Valuable lessons life has taught me. Part one.

If you’re going to be playing a round of mini-golf later in the day with your son, don’t drink heavily beforehand because if you get a fit of the staggers and fall into the shrubbery near the 13th hole – you’ll look like a bit of a goose.

On the brighter side, it improved my golf game no end!

I even shot a hole-in-one on the last hole.

What?!

It's too early in the morning for me to write a lengthy post about this, and too early for me to really grasp why I am so offended/annoyed by this article.

But I am, so here it is. Discuss away.

Ignore the power of Squib's badges at your peril*.

All praise the Welsh Wonder

It’s Gillard.

Well, yes, I was wrong and I’d like to thank the world for pointing that out to me (even the cat had a supercilious look on her dial this morning).

For the record, I think this was a mistake.

However.

We would have won under Rudd.

We’ll win under Gillard.

I’m still a bit gobsmacked that the caucus could be so easily rattled. I can only assume the internal polling must have been horrendous but still.

Expect an election, probably in October.

*I’m expecting Charles Darwin to make a come back any day now.

And in breaking news...

Ramon regains his glasses just in time to see the naked chick!

As I made my journey and drew near to Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me. And I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?' And I answered, 'Who are you, Lord?' And He said to me, 'I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.' Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the One who was speaking to me. And I said, 'What shall I do, Lord?' And the Lord said to me, 'Rise, and go into Damascus, and there you will be told all that is appointed for you to do.' And when I could not see because of the brightness of that light, I was led by the hand by those who were with me, and came into Damascus.

"And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, well spoken of by all the Jews who lived there, came to me, and standing by me said to me, 'Brother Saul, receive your sight.' And in that very hour I received my sight and saw him. And he said, 'The God of our fathers appointed you to know His will, to see the Just One and to hear a voice from His mouth; for you will be a witness for Him to all men of what you have seen and heard. And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His name.'

All of which is a long-winded way of saying

MY GLASSES ARE FIXED!!

Woot!

I battle on, through my pain!

I can't see a fucking thing without my glasses

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress—to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself )
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,—who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;—they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;—
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Wcre called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

My glasses are still broken, you know.

I hope you lot appreciate this

Excpet Puss, of course.

Puss is a lost cause.

Look! Out the window!

When will Ramon's glasses be ready? When!?

Can there be any better feeling, comrades, than standing in your living room, a glass of red in one hand, the last movement of the "Glorious Ninth" playing, watching a thunderstorm rolling across the northern sky and knowing you’ve already brought the washing in off the line?

I put it to you that there can not.

Me versus wild!

Osso bucco ahoy!

I recall reading somewhere* that the ultimate test of those super-fit, SAS types is to be parachuted naked into the wilds and live off the land for a set time.

If I was parachuted naked into the wilds of Melbourne, I’d probably be attested for indecent exposure.

If, however, I was parachuted fully clothed with $150 in my kick into the wilds of Melbourne, I’m pretty confident I could find my way to the Italian Waiters Club and organise a slap-up feast and a couple of bottles of red.

There’s something in that for us all.

Also – can we just accept we’re shit at soccer and move on?

It really will save a lot of time.

*And if people would hurry up and fix my fucking glasses, I could look it up.

Piss weak "I've broken my glasses" PSF

Take me out tonight
Where there’s music and there’s people
Who are young and alive

Driving in your car
I never, never want to go home
Because I haven’t got one anymore

Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people
And I want to see light

Driving in your car
Oh, please don’t drop me home
Because it?s not my home, it’s their home
And I’m welcome no more

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die

And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine

Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere
I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care

And in the darkened underpass
I thought, oh God, my chance has come at last
But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn’t ask

Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere
I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care

Driving in your car
I never, never want to go home
Because I haven’t got one
I haven’t got one
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die

And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us, so what
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine

Oh, there is a light, never goes out
There is a light, never goes out
There is a light, never goes out
There is a light, never goes out
There is a light, never goes out
There is a light, never goes out
There is a light, never goes out

The Countess in the Cake: Hyper-Reality & Rudd

Why'm I the only one posting shit here? Come on other people, post sumfin.

**

Not having anything better to do, I was reading up on the history of 'pataphysics, which is a kind of absurdist piss-take on metaphysics.

On doing my research I came across a literary word-game called S+7 that 'pataphysicians once played, which involes taking a work of literature and replacing every noun with the noun that comes seven times after it in whatever dictionary you have laying about.

