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G’night folks, happy new year. Thanks to everyone who commented, emailed, or just read this blog over the last twelve months. Hope I’ve made your visits worthwhile. My hope for 2005 is that it will build on the successes of 2004, provide opportunities for growth and learning, and not be quite so discoloured by death, destruction and mayhem as the last few.

As a final parting shot, here’s an image from today’s Age which, like probably every paper in the world, included a “2004 in review” liftout today. And what would a new year’s eve liftout be without a round-up of famous folks who’ve died this year?

Ronald Reagan, actor … what trashy 80s horror movie was he in again?

Fred Phelps and his band of crazy hipsters at [godhatesfags dot com] have excelled themselves yet again.

Imbued, no doubt, with substantial quantities of Christmas cheer, Phelps has issued a press release headed “Thank God for Tsunami and 2000 dead Swedes!!!” which explains that the Sumatran earthquake and subsequent tsunamis were sent by God as punishment … to Sweden.

Sweden, you see, has laws prohibiting incitement of hatred of and violence against people on the grounds of, among other things, sexual preference. Unlike many countries, however, you don’t get exempted from this law just because you wear a funny collar and deliver your incitement from a church pulpit. Earlier this year Swedish tubthumper Ake Green found this out the hard way when he delivered a sermon in which he allegedly described homosexuality as “abnormal, a horrible cancerous tumor in the body of society,” and homosexual people as “perverts, whose sexual drive the Devil has used as his strongest weapon against God.”

So God (reasons Fred Phelps in this presser) decided to punish the wicked Swedes by raining down destruction on Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. Why South-East Asia, Fred? Why would He not direct His wrath with a bit more precision? Maybe take out one of Stockholm’s many fine homo bars and discos?

I know He works in mysterious ways and all, but frankly I think His aim would be a bit better.

(The press release is available on the god-hates-huckabees website. I won’t be linking to them lest they picket my funeral.)

So we have reached, once again, the arbitrary point in the Earth’s circuit around the sun which marks the end of one year and the beginning of another.

It wasn’t the easiest year on record – on reflection, we had an awful lot riding on 2004 – but it has been a good year. Below the fold, the year in pictures: one photograph from each month from January to December, and a few words of explanation. (more…)

Susan Sontag is dead.

On hearing this news, I went to my bookcase and found my copy of AIDS and Its Metaphors, which I read in the early 1990s. I was travelling in Europe at the time (the price tag on the back of the book says “78000”: I think I bought it in Czechoslovakia, or perhaps Poland).

Sontag’s essay had a significant impact on me in those days; I guess it still informs my thinking (and, now, writing) about AIDS and the way it is conceptualised. There are too few good books about AIDS: this is one of them.

Not all metaphors applied to illness and their treatment are equally unsavory and distorting. The one I am most eager to see retired – more than ever since the emergence of AIDS – is the military metaphor. Its converse, the medical model of the public weal, is probably more dangerous and far-reaching in its consequences, since it not only provides a persuasive justification for authoritarian rule but implicitly suggests the necessity of state-sponsored repression and violence (the equivalent of surgical removal or chemical control of the offending or “unhealthy” parts of the body politic). But the effect of the military imagery on thinking about sickness and health is far from inconsequential. It overmobilizes, it overdescribes, and it powerfully contributes to the excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill.

No, it is not desirable for medicine, any more that for war, to be “total.” Neither is the crisis created by AIDS a “total” anything. We are not being invaded. The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy. We – medicine, society – are not authorized to fight back by any means whatever. . . . About that metaphor, the military one, I would say, if I may paraphrase Lucretius: Give it back to the war-makers.

I remember reading these words, somewhere in Eastern Europe at the height of our own cold war. They helped me understand what was going on around me on so many levels.

Like most brilliant people, not everything that Sontag said and wrote has stood the test of time (I’m thinking of her admiration of Leni Reifenstahl and her intemperate comments about the 9/11 attacks) but there is always some truth to be found, and stimulus for thought. We need more of that.

• Update, 5 PM: Bentkid’s “respectful, loving note on Susan Sontag” is beautiful, moving, and unmissable. Go there now.

It’s been 2½ days since the earthquake, and picture just gets worse and worse. We had some friends over for dinner on the 27th and they commented on the fact that, when they went to bed the night before, the news media were still talking about a few hundred dead – how could they have got it so wrong?

