Hello Cruel World
Saturday, July 04, 2009
 
This comes under "We Told You So"
Women stretched to snapping point
Adele Horin
July 4, 2009
The 1.5-earner family became the predominant form between 1997 and 2006, from 35 per cent of all couples with children under five to 46 per cent. But life for parents grew harder and less equal. By 2006, all parents were more likely to report feeling stressed

"There was reduced gender equity and strikingly increased reported time pressure," the study found. Based on 772 families in 1997 and 652 families in 2006, and using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, the research will be presented at the Australian Social Policy Conference next week.

It shows part-time working mothers put in as many hours overall as full-time working mothers - when paid work, housework and child care were tallied - and worked longer than their 1997 counterparts.

The Howard government promoted the 1.5-earner model with family tax policies that provided most benefits to single-earner families and to couples with an 80:20 income split.
.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 7/04/2009 01:14:00 AM
Sunday, June 21, 2009
 
Journeying

From Trip to Minneapolis (June 2009)

Philosophical observations (formatted as poetry)
…
Train views are like water,
always the same, changing always
fleeting, glimpsed, gone.
…
       — Jo Walton

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 6/21/2009 04:03:00 AM
Saturday, June 06, 2009
 
Colour & Light in a Winter's Night

Full moon in luminous dusk sky. "Vivid" winter light festival on. Walked & watched w others on fine cool clear evening. Lovely.

1. IMG_1095 - Vivid: Lightbox city, 2. IMG_1085 - Vivid: Customs House, piano, lights, wires, 3. IMG_1060 - Vivid: cowled circle & outlier, 4. IMG_1041 - Vivid: Opera House

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 6/06/2009 11:08:00 PM
Thursday, May 28, 2009
 
Hand-Foot Syndrome – cont. Another side-effect

Cancer drug erases fingerprints
Travel warning with capecitabine (Annals of Oncology: Vol 20, No 7, p. 1281)
A patient who took a drug for cancer lost his fingerprints, which caused him to be detained for hours when he tried to visit the United States, according to an unusual case reported on Wednesday. The patient was unaware the treatment had wiped out his fingerprints.
The 62-year-old patient had been taking capecitabine, a follow-up drug for chemotherapy for cancer of the head and neck, Singaporean specialist Eng-Huat Tan and colleagues recounted in a letter to the British journal Annals of Oncology.

Capecitabine's side effects include inflammation of the palms and soles of the feet. The skin can peel, bleed and develop ulcers, and with time can cause fingerprints to be eradicated, Dr Tan said. … "He was detained at the airport customs for four hours because immigration officers could not detect his fingerprints." … Mr S. was eventually allowed to enter… He was advised to travel with a letter from his cancer doctor to explain his fingerprint-free condition.
The report urged patients who are put on long-term courses of capecitabine to be aware of the unusual risk. [AFP]
News Links:
Travel warning with capecitabine (Annals of Oncology: Vol 20, No 7, p. 1281)
Cancer drug wiped patient's fingerprints (Aust ABC News)
Drug erases fingerprints, causing immigration drama (SMH)
Cancer drug capecitabine causes patient to lose fingerprints and be detained by U.S. immigration
 (The Medical News)
Cancer Drug Causes Patient To Lose Fingerprints And Be Detained By US Immigration (Science Daily)
Side Effect of Drug Capecitabine Is Fingerprint Loss (CancerQuest)
Cancer patient lacking fingerprints held by US customs (The Family GP)
Cancer drug causes patient to lose fingerprints and be detained by US immigration (e! Science News)
Cancer drug erases fingerprints (BBC News)

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 5/28/2009 06:42:00 AM
Thursday, May 21, 2009
 
And we thought they just made those stories up

Art imitates Life imitates Art?
A New Zealand couple from Roturua are reportedly on the run after $NZ10 million – instead of $NZ10,000 – was mistakenly deposited in their Westpac bank account.
(Assorted news stories abound; comments (some context, especially on the comments).)

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 5/21/2009 03:56:00 PM
Thursday, May 07, 2009
 
Magpie Dishonour

Trying to resist the Pretty, Pretty, Shiny Things!

How cruel is this lioness, tempting, teasing, playing with her prey? Go thou, & save me from temptation. Take them away!

Repeating my earlier entry on the same subject:
Magpie Telegraph Alert
My Tormenting Temptress, Elysian One, has had a bit of an unpleasant time and setback recently. She's started a special sudden June Shiny Sale of her jewellery to help recover. It's fascinating, captivating, intriguing, sometimes glorious, stuff. Or pretty and shiny, if you will. Maybe you'll like it.