I've done it here with a speech Kevin Rudd made to the Health Services Union of Australia on June 7 (avoiding derivations of my root and subsequent noun), and laid it out poetically:



The Countess In The Cake

Ontology thistle
I've heard lovebird and clemency
as the Heartbeat Minotaur Nicola Roxon
and
I
Have
Talked

To patricide,
To heartbeat explosion,
To stain,
And to heartbeat unknown is this:
There's a lout we can do.

To deliver better heartbeat
And better hotbed,
And it doesn't matter who talks to me -

Nutmegs, surrealism, ordure*,
Amethyst, clerical stain
Or the percentage
Behind the countess in the cake-
everyone knows we need chanterelle**.

K. Rudd, 2010

* Ordure is 'excrement' apparently. Didn't know that word.
** Chanterelle is a type of mushroom. Oh, the coincidence!

********

The reason I was looking`at 'pataphysic history is because in my day, when I was young and had a flat stomach, and no hair was growng out of my shoulders and my mother loved me, I read a lot of Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, who, as far as I know, coined the term 'hyper-reality' (and was once a 'pataphysician).

That term is bandied about a lot these days. I heard a footy player using it recently to express his joy about winning a match... "Oh mate, it was hyper-real". I don't think that's what he meant though. I think he may have meant he was experiencing a heightened reality, or an acute sense of reality, or maybe it was a case of "I can't believe we won" delayed-reality, or plain old joy, but not hyper-reality. What he should have said was, "Mate, it was really real," or, "Mate, it didn't seem real" - depending on what he was getting at.

As I remembered it, hyper-reality means the exact opposite to what the footy player probably meant. Hyper-reality is not real at all. It is fantasy posing as reality, sort of. I can't find it anywhere on the netz but Baudrillard talked of a Disneyland ride where you go in a slow boat and travel the world... the 'France' bit was probably an Eiffel Tower and a man with a striped shirt and twirly moustache playing an accordion, which the dumb American on the ride would know evermore as 'France'. That's a 'France' hyper-reality. Exaggerated (or understated), false, based on a messy cocktail of misconception and popularity; that's what you need to make something hyper-real.

What the footy player experienced was 'reality', ot 'facts dawning'. If he then went on to say that it was his greatest achievement in life, that, I guess, could be a kind of hyper-reality if measured eternally against other achievements he may have made (eg: staying alive, being nice to his wife).

Baudrillard put it best when he said that hyperreality is: "The simulation of something which never really existed."

But all that's Day One of Baudrillard 101, and it's his advanced theories that make for truly fascinating reading and I think I might get back into him next summer.

But as for K. Rudd, he is suffering from a nationwide hyperreal reaction to his prime-ministerialship. I really don't think he's deviated from his leadership style and decision-bents from Day 1, and yet his popularity grows and shrinks like an 18year old boy's dick when he's at a strip joint with his mum.***

Kevin's lost the plot!
Kevin's a shoe-in!
Kevin's the leader we need right now!
Kevin's a disaster!

And yet, he doesn't change, just our perceptions change on some hyperreal level - (except for Ramon, whose support for Kev is not subject to hyper-reality, but rather, works on a kind of religious deity level).

The whole will he / won't he win an election is already boring me, and the date isn't even set.

I hate polls.


***What?

Another Lazy Post

...speaking of formula film plots and characters, I find this hilarious:



Weekend Wrap: I went to a party on Saturday night, and someone was handing our magic mushrooms. I took two. Half an hour later I was dancing to Lady GaGa. Later on I was positive that as my blood surged through my veins, it made electronic noises that only I could hear. As I walked home down a steep hill, I couldn't work out why people don't fall down hills more often (I forgot that ankles can bend, thus straightening us). The sudden realisation that gravity should be propelling me head first down the hill made me gingerly side-step down the hill. It was 3.30am.

You know how everyone thinks the Native American and their peyote made them wise and spiritual and shit? Wrong. It made them trip balls and think rubbish, just like anyone else on a hallucinatory drug trip.

KILLDOZER

I'm off for a few days.

Wari / Witchie... I'll email you soon.

E. Discharge... I'm starting your project on the weekend. Finally.

Please enjoy this videoclip, by one of my all-time favourite bands, KILLDOZER and their tribute to Irwin Allen disaster films of the 70s... 'Man vs Nature".

Flotilla Flotilla Flotilla

I reckon for the duration of my life I've come across the word 'flotilla', on average, thrice a year. If someone had told me I would hear the word 'flotilla' 793 times in one week I'd have said, "In your dreams..." But this past week, the 793 utterances of the word 'flotilla' has occurred. I kept count. I'm going to see if it can reach 1,000 by Sunday, and so, I may insert the word several more times in this post.