The way information travels in situations like this is highly organic. In a disaster of these proportions, the outermost, least-affected areas are the first to report, so initially the picture looks a lot less worrying. A large earthquake, some big waves, a few hundred dead. Communications to the worst-hit areas are cut off, so the full scale of what has happened is impossible to discern at first. Details emerge from the outside in. So the death toll mounts – it was 200 on the 26th, 4000 on the 27th, 15,000 on the 28th and stands at about 30,000 this morning.

With this event, many of the affected areas have very poor communications infrastructure to begin with, and in the worst-hit areas, everything – phone lines, power supplies, roads, bridges – is gone. So the death toll will mount for some time to come. The news media are further hampered by the fact that two of the worst-affected areas, Sri Lanka and Aceh, are civil war zones, with nervous governments tightly restricting any media access at the best of times.

Only this morning have the news media moved on from talking about reported deaths to speculation about how high the toll will finally go. “Tsunami toll predicted to pass 50,000,” says the Age this morning, but even that seems conservative, only a few hours after that paper rolled off the presses. The ABC is already reporting that “Tens of thousands more bodies have been found in the sea and wreckage of coastal towns around the Indian Ocean, pushing the death toll from Sunday’s tsunami close to 60,000.”

It just gets worse.

Moments ago:

Hello I’m Sandy Roberts with a Seven News Update. The government has warned that the death toll from the Asian tsunamis could rise substantially higher than the seven Australians confirmed dead so far…

I guess the 26,993+ other corpses don’t count.

I’ve added a little dinky linky at the bottom of each entry on buggery.org which allows you to quickly post that entry to del.icio.us, if that’s your bag. I think it works. If you’re a del.icio.us user, you might like to do me favour by trying it out and letting me know if there’s any problems. I’d appreciate that.

Rescuers carry a body of a fisherwoman killed after a tsunami hit the area in the southern Indian city of Chennai on December 26. (Reuters photo)

Terrible, awful things happening on our doorstep yesterday – but for once this is the work of nature, not man. The earthquake and subsequent tsunamis have wrought terrible destruction in our region and I dread the humanitarian crisis which will undoubtedly follow.

The first I heard of this was on the SBS World News yesterday evening, and it seemed clear then that it would get much worse. It has, and it will further. The death toll – currently 11,500 – will undoubtedly rise. Millions of people are homeless across South East Asia, in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Burma and the Maldives. The waves reached as far as the East coast of Africa. Amazing.

Christmas is over for another year.

We had an easy, pleasant day, great food and just enough company. Brent slow-cooked an amazing stuffed pork loin on the new barbecue, which we had in the early evening. Grilled prawns with onion and fennel, cabbage and tomato salads, siena cake and pot brownies to finish. Pimm’s with dry ginger ale, fresh fruit and cucumber slices … watermelon and berry punch … King Island brie, English stilton, Caerphilly … a tray of fresh mangoes, slices of watermelon. Brent’s herb damper (cooked on the barbie in the Furphy oven, which you can see in the post below) which became bruschetta later in the day. Christmas is about food. Lots of it.

Spoke to Mum on the phone from Wollongong and to the Canadian family in Edmonton, where it was still Christmas eve. Christmas is about family.

In the lead-up to the fête, I put together an iTunes playlist of Christmas music including such classics as the David Bowie/Bing Crosby “Little Drummer Boy”, Otis Redding’s “White Christmas”, the Aussie classic “Six White Boomers” and Pansy Division’s Queercore masterpiece “Homo Christmas” … an eclectic mix. Christmas is about music which, thankfully, we don’t have to hear all year round.

Took some time out during the hot part of the day to turn the music down and enjoy the quiet and sunshine before the guests arrived. Brent and Ryan napped while I sat in the garden and read, listening to the pork sizzling on the grill. Christmas is a time for peace.

On Christmas Eve especially, and again during the day, I paused often to remember my friends in Sydney, outside Australia and especially those who’ve gone from this world. Christmas is about absent friends.

Now it’s Boxing Day … blissfully quiet in the house, sunny and warm outside, but not too hot. Brent’s listening to his new iPod and reading some trashy novel, Pepe has taken a bag of leftovers and gone to visit a mate, Amanda Vanstone is using Christmas as a cover for expelling asylum seekers, and I’m off for a nap.