The names of the pieces — are there many makers who give such names to their jewels? — can send your imagination spiraling in all sorts of ways. Contemplation has inspired different people to other creative endeavours, and they've put together a chapbook with stories, poems, essays matched with their Muse-in-Artifact: “Glass Bead Games”. You can order that there too. Two of my small obsessions intertwined in a nefarious snare! <makes dramatic 'suffering' gesture>

Go then! Feast your eyes and imagination; remove (curse you; bless you) temptations!

And if you're coming on this entry sometime in futurity when the sale & so forth is past, still go thou, and check out what's happening at 'Honor Your Inner Magpie', or what was happening back in the day …

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 5/07/2009 05:39:00 PM
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
 
Science & Technology, destroying Wonder, Beauty, Art & History

Religion & History through Science

Have you seen the new comprehensive interactive three-dimensional image/model of the Saint Domitilla catacombs, made using laser scanners & digital images by a team lead by Dr Norbert Zimmerman of the Vienna Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften — ÖAW on Totenstadt )? (BBC story; START-Projekt site. I find Fig. 9 particularly impressive.) Google may have made an offer already (Google UnderEarth? Google AncientEarth?).

Local Hero: They're using 3DM Analyst from ADAM Technology in Perth, Western Australia, to generate high-resolution 3D photo models. It sounds like great fun: "the same camera and software can be used for the smallest projects, in the order of 30 microns (over 1,000 points per square millimetre), up to large projects spanning several kilometres." My optimist senses wonderful and amazing possibilities; my cynic sees baby-sized Hello Kitty dolls personalized with your daughter's face; my pessimist foresees even darker and dirtier uses.

Art through Science


A video of an installation, 9 was 6 if (by Swedish artist Christian Andersson), from the "it's not a blog" of Mattias Rickardsson - nu även digital at www.analogue.org/ mr

A kinetic sculpture at the BMW Museum, recorded on the ART+COM site. It is made from "714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors, and covers an area of six square metres".

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 5/06/2009 08:48:00 PM
Thursday, April 30, 2009
 
Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams

Between ANZAC Day and Mother's Day, as April turns over into May, Sydney feels the breath of winter approaching. There are birthdays and anniversaries important to me in the first week of May, immovably connected with the memory of walking out in the chill of dawn, watching puffs of breath mist out into the air. Daylight saving's ended; dark closes in earlier & earlier; thoughts can turn towards larger themes.
From Bartleby, an excellent & useful site:
Modern Essays, 1921. (Christopher Morley, ed.) 30. Beyond Life by James Branch Cabell:
… romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For, be it remembered that man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed by divine spectators), and that he is strong and excellent and wise: and to romance he listens, willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction. The things of which romance assures him are very far from true: yet it is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee …
And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but “as they ought to be,” which we call romance …

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/30/2009 09:27:00 PM
Sunday, April 12, 2009
 
An Easter Coincidence
Titanic anniversary. Of so many shipwrecks, that one serves story.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/12/2009 09:35:00 AM
 
For Easter

Opening Words
    I believe the earth
    exists, and
    in each minim mote
    of its dust the holy
    glow of thy candle.
    Thou
    unknown I know,
    thou spirit,
    giver,
    lover of making, of the
    wrought letter,
    wrought flower,
    iron, deed, dream.
    Dust of the earth,
    help thou my
    unbelief. Drift
    gray become gold, in the beam of
    vision. I believe with
    doubt. I doubt and
    interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
    beloved, threatened world.
    Each minim
    mote.
    Not the poisonous
    luminescence forced
    out of its privacy,
    The sacred lock of its cell
    broken. No,
    the ordinary glow
    of common dust in ancient sunlight.
    Be, that I may believe. Amen.

