Brave Creatures

On a blog ramble this morning I ran across a YouTube video of a TV show that as a kid I was kind of facinated by - ElectraWoman and DynaGirl . At the time I wasnt so much facinated by how good they were as how could anyone make something that lame. Lame but kind of captivating. But then I think the same thing about Big Brother and Idol.

The creators of the show, Sid and Marty Krofft, were responsible for a number of other high camp, low production value spectaculars including Land of the Lost, Isis, Wonderbug, The Bugaloos, Lidsville and HR Pufnstuf. Clearly 70's, laced with drug references and anti establishment references, I suspect my love of bad, high comedy drag was founded in these programs.

I can't tell you how much I am loving those boots. 

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It doesn't matter to me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting you heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to now if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can be faithless and therefore...trustworthy. I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"

t doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer and thanks to a very handsome man for bringing this to my attention.

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Another washing themed Adam and Andy from the archive. This is the one the convinced me that I knew who Adam really is.

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From: "Robert Miller"
To: <governor-general@gg.gov.au>
Subject: Same Sex Debate
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:24:51 +1000

Your Excellency,

I am writing to you regarding the debate on the recognition of same sex relationships.

I am a 37 year old man.

I am a contributing member of society.

I earn good money and I pay my taxes.

I have three degrees. I contribute to charities. I do community volunteer work. I play sport.

I value my friends and family.  I look after my mother (who is getting on now). I believe that making a long term commitment to a single partner is an important part of life and that this partnership contributes to society as a whole as well as to my own personal happiness.

But because I am gay, my relationship is not recognised by the government of my country. Why is the love I feel for my partner seen as second class?

I don't need the word marriage. The word is not important to me. I am not looking for tax breaks or benefits. What is important to me is being able to stand up and say publicly:

"I choose this to be with this person. This is my partner, and I will stand by them for all of my life"

I want to be able to say that, and have that recognised by my friends, family and my society.

My society expects the same things of me that expects of straight people. I am expected to contribute and engage the same ways, but I am not given the same recognition.

What I don't understand in all of this debate is, why would recognition of my relationship, of my love and commitment to another person, going to in anyway degrade the recognition of straight relationships.

I hope you are prepared to hear what I am saying and that you take it into account when the federal government attempts to have the ACT's Civil Union laws over turned.

Thank you,

R

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You know its going to be a quiet weekend. Both Barbie and my training partner Binky are going ot be away.

I am going to be abandoned for the Queens Birthday. Maybe I will go to Cairns to go diving.

Whatever I do, I will miss my Barbie and my Binky.

God damn it, I feel like my life is turning into an episode of the Teletubbies.

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There once was a man.

Not a priest or a lord or a hero, just a man. But a kindly man.

In the city where the man lived there were many poor people who had been abandoned by their king. These paupers begged for money to buy food and clothes. Many had no homes to go to and lived on the streets sleeping in the cold and rain.

The people of the city did not want to give money to the poor fearing it would simply be spent the money on wine or strong spirits, so the people donated to charities so the money would be well spent.

The kindly man, like many men in the city, donated some small part of his earnings to these charities to help the poor. But the kindly man also did something else.

When the poor of the city begged money from him, he did not ignore them. Instead he answered their request politely, even if refusing them. One day, one of the other citizens asked the man "why do you talk to the poor, why do you respond?".

And the man said "I may not give them money, but I will not also take away their self respect by denying their existence".

Sometimes the kindly man is more gracious and noble than any lord, or hero.

 A pretty story? Also a true story. It's about someone I once knew\, and who I will always value for being a kindly man.

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< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

type T personality n. A personality type that regularly seeks out thrilling or dangerous experiences.

We all know the classic type A personality, which was identified in 1959 by the cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman. But there's a whole type taxonomy out there, of which today's type T personality is but one example. Here's a list of all the personality types I was able to identify (note that many of these require your tongue to be planted relatively securely in the cheek of your choice):

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I am trying to decide on a beard look for the Winter. Of course all of my friends have dipped their oars in, but the Greek chorus is pretty evenly divided so I thought I would open voting up to the democratising principals inherent in the Internet.