Peace on Earth.

Guess who got a new barbecue for Christmas?

“It’s turning nasty out there,” reported Brent when he returned from a pre-Christmas sortie to the market this morning. Details are sketchy, but apparently two women were on the verge of coming to blows over a parking space, and tempers are getting short out there in Christmasland.

It’s over 30 degrees C here in Melbourne today, and with just two days before the annual orgy of consumption, it’s probably not surprising that Brent found himself on the receiving end of some un-Christian language today.

So if you’re heading out to do some last-minute shopping, consider yourself warned. Or, better yet, do your shopping from the comfort of your own home over the internet.

Christian charity World Vision have this little darling on special, and at only about a hundred (Aussie) bucks he’s a steal. You don’t actually get the pig – he goes to a starving family in Honduras – so it’s a thoughtful gift. If you don’t want a pig, you can also get blankets, bicycles, emergency medical equipment or HIV/AIDS education programs at the website www.greatgifts.org. Included in the price is a gift card and certificate to give to your loved one, who will no doubt be relieved you didn’t get a real pig.

Howard, la poubelle de l’histoire t’attend (with apologies to the situationists)

As of today, John Howard is Australia’s second-longest serving Prime Minister, having subjected me and my fellow countrymen to eight years, nine months and eleven days of his unique brand of leadership.

Is it just me, or does it seem much longer?

Certainly, it’s been a lively few years, and Howard has certainly his mark on Australia, of that there can be no argument. But is his legacy an ornament to this country, or a stain?

There won’t be any prizes for guessing which way I’m leaning on this, but I am beginning to marvel at the depth of social change that Howard has achieved. I’m not a fan of “great man” analyses of history, but it’s impossible to ignore the reality that, after nearly nine years with Howard pulling the levers, Australia is a deeply changed nation. Much more socially conservative, much more hostile to difference, deeply troubled by causes and forces it barely understands, belligerent, distrustful, materialistic and – perhaps worst of all – prepared to wear all those labels and perhaps more in return for promises of economic wealth, authority and the friendship of the United States.

In a nutshell, not the country I grew up in at all.

I wonder where it will end. Plainly Howard has no intention of retiring soon. He’s well past his ‘non-core’ promise to quit on his 64th birthday, and the future looks incredibly rosy for a man who apparently delights in social engineering on a grand scale – while at the same time publicly expressing disdain for such pursuits. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to suspect that he won’t still be PM at the next election in 2006, and beyond that, who knows.

Has he got Menzies’ record in his sights? I wouldn’t put it past him, and between here and there there’s a lot of time, and I dread to think how much further down this path my country can be dragged.

At the mall yesterday, I was waiting while Brent purchased an enormous barramundi for our dinner, standing in the food court, watching. Six days to Christmas, and of course the place was crowded with shoppers at varying levels of pre-Christmas hysteria. Everyone, it seems, was carrying at least one plastic shopping bag from each of the centre’s thousand stores. We were there just to buy a fish.

Through the crowd I saw him coming towards me, growing larger in my field of vision as he approached, then disappearing behind me. He was staring straight ahead, not looking at me, with a face that said nothing about what he was thinking. Blank. Middle aged, a bit overweight, dark hair, thinning – perhaps a combover. I didn’t see him for long.

And wearing a uniform. At first I took him for a scout leader – the uniform consisted of matching mustard-brown shirt and short pants, with epaulettes and shoulder flashes, both parts crumpled and worn. In the instant that he moved past me, I recognised the badge on the left breast of that shirt. Eagle. Swastika. Nazi.

My first brownshirt.

Summer is in full swing now. The evidence to support this assertion is incontrovertible:

1. Flies. This is Australia, and if it’s summer there must be flies. In the last couple of weeks I’ve moved on from being distressed and annoyed by their annual appearance to a more complacent acceptance of their right to coexist. I have purchased a spring-powered “Fly Gun” which is giving me hours of demented, but environmentally friendly, enjoyment.

