Brave Creatures

I think this basically speaks for itself, I found it the other day on an extended browse through some blogs. Its from an old Travelocity ad from the UK, cause it sure as shit wouldn't be shown in the US.

This is not directed at anyone, its just funny - ok. Its DEFINITELY not directed at anyone.

Unfortunately I am still trying to figure out how to embed video into my blog, so you will need to link out to this.

If you are not seeing anything above, you may need to get the latest Quicktime player from Apple .

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Run, run, run, run. Lordy its been a month of travel. But I am home again in my little cupboard in leafy Armadale and about to go to bed, but I thought I would scratch something down first.

Narnia

I saw The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe on Boxing Day like a good little boy and eh - its ok. I kind of agree with David and Margaret, but I was not blown away by it. Its been played with a very straight bat -I am sure C.S. Lewis would have approved, as will no doubt the god botherers. The effects are ok, but not exceptional, apart from the Beavers and Aslan. An indication that I wasnt carried away by the story is that I spent some time wondering if the head centaur was actually kind of hot, or if its just that I havent had sex in a loooooooong time. I think its mostly the later.

Tilda Swinton, who I usually adore, is a little wooden and not that scary as the Witch. I have to say I remember the character being a little more interesting, in a petulant, demanding sort of way. This kids however are excellent as are the voice talent for the animals.

Certainly its worth a look, and benefits from the big screen, but if I had to choose, I would pick Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.

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Fruity Tooty

Next stop on the whirlwind tour is Queensland again to see that my mother is ok, and maybe just to visit my friend Tony in Byron Bay at New Years. Rumor has it there is a party there and Tony is trying to get me to go.

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I while back I had a bit of a rant about "Intelligent Design", which as far as I can see is at best only one out of two of the things its name suggest. As Tom Coasts over at PlasticBag.org comments, the best response to Judge Jones' (not a pseudonym) 139 page written opinion comes from Pat Robertson.

Now just recall for the sec that Pat is:

a/ a Christian Fundamentalist and TV evangelist
b/ an Intelligent Design supporter and
c/ has been repeatedly quoted as saying that Intelligent Design is NOT religion but good science.

Its this last bit that's interesting since he has now apoplectically promised that gods wrath will rain down on Dover Pennsylvania for this. Somehow Judge Jones was missed in his wrath, unless of course he lives in Dover which is unclear.

In other recent spewings from Robertson have included

• a call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez
• the assertion that the State Department would be improved if a nuclear bomb were to explode within it, and
• a prediction that Orlando would be hit with a meteor because it allowed a gay pride event to take place.

All up, quite a fun guy.

Religious extremists seem to all work pretty much the same way as far as I can see. The rules seem to be:

1. My invisible white/brown/black/yellow/red man is the sky is better than yours
2. He talks to me only and only I actually GET what he means
3. He doesn't like anything that I don't like
4. So either you play the game MY way or its going to go very badly for you
5. Only by doing EXACTLY what I say do you have any chance of forgiveness

Personally I cant see that there is all that much difference between Pat Robertson and the Islamic fundamentalist currently spewing vengeance against the west - apart form the suicide bombers.

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Christmas has been very low key this year. I am on the Gold Coast with my mother who is just out of hospital and recovering from a pretty big operation. She is doing really well, but it made for a low key day and since we are both being careful with money, we put an embargo on present, which of course I broke for her. 

The following is a letter from my mother to her email correspondents, of which she has hundreds. I thought it worth reproducing here.

Somehow I have pulled my self together completely, and the conclusion I came to? That Christmas did not have to mean presents and a big turkey/seafood meal, but love. And that I have received in abundance, and I feel that I am enjoying the most wonderful Christmas ever.

Not only have I been inundated and surrounded with love, but I have gone thru a very large operation, come out the other side, and now, with just a little pain, I am on the way to a full recovery. I have spoken around the world and your care and concern has helped me to handle this little hic up in life.

To all of my friends, rellies, caring acquaintances and most of all my doctors, I give up thanks in abundance.

