Did you watch Four Corners last night? It was on childhood obesity and made much use of the Health Minister who was his usual charming self.
About halfway through the program I found myself thinking something’s not right about his face. He frowns, he winces, he expresses the full range of politicians’ emotions, but that huge expanse of forehead never budges. Has Tony Abbott had Botox?
Sydney’s iconic Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is in financial difficulties again. Apparently only 6500 people went to last weekend’s Sleaze Ball, less than the 10,000 the organisers were hoping for. New Mardi Gras is confident that Sleaze Ball will make a “small profit” (the ticket sales must have been close to a million bucks, God knows what they spend it on) but the main event is apparently threatened.
I was one of those who argued last time that we should let the old girl die gracefully, so I won’t say much (and I certainly won’t wish her dead just now) but I have to question the business model. The whole purpose of Mardi Gras is to put on a street parade. This requires planning, logistics and money. To raise money, NMG puts on two mega-parties a year — just the sort of parties most queers of my acquaintance used to love and now avoid. It’s a model that worked in the 1980s, failed spectacularly in the 1990s, and now is being totally relied upon again in the 2000s. There must be other ways of stumping up the cash than a total, year-on-year reliance on ten thousand people paying $140 apiece to spend the night in a drug-and-drag-addled rave which is twenty years past its use-by date.
Mardi Gras used to pride itself on being a hotbed of art, culture and experimentation. Things started going downhill when it became a business. And shoehorning the word “community” in front of “business” hasn’t made any difference.
If Mardi Gras wants to survive (and I want it to survive, dammit) it needs to get small again. Bring back the artists, the performers, those who can channel the spirits of Peter Tully and David McDiardmid and Brenton Heath-Kerr (they’re out there; just go to Bad Dog) and kick the suits out of the place.
Even I might even come back then.
Is it just me, or do natural disasters seem to be occurring rather more often these days?
I don’t want to read more into this than is scientifically justifiable (last year’s tsunami and this week’s Kashmiri earthquake seem to be true “acts of God” which are random and unattributable to human forces) but I worry about the increasing signs that our species’ habits are making our planet a more chaotic and dangerous place to be.
The current season of hurricanes and storms which have struck central and north America, and the ongoing, terrible African famine are foremost in my mind.
These dreadful, terrible occurrences seem strongly linked to climate change. Yet we’re still going about our business as if it doesn’t matter how much oil we burn, how many forests we destroy, how profoundly we alter the delicate balance of the planet — the “consequences” of climate change, after all, are something that will happen in the future, right?
Isn’t it just possible we’re seeing them now?
(On “acts of God”: there is, of course a link between human activity and the devastation these events create. Overpopulation — something we seem to have given up trying to deal with — increases the impact of even the most random natural disasters. The Kashmiri earthquake would not have killed nearly so many people had it occurred 100, 50 or even 20 years ago.)
Meanwhile: Bird flu has spread to Europe. Just in time for the northern flu season.
Two Australian scientists have won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium which causes most gastric ulcers.
H. pylori is one of the plushy giant microbes I have in my office, and with his long yellow hair he’s always been a favourite. Today he’s in pride of place by my monitor.
Awww…
The research methods used by the pair included experimenting on themselves, something there’s tragically too little of among today’s research scientists:
Lord May of Oxford, president of Britain’s Royal Society of leading scientists, said Dr Marshall’s “extraordinary act” of becoming his own guinea pig showed outstanding dedication.
With some scientists calling their findings “preposterous”, Dr Marshall drank a broth of bacteria to show that the presence of H pylori in people with ulcers was no coincidence.
“I planned to give myself an ulcer, then treat myself, to prove that H pylori can be a pathogen in normal people,” he told a scientific review.
“I thought about it for a few weeks, then decided to just do it. Luckily, I only developed a temporary infection.”
Suffering stomach pain, nausea and vomiting, he underwent an endoscopy which showed the distinctive spiral-shaped E pylori crowding around the inflammation in his stomach. His wife urged him to think of his children and get treatment – which he did.
War, famine, pestilence … I’m finding it hard to keep my chin up and keep from getting depressed by the less-than-wonderful world I find myself living in. Wasn’t the 21st century supposed to be all hovercars and robot maids?
Seriously, between the bird flu pandemic, terrorism, official terrorism, hurricanes, global warming, mayhem, social collapse, AIDS, famine, poverty and christ-knows-what-else, sometimes it feels like there’s little hope at all. That’s where I am right now.