2. Sharks. It’s looking like a bumper year for the sharks, with two people dead already this summer, and today we have the predictable bloodlust that always accompanies these tragedies. The South Australian government has ordered that the shark which killed an 18-year-old surfer yesterday is to be hunted down and killed, despite the fact that great white sharks are a protected species. I can understand the urge for revenge that triggers this, but what is to be gained from killing a shark (or a crocodile – another common target of revenge killings)? There is no word yet on whether the shark’s accomplice will also be summarily executed.

3. Crap TV. Hardly an endangered species during the ratings period, but much in abundance in the warmer months. Australian TV stations use this time of year, when no TV ratings are published, to serve up the most appalling tosh. The argument is that people are less inclined to sit in front of the boob tube in the summer, but by switching their programming to “All crap, All the time” they ensure it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. Last night saw the premiere of “Outback Jack”, an American “reality” series of the worst order. I didn’t watch, but the blogwaves are abuzz with less-than-flattering commentary today. The name of the show has given me cause to titter, as several friends and I have taken to substituting the word “outback” for “bareback” whenever the opportunity presents.

4. Cricket. What would summer be without the sound of leather on willow? Less dreary, that’s what. Grown men in long pants standing around in the scorching summer heat hitting a ball with a stick. Sounds a lot like golf, but it goes for five full days days on the trot, and often ends with neither side winning. Which makes it even stupider than golf.

5. The Gleebooks Summer Reading Guide. Oh bliss. If only I had time to read the books, not just the guide. But what with chasing flies from room to room with my flygun and watching mindless crap on TV, who has the time?

6. Bushfires. The state is a tinderbox, of course. It always is. So far this summer, not too many fires. Seriously, I hope it stays that way. Fire is an integral part of the ecosystem in this country, and we’ve grown better at living with it, but no-one in their right mind looks forward to the bushfire season.

7. Sandon. I wish we were going to Sandon this Christmas, like I did in 2003-4, 2001-2 and several summers before that. But we’re not. Makes me sad, makes me want to get out of town to somewhere quiet and simple. Sigh.

Most of my interaction with this blog lately has been deleting the 200+ spam comments that I’m now getting daily. I coped for a while but I’m now royally over it. So, for the foreseeable future, comments are turned off unless you have a Typekey ID, in which case they are still operational.

I’m less than pleased to have to do this – comments add a really valuable level of interactivity to the blogging experience – but I’ve despaired so much at the quantity (and asinine quality) of the daily round of“Texas Hold ‘Em” and “Online Pharmacy” crap that it’s been putting me off posting altogether, and that does nobody any good.

If you don’t already have a Typekey ID, please go and get one, and keep those comments coming in. As a bonus, if you have a Typekey ID your comments will appear on the site immediately, instead of having to wait for me to dig up the energy to sift them from the dross and OK them.

In Canada, the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government has the power to legalise gay marriage. Canadian PM says his government will bring in national equal marriage legislation next year. Screw you, Ralph Klein.

“Canada is a pluralistic society,” the court said. “Our constitution is a living tree which, by way of progressive interpretation, accommodates and addresses the realities of modern life.” (from the Guardian’s coverage)

Meanwhile the New Zealand Parliament has passed the Civil Unions Bill, giving KiwiQueers equal rights to their straight cousins.

A frabjous day in the dominions.

Jonathan Green, in The Age, on plans to take footballer Sam Newman to the discrimination police over his not-funny Today show turn:

“I’ve lodged a complaint with the Anti-Discrimination Board in NSW,” he told Neil Mitchell. “If Mr Newman is convicted and found guilty … he could spend six months in the clacker.” We think he meant “clink”, but clink or clacker, jail would certainly widen Newman’s circle…

Brings tears to my eyes. (Non-Australian readers might wonder what a “clacker” is. Hint: you’re sitting on yours. Widen his circle, geddit?)

Dannii Minogue has saved us all from AIDS by taking her kit off and getting jiggy with a red ribbon. Bless.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt much connection with the red ribbon, the “international symbol of AIDS awareness”.

I’m not against them (although several people I know are – vehemently so) but it’s been several years since I last sported one. I don’t see what four inches of polyester ribbon has to do with HIV (unless it’s meant to symbolise the red tape that prevents dying people accessing life-saving medicines). It also bothers me that we need a “symbol of AIDS awareness” when tens of millions of corpses are already mouldering in their graves, and tens of millions more are set to join them. I mean, how much bloody awareness do you need? (more…)