    — Denise Levertov
Easter has come to have associations of death & disease for me.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/12/2009 03:18:00 AM
Saturday, April 11, 2009
 
QueryFAIL: Responding to some of the discussion
[This is still too long, but I can't get blogger's code to use "expanding posts", so you only see the full entry if you go to its separate page, to work on my blogs.]
From Making Light: On QueryFAIL
nielsenhayden.com/ makinglight/ archives/ 011160.html
A summarised summary by Jim Macdonald, Making Light moderator
Apparently a group of agents designated Thursday, the 5th of March, 2009, as official Queryfail day. Throughout the day they’d Twitter those little 140-character descriptions of the worst queries they read (either that day, or had ever gotten in their careers).
"A group of online agents, book editors and periodicals acquisition editors are posting about their queries in real time. The idea is to educate people about what exactly it is in a query that made us stop reading and say “Not for me.” We’re being very careful not to include personal identifiers of any kind. The idea isn’t to mock or be intentionally cruel, but to educate."
To what should have been no one’s surprise, authors who found out about it got upset ... Amid stories of authors planning to boycott the agents who took part in the first Queryfail, a second Queryfail is apparently being planned for the end of the month.
"Last week, literary agents blogged about failed queries on Twitter—generating a query fail feed, an agent fail thread, a GalleyCat post, and an emotional debate."
and
"after hearing from several writers who were upset by the event, I have removed the specific entries. Instead, I’ll focus on what I learned by following QueryFail.

I apologize to those writers who felt disrespected. My intention in reposting was to share what I thought was good information. I still think it’s good information. But if you know me personally, you know I’m an empathetic soul and I don’t wish to cause another writer distress."
See also: AgentFail, WriterFail.
My comment (#103) on one aspect of this discussion:

Cat Meadors (#93) "Don't be crazy" isn't at all useful, and seems to be what 99% of the "advice" boils down to. Crazy people won't listen, and non-crazy people don't need to.)

Help with defining or examples of crazy and non-crazy, and how one thing can be seen as both in different circumstances could be very useful, though Miss Snark (misssnark.blogspot.com) could be a better source.

Now I think I'm 98-99% non-crazy; feedback says maybe only 90-95%. So I've had to, with much struggle and still not always successfully, modify my (identifiable) public behaviour, writing and media output to make it more acceptable. I am rather angry and bitter about that, still sensitive on certain points — another bit that needs to be controlled (so I can understand, if not accept, some reactions). Honest feedback, even overhearing you being criticised between two other people, can be useful, if hurtful.

Many times I've heard people being mocked, called crazy, weird or otherwise unacceptable for expressing thoughts or behaving in ways I've found truthful or very understandable. It hurts, but it does show how I need to mask and modify to be acceptable (and perhaps try to argue or express those thoughts in ways the 'mainstream', 'normal' (mundane?) culture can digest); and, sometimes, consider the rightness of my thoughts <g>.

OTOH: Lotsa crude, rude, stupid vapidity (IMO) in lotsa comments (and blogs) in lotsa places. Lotsa baaad writing. Sturgeon's Law? It's wearying to get to the good bits

[Disclaimer: I make no claim to be a good writer, and have little authorial ambition. I do like to read.]

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/11/2009 04:11:00 PM
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
 
One of my favourite book titles

Things you see when you haven't got a gun by Harry (Henry Arthur) Hooton | National Library of Australia catalogue entry for this 1943 self-published poetry book by one of Oz's turbulent poets.
Review in 'Southerly' magazine (www.archive.org/ stream/ southerlymagass05howarich/ southerlymagass05howarich_djvu.txt)

(See also King's Cross)

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/31/2009 11:45:00 PM
Sunday, March 29, 2009
 
An Anniversary Villanelle

One Art
    The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
    so many things seem filled with the intent
    to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

    Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
    of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
    The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

    Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
    places, and names, and where it was you meant
    to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

    I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
    next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
    The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

    I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
    some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
    I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

    – Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
    I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
    the art of losing’s not too hard to master
    though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

                        — Elizabeth Bishop
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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/29/2009 02:38:00 AM
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
 
Bucolia in Tasmania; Bliss in Luna

Seeing the set (see links below) about the 'reality' of the Windows XP default wallpaper screen background reminded me of my small project in Tasmania.

Tasmania: Bucolia Mosaic


Bucolia Backgrounds – Tasmania 2005

Most of the Australian mainland had been in drought for some years & was fairly brown or straw-coloured where it had been green. Tassie, OTOH, had so much rain the potato harvest was in difficulty because the fields were too muddy to work. The bus route between Devonport and Hobart went through some absolutely classical green rolling hills & fields, which I named 'Bucolia'.

I formed an ambition to try and replicate the WinXP picture as I remembered it (didn't use WinXP) from Real Life, and spent some time taking pictures from the bus. These are a selection. The circumstances mean they're not the best technical quality, and I've standard-sized them down to 1024 x 768 pixels.

