deserve to lose the election but you know, shit happens. History will record that he led Scotland well and made a lasting, positive contribution to Scotland's story. He'll contribute more.

Thomas

I am no longer sure I understand.
Not sure …

uncertain may be a word for it,
the way I feel;

this sense I almost have,
which undermines my self-belief.

And yet
if I, of all the people

one can think of, cannot
be persuaded by this argument,

this case perhaps,
what then … who then am I?

Good things come to those (of us) who wait

Rove resigns. Thank God.

When Karl Rove is in trouble - and he has been in a lot of it lately - George Bush has a simple way of showing his support. When he walks across the lawn out of the White House he has Rove walk with him, so the next day's photographs will show that familiar pink, bespectacled face at the presidential shoulder. More ...

Cheney and Iraq - 1994

Save us from these people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I

Partick Thistle 3-0 Livingston

The first victory of the new season, as reported by BBC Online:

Livingston are still searching for their first points of the season after two goals from Adam Strachan eased Partick Thistle to victory. A well-timed pass from Ryan McStay found Strachan in the box and the midfielder kept his composure to beat Marius Liberda after 18 minutes. Strachan added the second from an acute angle six minutes later. Liam Buchanan added the third on 55 minutes after the Livingston defence failed to deal with a McStay corner.

Partick: Tuffey, Storey, Harkins, Archibald, Twaddle, Strachan, McStay, Rowson, Murray, Donnelly (Buchanan 7), Roberts (Chaplain 36). Subs Not Used: Boyd, Lennon, Hinchcliffe.

Booked: Rowson, Archibald.

Goals: Strachan 18, 24, Buchanan 55.

Livingston: Liberda, MacKay, McPake, Tinkler, James (Weir 72), Kennedy, A Trialist, Noubissie, McCaffrey, Craig, Snodgrass (Pesir 56). Subs Not Used: Fox, Mitchell, Stewart.

Att: 2,481

Ref: E Smith

Lions, buffalo herd and crocs in the Kruger game park

Some events are almost impossible to believe unless you watch them unfold before your eyes. I stumbled on this astonishing video on You Tube. (by the way, the baby buffalo escapes!)

Nagasaki: the second bomb

According to some estimates, about 70,000 of Nagasaki's 240,000 residents were killed instantly,[45] and up to 60,000 were injured. The radius of total destruction was about 1.6 km (1 mile), followed by fires across the northern portion of the city to 3.2 km (2 miles) south of the bomb.[46] The total number of residents killed may have been as many as 80,000, including the few who died from radiation poisoning in the following months.[47]

I remember my dad gave me two books to read linked to the subject: We Of Nagasaki by T. Nagai (memoirs of survivors) and a novel based on the death railway in Burma, And All The Trumpets by Donald Smith. He believed in peace, forgiveness and complexity. I owe him.

90 years ago today

The Battle of Amiens, which began on 8 August 1918, was the opening phase of the Allied offensive later known as the Hundred Days Offensive that ultimately led to the end of World War I. Allied forces advanced over seven miles on the first day, one of the greatest advances of the war. The battle is also notable for its effects on both sides' morale and the large number of surrendering German forces. This led Erich Ludendorff to famously describe the first day of the battle as "the black day of the German Army." Amiens was one of the first major battles involving armoured warfare and marked the end of trench warfare on the Western Front; fighting becoming mobile once again until the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918.

Amiens today:

Visit

When in doubt ... invoke greatness

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

Hiroshima Day

62 years since the day the first atomic bomb was dropped. 45,000 people died on the day of the explosion. The same number perished within the next two months and by the end of 1945 an estimated 140,000 people had died out of a city population totalling 350,000 (source official Hiroshima Peace Site). One bomb.

Read this for more.

Waste of a good day Dougie

David and Maureen fly home

A Streetcar Named Desire

Four of us attended the opening night of Opera Australia’s A Streetcar Named Desire by Andre Previn. Gorgeous music, truly American in sound with bits of jazz, echoes of Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber maybe but also genuinely symphonic in a mid-twentieth Century modernist way. That’s how it seemed to me, although I’m not well-versed in music. I was less enthused by the singing, which might have been technically good but struggled with the near conversational style of the text.

Teddy Tahu Rhodes filled the Marlon Brando role well enough but Yvonne Kenny was less than persuasive as Blanche Dubois. Maybe the problem lies with the character rather than Ms Kenny who sang well (if in a slighty dated style). Blanche is fragile, whistful or bird like. I'm not sure Opera does whistful particularly well, which is a bit of a restriction when your bird like central character is almost never absent from the stage during the near three hour performance. That was a problem but so too were the songs: Opera needs big songs. Streetcar has too few and they’re too short.

Dorothy Napangardi

Dorothy Napangardi is a Warlpiri woman from Mina Mina, a significant women's site in a remote area of the Northern Territory. Her works have featured in exhibitions throughout Australia, the U.S.A. and Europe where she is regarded as one of the leading artists of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement.

Dorothy's paintings are highly sought after by both collectors and curators worldwide. In 1991 she won the Best Painting in European Media, 8th National Aboriginal Art Award; in 1998 the Northern Territory Art Award; and she was "Highly Commended" for the 16th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in 1999. In 2001 Dorothy won the 18th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award ,presented by Telstra, with her spectacular black and white painting titled, "Salt on Mina Mina".

Napangardi's paintings adorn the walls of institutions such as The Australia Council; the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, Germany and the Kelton Foundation in Santa Monica, U.S.A.

Dorothy was first introduced to painting in 1987 by her friend and artist, Eunice Napangardi.She now paints her country, Mina Mina without any traditional iconography from her familial lines, creating her own innovative language to portray her country. Dorothy's paintings are created by an intricate network of lines that collide and implode on top of each other creating a play of tension and expansion, transporting the viewer through a myriad of intersections. Her view is constantly changing: one painting giving an aerial perspective; the next as if she has placed a microscope to the ground. Dorothy now resides in Alice Springs where she paints full time in her own studio at Gallery Gondwana.

Source: Gallery Gondwana