Photographing Lord Malcolm

Lord M wanted some pictures of him with Sirdan and myself, so Sirdan brought his camera and after lunch we went to the hospice. Lord M is pretty much the bionic man these days and can’t get out of bed much, but two nurses helped us wheel his bed to a spot with a nice background view and we took two sets of pics, one lot on Sirdan’s camera and the other lot for Lord M to look at on his mobile phone, along with some he took a couple of weeks back at the Chinese Garden.

Good blogging advice

Easy Writer by Kanani Fong is well worth visiting. Kanani Fong came my way through On welfare issues with Korean-Australian students over on English and ESL blog, my main contribution to the Virginia Tech discussion. She had written about some of the mental health issues involved. I quoted her and she responded.

Her latest post is A Bit On Blogging . Here are the top two “bits” minus the references. Do look at the whole post.

Language education in Australia

In Europe “Compulsory lessons in a foreign language normally start at the end of primary school or the start of secondary school… English is the language taught most often at lower secondary level in the EU. 93% of children there learn English. At upper secondary level, English is even more widely taught. French is taught at lower secondary level in all EU countries except Slovenia. A total of 33% of European Union pupils learn French at this level. At upper secondary level the figure drops slightly to 28%. German is taught in nearly all EU countries. A total of 13% of pupils in the European Union learn German in lower secondary education, and 20% learn it at an upper secondary level.” In China the study of foreign languages in schools, especially English, has been growing apace. It is estimated that 33% of Beijing residents will have reasonable English skills by the time the Olympics come around in 2008. See also Is English invading Chinese culture? (People’s Daily November 02, 2003.)

Big announcement on Riverbend’s blog

Riverbend has posted after another long hiatus: The Great Wall of Segregation…. This is a very moving entry. I won’t steal her thunder, except to reveal this bit:

…I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

On a personal note, we’ve finally decided to leave. I guess I’ve known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea- leaving ones home and extended family- leaving ones country- and to what? To where?…

So sad on so many levels, isn’t it?

Late Anzac Day thoughts

I didn’t do a special post on Anzac Day, letting last year’s serve, and a few people did Google to it I notice. However, two good programs on ABC-TV last night have inspired some reflections, not so much on the day and its significance — important and solemn rather than sacred as far as I am concerned; I can’t help thinking the word “sacred” in this context really isn’t quite appropriate.

The first program was decently low key, I felt: Andrew Denton’s Gallipoli: Brothers In Arms.

Why are more Australians drawn to the shores of Gallipoli each year? The Dawn Service at Anzac Cove, once a modest gathering of souls, has become an event on a scale that rivals the original invasion. The gentle, grassy slopes of this Turkish landmark are thronged with the relatives of those who fought and died, veterans of other conflicts, the merely curious, and a generation of backpackers paying their respects as they circle the globe.

In 2006, Andrew Denton went to meet some of these pilgrims, to listen to their stories, to ask why they had made the journey and what they were learning from it.

Focusing on the war-time experiences of three pairs of brothers, as told by the families who remember them, Andrew returned with a portrait of a special place, which then as now, is crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our nation…

As the program pointed out, even greater horrors awaited on the Western Front. (Transcript now available.)

Movie The Dish

The Dish (2001) is set in the NSW country town of Parkes in 1969. It is well to keep in mind that it is essentially a comedy, but it does reflect a degree of truth about the role the Parkes Radio Telescope played in the moon walk of Neil Armstrong in July 1969. Just what is fact and what is not is made clear by the CSIRO at “The Dish”: Fact versus Fiction — a quick comparison.

It brought memories flooding back. First, I visited Parkes a couple of times in the mid to late 1960s. This YouTube replicates that, even if over thirty years later.

Second, I hadn’t realised the moon walk was the day after my mother’s 58th birthday, but I vividly recall watching it at Cronulla High School, which ground to a total halt that day while the whole school gathered around various television sets to see an event that really captured our imaginations. That was my last year at Cronulla as a teacher; it was my first appointment. The movie captures all that brilliantly, except I would quibble that the Channel 9 News they run a clip of at one point is the Melbourne version whereas in Parkes it would have been the Sydney version relayed through some local commercial TV station.

Loved the movie though. Do watch it if you get a chance. Here is a good review.

This is of course bizarre…

…but what would you expect? Westboro Baptist Church is much loved by atheists and anti-clerical types generally (almost as much as the risible Aussie expat Ken Ham is) and deserves everything it gets, though it hardly deserves to be taken seriously. It is to mainstream Christianity pretty much what Osama bin Laden is to mainstream Islam, but fortunately less effective. It certainly gives religion a bad name.

For your reference files: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic

Found: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic on 3 Quarks Daily April 22, 2007.

Who on earth is James Dobson?

On The Religion Report on Radio National at the moment is an interview with Dan Gilgoff (not Gilgoth as the ABC has it!), author of a new book called The Jesus Machine. A transcript will go up on The Religion Report tomorrow.

My first interview with James Dobson was pretty much a fluke.