VVORK
www.vvork.com/ ?p=4534
“After Microsoft” by Goldin+Senneby. (Photograph “Bliss” by Charles O’Rear. The image was used as the default computer wallpaper for the “Luna” theme, which was included with Microsoft Windows XP).
After Microsoft (posted April 5th, 2007)
www.goldinsenneby.com/ gs/ ?p=81
On this hill grapevines had been planted. But in the early 90s a Phylloxera bug infested the grapes and made them unusable. The entire vineyard had to be pulled out. For a few years the hill was covered with grass

Serial Consign
serialconsign.com/ 2009/ 03/ desktop-deja-vu
Spotted on VVORK, After Microsoft (2006-07) by Goldin + Senneby revisits the site of the famous Bliss photograph by Charles O'Rear a decade later.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/18/2009 03:05:00 PM
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
 
Connexion

thinking on the traveling life

elisem.livejournal.com/ 1426047.html
(I'm not sure where this is going to go, but I have to write it right now. Guess we'll find out when we get there.)
...
Part of being suited to it is something I love, and part was something I feared for a long time. The part I loved is something I got to enjoy years later when I took my Great North American Railroad Expotition. Thirty days and more than thirteen thousand kilometers is a bit of a journey. I did it all with a purse and a carryon bag …
The part that I feared was how easy it was to let go and move on. … I started to worry that I wasn't capable of sustaining any kind of close friendship. I wondered if maybe I was just one of those rootless people who was supposed to wander the earth....…
Anyway, I'm still not entirely sure exactly what it was I was setting out to tell you here, but it seemed important to write it down. …
I'll be pondering this some more. Thanks for listening.
"I'm not sure where this is going to go"
Kind of says it all.

Working on a lot of issues about connections, roots, memories & my own posterity. Am I building myself into my own pyramid before I'm dead?

But a lot of the world's problems are from people losing wise memories, lessons from pain. Except a lot of the world's problems are from people hanging onto memories of pain & bitterness & hate …

Working on a lot of issues …

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/17/2009 01:31:00 PM
Monday, March 16, 2009
 
Real Estate Ruminations
Real Estate Report: Sydney's cheapest inner city flat? On the 6th floor of an attractive, if slightly seedy, Art Deco building with rather wonky lifts, in a central, if also slightly seedy (sketchy?) precinct where I live (close to shops, transport, my hospital, nightclub strip, courts, homeless shelters, drug, alcohol & mental treatment centres). A single room maybe 10 foot by eight. Not too much to keep clean, I guess. Rolled futon on the floor. Door & swing-space takes most of inner wall. Two nice light windows on the outer wall. Small wardrobe & a desk/dining table with shelves above cover left wall – agent suggests one of those fold-up 'murphy' beds.

Right wall taken up by world's smallest bathroom & kitchen ditto. I could sit on the toilet & turn the taps on the tiny handbasin opposite; a hand-held shower perched between them, with the shower curtain across the door.
In the kitchen, an eensy sink with room for a mini bar-fridge (say 18" square) beneath faced a bench with an electric hotplate/griller for the stove. For a space I could just stand & turn in, it had quite a few shelves & cupboards.

All this for roughly 3x mean male annual earnings — $155,000. Le sigh.

Hearing that it's now rented for $200/week shook me a bit. Makes me appreciate room @ $250/week even more, maybe 2.5–3 times the size. ($AU1.00 = $US0.64 approx.)

I did grab mine fast at the time (being evicted midway through chemotherapy), seeing many smaller, grottier places going at higher rents in my search area — not too hilly, walking distance to hospital, close to public transport.
Looking with mingled feeling at returning home. Friday night on the roof here facing the Southern Cross, with Orion behind my shoulder, I watched the full autumn moon rising while lightning-laced thunderclouds rolled up from the south. Aeroplanes from Kingsford-Smith criss-crossed flight-lines with flying foxes while the next-door pub's beer garden rumbled with Friday night crowd noise. Won't be quite the same there.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/16/2009 01:04:00 AM
Friday, February 20, 2009
 
Refreshment
Last sennight or so, times have been troublous, myself tim'rous, difficult, despondent. Then friends dragged me out, we had tea & sandwiches with the pigeons at Pyrmont, spent several hours at Sydney Aquarium [long descriptive enthusing redacted], hot congee in Dixon St, walked home, watched a Monty Python episode (with more tea). Now well-fed, content, refreshed & quite tired out.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/20/2009 02:41:00 AM
Monday, January 19, 2009
 