To all of you, enjoy the day with loved ones and count the many blessings

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Petty thief, but basically decent guy, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), stumbles into an audition for a Hollywood detective story while escaping the police. Whisked off to L.A. Harry is teamed up with tough-guy private eye, Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer), aka Gay Perry, who is supposed to help him prepare for his screen test.

Suddenly bodies are turning up everywhere and people are trying to kill them as they become embroiled in a real-life murder mystery.

This is clearly a film that everyone involved threw themselves into. Downey Jr. is fantastic as the hero and narrator, a twitchy, cynical but basically wide eyed petty thief caught WAY out of his depth. He spends a proportion of the film wandering around with a severed finger and trying to figure out what's going on.

Kilmer as the Gay Private Detective is cutting and brutal without resorting to camp or stereotypes - unless of course you actually know many LA queens, in which case he has it on the money.

Shane Black, the writer of the Lethal Weapon films, The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodbye, has made his debut as writer/director in this film. He uses every bit of cheekiness in directing the film, winding back, interrupting scenes when Harry gets things out of order.

This was a movie that I knew little about and had next to no expectations of - and I really loved it. Its smart, funny,  cynical post-modern take on the Detective genre and its a laugh out loud rollarcoaster ride.

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Not much to say today. My mother came home from hospital so we have been talking a bit and settling her back into home. When she has been napping, I have been tweaking the edges of the site. I have got two new pieces working - "email this article" and the guestbook. Next on the list is a subscription service to allow notification when new articles come out.

Mum is doing really well. She has recovered from the operation with remarkable speed and the doctors are all very pleased. She is understandably weak and a little shaky, but with a cancer scare and a BIG operation that's not surprising. She has some therapy to go through, but it looks like they caught things in time and she is expected to pretty much make a full recovery.

I cant tell you how relieved I am.

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I bought myself a new t-shirt the other day. This in itself is a bit of an event since I have been living the life of a poor student for the last 18 months. Its also a little amazing that I found a t-shirt that was a/ nice and b/ fits. I am not THAT big, 110kgs/245lbs as of this morning, but it seems that the L in XL stands for lean now a days.

The options in appear to be either ugly shirts as worn by 500lb food hall feeders, or Barbies Bulimia Couture What do adults wear? Cause its not this stuff.

But I digress.

So I bought this t-shirt. Brown with a yellow and white print on the front, Yokohama Valley Track Club, and the back, 69. I didn't think much of it. Its a track shirt, it has a number on it, situation pretty much normal there. Maybe I was distracted by the fact that it almost fit, and that's kind of rare. In any case I was floored when I showed it to my mother and the first thing out of her mouth was - "THAT'S RUDE".

Now admittedly she was still a little high on post operative morphine, but FUCK ME! I do not need to be aware that my mother knows what a 69 is, or heaven forbid has performed one.

I don't know about you, but part of my sense of stability in the world rests on maintaining a mental and emotional distance from the fact that my parents have had sex. I think we are all aware of it in the abstract, but I don't know many people who feel like actually facing up the reality of it. Its kind of like the risk of a comet striking the earth and causing another extension event - I am aware that its happened in the past, its possible that it could happen again, but there is nothing I can do about it so its just better for me not to think about it or I will likely just stay in bed all day.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not prudish, I can deal with hearing details of other peoples sex lives without any problem at all . Lord knows there is not much I haven't seen or done myself at some point, so its a little hard to startle me. But I do draw the line at discussing my mothers sex life.

I am allowed to discuss my sex life with her, although in reality this is pretty much academic at the moment, but this is definitely a one way street of information.

My mother should be wary of raising the topic with me anyhow since we have had a few incidents over the years, some of which have apparently scarred her quite dramatically.

One of note, and let me be clear that I am selecting one of many pretty much at random, was when I was about 6. I was a particularly precocious and inquisitive child, not much stayed out of my reach for long. This wasn't a particularly deliberate trait on my part, it just seemed that if there was something to stumble across, I would be there at the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time.

For some reason I was playing in my parents bedroom, presumably the obligatory gay childhood experience of wearing of mothers high heels or some such. My parents were out by the pool with Richard Hybers, 19 y/o son of Mums best friend, who was signing on to clean the pool for us.