Big Bear		Amish
The full bearded bear look  - GGRRRAAAHHH		Something a little more interesting. All I need is a buggy and perhaps a bonnet.

Not the perfect comparission, I am wrinklier in the bear shot and I look chubby in the face in the Amish one, but you get the idea. 

[poll=6]

In reality this is more out of interest than any intent to follow the advice of random strangers on the Internet. Truth be told there is a certain French Muscle Bear who has a veto vote. Lets face it, if he thinks I am hot, I am going to get laid more.

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This will sure fix that.

Abba vs. Mommy Dearest - what a combo.

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It seems to me that there is something going on deep in the earth at the boundary of the Australian and Eurasian continental plates . Over the last 18 months there seems to have been a marked increase in number of significant geological events in the region and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.

While the Boxing Day Tsunami, the Pakistan quake, the rumblings of the Mount Merapi volcano Central Java and now the earthquake in Yogyakarta may seem quite distant from each other, but all of these events do share a common fault line. What's going on down there I wonder?

The truth is there would be nothing I can do about it, even if I knew what was going on. Rumors to the contrary aside, I don't actually have the ability to affect plate tectonics. What also concerned me, and I can have some influence on this, is the effect this planetary instability could have on future nuclear development, and the "debate" here in Australia about the countries role in the provisioning of nuclear fuel.

Quite a leap? Not really. Here are some under reported facts.

The Kartini research reactor research reactor is located at Yogyakarta and while the reactor and its buildings don't seem to have been damaged by the recent quake, some of the outbuildings were.

Last year, the Indonesian Government announced plans to begin building the country's first nuclear power plant in central Java to feed its rapidly growing energy needs. The site for the proposed power plant is next to a dormant volcano called Mount Muria, and is on the fault line that runs through the archipelago.

I am not making any of this up.

Lets face it, there is no such thing as a completely dead volcano, that's why they're called dormant, but if people can live on the slopes of Vesuvius I guess nowhere I out off the question.

It's very true that other countries, notably Japan and the United States have built reactors is geologically unstable areas. The difference is that Indonesia I not as wealthy a country and it has something of a history of, I don't want to say corruption, so let just say cutting corners. Its also doesn't have the best record of environmental concern.

All of this adds up, for me at least, to a recipe for mushroom clouds to the north of the Kimberly's and calls into question the advisability of encouraging the nuclear solution to the burgeoning global power shortage.

It seems to me that the bottom line on nuclear energy is that we just don't know how to deal with waste, waste that is not only incredibly toxic but that remains so for not just decades, but possibly millennia. Today that would be like dealing with a problem that was created by Ethelred the Unready. It's pretty much unthinkable, and yet we seem to be planning to do this to our future generations.

But we seem to be considering it, and all in the name of market forces. The "market" wants to use nuclear energy because its the cheapest solution. The implications here seem to be that a/ cheapest is the same as best and b/ the "market" knows what it is doing.

Can anyone say asbestos?

Companies planning horizons are shrinking so that now the common product planning cycle is only 3 years and it appears government is becoming not much different with politicians only looking as far as the next election or possibly the one after that. At what point did we lose our shared responsibility to future generations.

And I am a big fag. I am never going to have kids. Why should I care about what happens beyond the next 50 or so years? But I do.

What I don't understand is why the rich, fat, old white guys at the top of government and commerce don't care enough about their grandkids to do something to help them. When are our monkey brains going to start seeing further than the end of our own lives? I have to wonder how many disasters we need to live through to start accepting that there are things we can't control and we need to factor this into our calculations.

Playing chicken with mother nature has proven time and again to not be a winning strategy, and yet we still do it. Heres hoping that the Indonesians are lucky a little longer. Long enough that cheap alternates to nuclear energy become available.

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