History continues

From Making Light:
The true history of the Bush years
nielsenhayden.com/ makinglight/ archives/ 010952.html
"There will be histories written about the Bush administration. They’ll be privy to information we don’t have yet, because the future is like that. On the other hand, we have our own privileged knowledge: We know how the story looked like to people who didn’t know how it was going to come out.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 1/19/2009 06:21:00 PM
Saturday, January 03, 2009
 
Influence & plagiarism: myths, legends, folk stories, oral history, epics, sagas, literature, &c.
I think I've mentioned my theory/feeling about myths & folk stories & such traditions being mostly what we'd now call 'fanfic'. Here are two people dealing with some of the ideas in that. (Most of Jonathon's Harper's article isn't so sesquipedalian <ahem>)
The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism,
by Jonathan Lethem
Harper's Magazine, February 2007:
www.harpers.org/ archive/ 2007/ 02/ 0081387
LOVE AND THEFT …
consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
Bellatrys at Nothing New Under the Sun started discussing a set of examples at the turn of 2008/2009 with the post
A Quest that begins in a Tavern...

bellatrys.livejournal.com/ 413660.html [longish description cut] … is best described as:
a) an example of "PC gone mad™" in the fantasy genre today;

b) the sort of insane mish-mash of cliches, anachronisms, mythology rip-offs and proper nouns improperly used that gives gaming a bad name;

c) taken directly from an internationally-bestselling work of serio-comic epic fantasy itself derived from earlier popular fantasy tales, which the author reworked and polished for decades, that was first published under the d'Estes in Renaissance Italy and ripped off subsequently by everybody from Edmund Spenser to Georg Friedrich Händel.
and continues with two more entries so far, with quite a bit of interesting discussion in the comments to them all.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 1/03/2009 01:15:00 PM
Thursday, December 25, 2008
 
Christmas Light Shows (via YouTube)
YouTube - El Paso Christmas Light Show 2007
"Over 120,000 lights in synch to the music of The Trans-Siberian Orchestra." (adrianh1969)

They say it's good to have a hobby. Hmmm. I'm amazed, but torn wondering if it'd be possible to put all this time, energy & expertise into something … "better"? … then, I guess it could have gone into something worse. And I suppose this is creating some kind of good in the world.

Does anyone else find the 'Birnham Wood moving to Dunsinane' moments rather disturbing?

El Paso Christmas Light Show 2006 (YouTube link) [www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qkmvkVtdUJg]
Music: Trans-Siberian Orchestra -

El Paso Christmas Light Show 2008 (YouTube link). This is the shortest, and starts off fairly quietly. It's possible I like this version best. [www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JZJfWMva8Sk&NR=1]

An altogether different version of A Christmas Story. Or, rather, a [C]HannuKwanzSolstMas tale. Father Christmas: The Untold Story (Whip of the Red Hunter )

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 12/25/2008 09:09:00 AM
Friday, December 05, 2008
 
33-Year-Old Memories of an Australian November

What is happening in Canada, from Yarn Harlot (3-Dec-2008)
www.yarnharlot.ca/ blog/ archives/ 2008/ 12/ 03/ what_is_happening_in_canada.html
There is confusion over what's happening in Canada's government. This is a primer for non-Canadians (and some Canadians) about this mess
I may, someday, put up some links about 'The Dismissal' of November 11, 1975, Gough Whitlam, Sir John Kerr, Malcolm Fraser, et al. There's a shedload of material on't, including at least one television mini-series.

But we tend to forget it's not completely sui generis in Australian history, there were incidents in 1932 and 1808, for instance. I'm grateful to Epacris putting links to some material about these over at Making Light. Here 'tis.
From Australian Dictionary of Biography site:
Lang, John Thomas (Jack) (1876 - 1975)
Game, Sir Philip Woolcott (1876 - 1961)

Dismissal of a Premier - The Role of Governor Game (Dept of Education & Training)
Dismissal of Jack Lang (Interactive schooling, Year 10)

Dismissed From Office Lang Government (Original newspaper report, The Age, 14-May-1932)
Microphone, Reiss (Reisz) carbon granule, 1925 (not FDR's cigarette lighter … from Powerhouse Museum collection, explained on that page)

The Story of J T Lang by R. Dixon (1943) (somewhat partisan publication, from an interesting resource)
The Australian Republic Issue (Other Relevant Papers)
Library Catalogue record (1) Dismissal of a Premier - the Philip Game papers by Bethia Foott [sic]
Dismissal of a Premier: the Philip Game papers by Bethia Foote [sic] Library Catalogue record (2)
and the 'Rum Rebellion' of 1808
Captain Bligh's other mutiny (newspaper article)

'The Rum Rebellion' (same paper, multimedia piece with links elsewhere)

The Significance Of The Integrity System (Acessible by this page with link to PDF versions of speeches. Transcript also here or here) Or compare The coup of 1808 and the rule of law, an edited combination of two related speeches.