I had been snooping in their bedside table, presumably looking for some trinket or other to add to my expanding collections of a/ interesting pieces of mechanical or electrical equipment and b/ sparkley pieces of costume jewelry. As a side note, I think from this little piece of childhood minutiae you should be able to divine a great deal about my drives and goals in later life.

In any case I came across something that I couldn't identify, but was pretty sure fell into the category of electrical doohickey. I went out to the pool waving my new, beige and buzzing discovery. Running up to my mother I cried, in loud, child like innocence, "MUM WHAT'S THIS" and proceeded to wave her operating vibrator at her, my father and Ritchie Hybers,

Suffice to say that Ritchie didn't clean our pool and I was banned from entering their bedroom - which of course didn't stop me as I seemed to have a strange fascination for that vibrating piece of beige plastic. And I hadn't tried on all my mothers shoes yet.

Now that's about as close to my mothers sex life as I ever want to get. The full impact of what I had done didn't really dawn on me until I remembered the event when I was about 18. I think I washed my hands a dozen or so times a day for about a week when I connected those particular dots. In fact, i think I might just go and wash them again now.

Excuse me.

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Sometimes a quote really catches my attention. This one from a famous Jewish scholoar, Rabbi Hillel, that sums up the Jewish philosophy.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am not for others, what am I?

And if not now, when?

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Race riots in Australia. I didn't think I would see that in my life time, but then so much has changed since September 11th 2001. And more seems to be changing all of the time.

In the last month we have seen the passage of new anti-terrorism legislation through the parliament, emergency revisions to existing legislation and the arrest of a number of people on charges of planning a terrorist attack here. Now the New South Wales government has, in an emergency session, passed legislation providing police with broader powers to search, detain and restrict access to people engaged in, or suspected of planning violence.

I can see the reasons for these expanded powers and I agree that as a society we need to protect the peace. But what seems to be missing from all of this is a focus on the causes of the violence, beyond labeling as racially motivated. What is causing these groups to lash out at each other and what can we do to deal with these issues?

I think the Prime Minister has been a little disingenuous in his assertion that Australia is not a racist country, I think we are just as vulnerable to narrow and parochial thinking as any country. What we do have is a history of not (usually) getting too caught up in events so that things tend to get worked out, rather than escalated. This time however, I am worried.

The media has been feeding the fear in Sydney and across the country; and local, state and federal politicians are all grand standing over the issue. This is all occurring against the background of a lot of strife for the Muslim community. The recent arrests of predominantly Muslim Australians on anti-terrorism charges, the debate over the new anti terrorism laws, and the ongoing violence in Iraq, Iran and Israel.

I really feel a great deal of sympathy for Muslims, this is not an easy time. I am hardly surprised that a bunch of young guys, having lived with the mounting pressure on the Islamic community since 2001, finally snapped. I am also not surprised that a bunch of Anglo boys felt that they had some sort of tacit community permission to give the Muslim boys grief.

So now what are we doing about it. Is there a push to reunite the divided communities? Is the government  coming out with pro active plans to improve race relations? Not so much. We have had lots of condemnation and police action with very little on the reconciliation front. But then this is from the government and the Prime Minister who cant say sorry.

The best we have had is Cate Blanchet getting up and give a speech at the beach. Last time I checked, Cate isn't head of state (except in Lothlórien) and while I am glad she is prepared to come out in support of strengthening the community I don't think she should be leading the charge.

Right now I am not sure what can be done. I have done the obvious, writing to my state and federal Senators as well as the Victorian Premier, but I suspect the thing that we all can do is a little more subtle. I think that if we want to live in a peaceful country, we need to think about what it means to have other religions and nationalities amongst us; to learn to differentiate between what is part of the problem (terrorists) and of the solution (Muslims SHARING our country); and to try and include new Australians so they can share their culture rather than be simply trying to assimilate.

Australia has enjoyed a number of very peaceful years as wave, upon wave of migrants from a range of cultures has come to our shores. These migrants have shared their culture and expanded our horizons, but they did so against the background of relative global peace. The current global climate is not peaceful so it is making things harder, but I think that Australians can manage to deal with the complexities.

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