Melba wrote yesterday: "Wow, I keep coming over here thinking there might be something about the Israel-Gaza thing. But no. Humpf. Typical, and I don't know why I expected differently, but the silence is deafening. Flotilla."

"Typical"? Are you suggesting Melba that I was displaying some sort of cowardice in not posting on the topic (being TSFKA's unofficial Middle-Eastern correspondant)? In actual fact, I've been away from the flotilla internets for the past few days, and couldn't wait to post something about the flotilla. But I was spending quality nude time over a couple of nights with Ponygirl Flotilla, and I'm afraid that in the battle of Rudeys With Woman I Love vs Posting On TSFKA, rudeys win, flotilla.

Flotilla:

This is certainly a PR disaster for Israel. Tazering western journalists and rough-housing unaligned humanitarian volunteers, as well as killing a handful of them, does not look good at all. They acted like gung-ho pirate cowboys, and in International Waters as well, where, in theory, unless there is an actual war, you're not supposed to be firing guns.

There are many around the world who, previously, may have not taken sides in the whole Israel vs Palestine thing, who may now find themselves turning against Israel.
Israel needs all the friends they can get...

I have maintained consistently that Israel should not do one thing to assist Hamas. Hamas is an evil, far-right religious-based organisation that in its own charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews. Israel has every right to starve it of funds, weapons and infrastructure.

However, there's a couple of million people living in Gaza and they need food, electricity and gas, water and medicine. The innocent people of Gaza flotilla should not have to unduly suffer because they happen to be governed by psychotic fascists.

Enter: Free Gaza Movement, and a flotilla of ships.

The Free Gaza movement is a motley collection of genuine and kind-hearted human rights activists, anti-semites, pro-Palestinian agitators, Palestinians, intellectuals, left-leaning cowboys itching for a fight, good people, bad people, brave people and sailors in a flotilla.

In 2008 and 2009 they made a few trips to Gaza, and each time were held up by Israel but eventually let through... though Israel did all they could to worry the activists out of trying it again.

Israel warned them that if they tried it again, there'd be trouble. Flotilla trouble.

And there was. Big trouble. Death and injury trouble.

They knew they were going to get held up, but sailed anyway, and the journalists aboard no doubt were prepared to get involved in a diplomatic standoff, but I'm flotilla guessing they weren't expecting to get bashed, tazered, imprisoned and deported.

But they went head-first into a fight, knowing there would be one. Personally, I wouldn't goad Mike Tyson in a pub. Yes, Israel have fucked up here, monumentally, but in the same way that Mike Tyson would have fucked up if he belted me in a pub after I goaded him.

I fully appreciate that Israel hate Hamas, and are nervy about the chance of Hamas gaining access to cash and weapons (and for good reason), but why the hell couldn't they have just stopped the flotilla, searched the ships top to bottom, and then got the hell off the ships?

Sigh.

I tell you this though: If there was just ONE gun in the flotilla being shipped to Gaza, we need to turn our attentions to Free Gaza Movement. And if it comes to light that Free Gaza shot first (as Israel claims), we must also re-evealuate the situation, slightly (it still won't validate the killings and bashings).

It must have been tense on the ships. The Israeli soldiers are just people after all. They are ordered onto the flotilla, the situation gets tense, they are out-numbered, they panic, they shoot. It's a story repeated throughout history, unfortunately.

Surely both sides could have negotiated some 'process' in advance.

I shall continue to support Israel and its right to exist and defend itself. I shall continue to agree that it should not help Hamas in any way, shape or form. But as a good ol' Lefty, I shall also fully support the delivery of food and medicine to Gaza, and hope that the Free Gaza Movement can concentrate solely on that task, and avoid any form of political grand-standing.

And next time, Free Gaza Movement, how about negotiating passage with Israel in advance, perhaps with an inventory of freight, rather than just flotillaring towards their waters? If you really, really want the Gazans to have food and medicine, wouldn't it make sense to clear your oceanic pathways first?

Diplomacy... it's often ignored by people trying to make a point.

**

One other observation... I'm sick of hearing people say that Isarel should have not stopped the flotilla at all. That's ridiculous. All nations on the planet have a right to stop boats entering their waters.

Israel should have waited until they got right into their waters (instead of stopping them in International Waters), but my point remains.

At least it's not "Stop the feckin' clocks".

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
and darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow,
"I will be true to the wife.
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages;
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Although my personal motto is “we must love one another and eat a pie”.

I think my version is much better.