"The Governor's Man", a book by JHM Abbott ~1919 – historic fiction.
And this is one of the historic documents you can have a look at online — part of an exhibition IRL at the British Library: King Charles I's Death Warrant.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 12/05/2008 11:11:00 AM
Sunday, November 09, 2008
 
Crystalline: 9/11 (9th November)
Crystal Night, 1938
When, on November 10 1938 at 3 o'clock in the morning, I drove up the Berlin Tauentzien in a taxi, I heard glass tinkling on both sides of the street. It sounded as if dozens of wagons full of glass were being turned over. I looked out and saw, on the left and right, a man standing in front of about every fifth house, each using an iron rod to smash store windows with mighty blows. The job done, he walked over to the next shop with a measured pace and, with powerful calmth, dedicated himself to that one's still intact window-pane.
Except for these men, wearing black breeches, riding boots and civil jackets, there was no human being in sight. The taxi turned into the Kurfürstendamm. Here, too, men were standing at regular distances and with long bars smashed "Jewish" show windows. Each one seemed to have some five to ten windows for a job. Cascades of glass fell down, crushing on the concrete. It sounded as if the entire town existed of nothing but crashing glass. It was a drive right through a madman's dream.
Between Uhlandstraße and Knesebeckstraße I asked to stop, opened the door and was just putting my right foot on the street, when a man emerged from the nearest tree and softly and energetically told me: "Don't get out! Drive on at once!" It was a man in hat and cloak. "But listen", I started, "I just wanted to…" "No", he interrupted threateningly. "Getting out is forbidden! Get on your way at once!" He pushed me back into the car, beckoned the driver, threw the door shut, and the driver obeyed. On we went through the ghostly "splinter night".

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 11/09/2008 10:55:00 AM
Friday, October 31, 2008
 
Living in a rectilinear Klein Bottle

May I draw readers' attention to one of this year's winners of the Australian Institute of Architecture awards, the Klein Bottle beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, outside Melbourne (Victoria). It's described here [Sydney-Melbourne rivalry? Phfft! Nah. Doesn't happen these days.] as “some metallic fungi-form zeppelin flung from outer space” (I'd interpolate 'geometric' or 'rectilinear' somewhere, not many curves; nor, in fact, my image of a Klein bottle. Memorable, however.)

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 10/31/2008 03:22:00 PM
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
 
St. James Infirmary Blues

From SubVerse, February 6, 2006
St. James Infirmary Blues
www.subverse.org/ 2006/ 02/ 06/ st-james-infirmary
This is a haunting song. … It’s a song about death. It’s about a man seeing the woman he loves stretched out dead on the hospital slab. But those horns rising and rising…. It’s a song about release. A song about acceptance. A song about drinking life in deeply, in all its pain and unfairness. … there are many covers of this song — a good 33 different versions … from Oing Boingo to Joe Cocker to The Dirty Dozen Brass Band …
Several mp3 links are on this page.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 10/15/2008 12:18:00 PM
 
Poem from Bluejo's Journal; Birthday; Testament

Bluejo's Journal, 14th October 2008:
She dances golden, in a drift of leaves,
she dances stark, skeletal, in the dark,
she dances in a cloud of solid green,
she dances with her branch and leaf and bark.

She dances with the birds, the wind, the street,
with child in stroller, with a hurrying nun,
with gardners, shoppers, lovers as they meet,
she dances, as we dance, around the sun.>
My late father's birthday. He now is "Rolled round in earths diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees".
Made my Last Will & Testament today. At least a first best draft of it (signed, sealed, witnessed). Avoiding for once my besetting sin of Making The Perfedt The Enemy of The Good, I settled for a simple, cut-down version which at least gives a start, and will avoid for my survivors the hideous mess I was landed in by Chris' death intestate.

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[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 10/15/2008 01:42:00 AM

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/ . Lives in Australia/New South Wales/Sydney, speaks English. Eye color is hazel. I am what my mother calls unique. My interests are photography, reading, natural history/land use, town planning, sustainability.

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Australia, New South Wales, Sydney, English, photography, reading, natural history, land use, town planning, sustainability.