I feel like I’m living through a terrible, endless, barely-defined war. Every day I think of George Orwell. Every fucking day.
I was watching The Sound of Music on TV last night when the news flash crawled across the bottom of my screen. Several bombs have been detonated in tourist areas of Bali; this morning there are 24 confirmed dead, many dozens injured. The toll is likely to be dominated with Australians, just like the first Bali bombings three years ago.
It’s just heart-rending to think of the suffering this will cause. To the victims, to the people of Bali, to those of us at home for whom this will be used to justify god-knows-what new government powers in the name of beating terrorists.
As you’d expect, the Indonesian terror group Jemaah Islamiah has been blamed. Makes Gareth Evans look a bit of a dill.
Much is being made of the apparent adoption by American Christian conservatives of a nature documentary they reckon provides “proof” of the syllogistic “intelligent design” theory.
By all accounts the movie, March of the Penguins, is set to become a box-office smash on the back of the Christian chatter it’s generated.
Towleroad got onto this a week or so ago, quickly pointing out some of the more obvious flaws in the theologists’ thinking:
Why don’t we also include Roy and Silo in that discussion? They’re the gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo who so yearned to bring up a youngster that they took care of a stone for several weeks hoping for it to hatch. Now I’m not sure that’s an argument for “intelligent” design, but it certainly proves that in the penguin world they’re not all marching towards heterosexuality.
In today’s Australian, columnist Emma Tom picks up the argument and expands on it:
[Using] animal habits as allegories for human values is risky. Sure it can work when applied selectively, but the big picture is not so neat. Take emperor penguins, for instance. Couples are monogamous during the breeding season, but only one in 20 penguin pairs are still together after two years.
The rest engage in a partner swapping spree that makes the key party scene in The Ice Storm look like a Hillsong singalong.
Tom picks up the Roy and Silo ball too, and runs with it:
It’d be fascinating to hear how churchfolk reconcile this type of natural homo romping with their intelligent design theory. After all, if the big G intelligently designed female monkeys to play games of erotic peek-a-boo, who’s to say he wasn’t planning something similar for humans when he dreamed up the ingredients for Mardi Gras?
In the Philadelphia Enquirer, Faye Flam (her real name, I guess) followed her journalistic training and went to the experts for comment. It turns out that not only is the God Squad reading rather too much into the film, the filmmakers, a French team spending the National Geographic dime, have exaggerated, misrepresented and editorialised their “documentary” into difficult territory:
Kooyman said these cold-adapted penguins probably aren’t suffering, despite what viewers are told. From beginning to end the scriptwriters project human feelings onto the penguins. It’s not exactly scientific, but then the film probably couldn’t have achieved its blockbuster status without going light on the science and heavy on the melodrama.
Flam also reveals some disturbing news about Roy and Silo. It seems that Silo, after a six-year walk on the wild side, has gone back into the closet and now “has a girlfriend”. Poor Roy.
It’s been a hectic weekend. Following on from the excitement of Friday night’s football outing, I jumped on a plane on Saturday to get to my lil’ sister’s (and her partner’s) 40th birthday in Wollongong. Marg is the closest in age to me of my six siblings and the only girl in the family (please no jokes) so she’s special to me and to all of us. She also knows how to host a wing-ding of a party so I had no hesitation in making the journey to the ‘Gong for the do.
I even managed to convince our brother Bill, who lives in Brisbane, to make a last-minute flight booking and get his arse to the party. Sometimes a little gentle prodding goes a long way.
The party was semi-optionally fancy dress — you were supposed to wear something you’d have worn to your high school formal. I don’t even recall my high school formal, so it must have been a glittering affair, but I dare say it was anything but formal. I was a dag then and I’m a dag now, so it wasn’t a fancy dress theme I could do much with. My 79-year-old mother, on the other hand, came in the same nurse’s uniform she wore at her graduation in the late 1940s. God bless her:
Sunday, nursing a very sore head, I headed home to Melbourne and the news that my friend Sean had succeeded in obtaining Grand Final tickets for the two of us. Woohoo!
Monday, we went to the Royal Melbourne Show to see the cows, horses, chickens, cockies, men-in-jodhpurs, screaming kids and sheep:
More photos from that expedition on Flickr.