It was just after Election Day 2004, and the entire Washington press corps was scrambling to report the story of how white evangelicals had handed President George W. Bush a second term. My editor at U.S. News & World Report called me into his office on the morning after the election with an assignment to write about these newly branded “values voters.” I had forty-eight hours.

Alasdair Duncan, Metro (2006)

It would be really interesting to read what people closer in age or milieu think of this book. Alasdair Duncan is “a writer, journalist, charming drunk and freelance practitioner of dark humour, based in Brisbane on the East Coast of Australia… He survives by the good grace of cold beer, decent conversation and romantic, moonlit bouts of intense neurosis and self-doubt, and writes a weekly column for Rave, Brisbane’s most popular music magazine.” (I even joined MySpace so I could explore that profile! Don’t expect my profile there to amount to much, but I may go back and add a little to it — links and such.) He is the same age as Mister Rabbit, not to mention Ian Thorpe, but I suspect The Rabbit might not like the book.

At some levels I did like the book. First, there were some pretty hot sex scenes… However, it tended to confirm all my worst suspicions/observations about the young clubby gay scene, even if I suspect it was meant to. I will now steal a summary from Daniel Smith on GAYinWA:

One of our stories well told: Radiance (1998). Stephen Page on Talking Heads

Louis Nowra adapted his stage play Radiance for film in a collaborative process well discussed in the DVD extras. (Nowra has received a bit of publicity recently for his small book Bad Dreaming which I included in my best reads of 2007: see Worth more than 200,000 blogs?) The movie is consequently a bit stagey, as Mirella Roche-Parker says in her review, but as she also says:

The performances of Morton-Thomas, Maza and Mailman are nothing short of superb. They represent a trinity of aboriginal actors of a quality without peer. They infuse their performances with integrity, honesty and a dimensional reality that take complete ownership of the stories they are portraying. The tensions, resentments, agonies and fleeting moments of warmth between the three women are palpably real throughout.

The film is a watershed for Australian cinematic portrayal of aboriginal women. This is not a self-conscious or socially political film. It is a film about three women who happen to be aboriginal. Surely this approach has been a long time coming, and it is a refreshing innovation.

Radiance is an exploratory work: What makes relationships? What binds us into a family? What do we have to leave behind in order to move forward? Whilst frequently delving into the painful world of abuse and guilty secrets, it travels with a wit and warmth that allows it to avoid an overly moribund approach. It is a low key presentation that may well resonate with you for some time.

The misguided and the misled…

Hard choices imply trade-offs. When these are ignored, when ideology takes over, that’s when costly mistakes are made. It’s when unintended consequences multiply. Why do I dwell on this? Because my political opponent pretends to have discovered a different brand of politics ™ – a politics without hard choices ™, without trade-offs and without unintended consequences. A politics of gestures and good intentions ™ and little else.

Mr Rudd argues that in this world Australians face one overriding moral challenge – climate change. I’ll talk more about this challenge in a moment, but let me say where I stand on priorities, on decision-making and on the moral challenge of our time.

God is Jewish and has a moustache

That’s one conclusion arrived at in this amusing profile of Robert Winston whose Story of God Part 3 I also watched on ABC last night. The elaborate mathematical formula for calculating the likelihood of God was only slightly less mad than Ken Ham.

Nonetheless I enjoyed Story of God, partly on the grounds that Winston’s idea of uncertainty is pretty much my own as well, as my Faith and Philosophy links (see the new links page tabbed above) would tend to show, not to mention the totally coincidental post I put up yesterday morning.

Here’s another vaguely related YouTube.

Visit #60,000… and Curtin tonight

Visitor #50,000 to this blog arrived on 15 March 2007, and at this moment WordPress tells me visitor #59,994 is reading. It isn’t me, by the way, because WordPress does not count my visits (unlike Sitemeter). Hmmm. How long will it take for another six to arrive?

*** TOILET BREAK ***

Did you watch Curtin tonight on ABC-TV (Australia)?

In a new ABC period drama heavy with pipes, spectacles and fob chains, William McInnes plays Prime Minister John Curtin. “Someone asked how it’s going,” McInnes says during filming. “I said, ‘Oh, all right.’ To which they said, ‘He’s the one that drowned, isn’t he?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he’s the one that drowned. He got hit by a submarine crossing the street.”‘

In fact, Curtin was the one who saw Australia through World War II. The family man from Perth, the rousing orator who battled alcoholism, ill health and self-doubt to face up to both Winston Churchill and the threat of a Japanese invasion…

Reading the Bible

To quote the appropriate page for today from Deng Ming-Dao’s 365 Tao: Daily Meditations:

Don’t be afraid to explore;
Without exploration there are no discoveries,
Don’t be afraid of partial solutions;
Without the tentative there is no
accomplishment.

I am still in the habit of following the Daily Office Lectionary from the US version of The Book of Common Prayer, an eccentricity I mentioned on Blogspot Books and Ideas in January 2006.

Urgency of drought in SE Australia

Lateline last night had segments about the issues the following maps from the Bureau of Meteorology represent. Click pics to see full size.