Burma Cyclone - Some Advice

Everyone is criticising the Burma regime over the delay at getting aid and assistance sorted after the devestation and massive death toll, but who CAN work things out quickly and effectively in such overwhelming circumstances?

However, one thing to be sure of: don't ask the Americans to help - look at the way FEMA and the Fed Govt they stuffed around after Hurricane Katrina.

(From an ABC Radio [Australia] talkback.)

E@L

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2 "Meme"s

My blogging has sunk to these depths...

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From Savmarshmama:

Put your iPod (or iRiver) on shuffle (unless it is an early version iPod, one that doesn't have shuffle) and press next for each question. Write down the song that's playing as an answer.


1) How would you describe yourself?
Are You In? - Incubus. (No laughter please, no woman has ever said this to me!)

2) What do you like in a guy/girl?
Evil vs Good - Clem Snide (muhahahha)

3) What is your motto?
Please Forgive Me - David Gray (What for, I'm innocent!)

4) What do your friends think of you?
Learn To Fly - Foo Fighters (Learn to shut up more likely)

5) What do you think about often?
You Don’t Know What Love Is - John Martyn (Not a clue)

6) What do your parents think of you?
Mannish Boy - Muddy Waters (Mum thinks I'm camp?)

7) What do you think of your best friend?
Solitude Standing - Suzanne Vega

8) What do you think of the person you like?
Sink The Pink! - AC-DC (Subtle!)

9) What do you want to be when you grow up?
Traffic In The Sky - Jack Johnson

10) What do you think when you see the person you like?
I Need - Jay Quinn Band

11) What song will they play at your wedding?
Poison Girl - Chris Whitley (Poisonous Bitch is what they should have played, ha ha)

12) What will they play at your funeral?
You Ain't Got A Hold On Me - AC-DC

13) What is your hobby/interest?
Slippery People - Talking Heads (no, ultrasound scanning, that's my CAREER!)

14) What is your biggest fear?
Limited Excess - Acoustic Alchemy

15) What is your biggest secret?
Hillbilly Highway - Steve Earle

16) What do you think of your friends?
You Could Be Happy - Snow Patrol

17) What is your theme song?
Marjorine - Joe Cocker ("I want you back, but you will not get in the sack, oh-o")

18) What do you think of your family?
Leech - Incubus (the iPod never lies!)

19) What is your best friend's theme song?
Megalomaniac - Incubus (not saying who my best friend is!)

20) What is your mood right now?
Just Like a Woman - Bob Dylan (just wearing these silk knickers for comfort, as we discussed Marge)

21) If your heart could talk what would it say?
Vampyres! - Chris Bailey (and it should know)

22) What do your co-workers think of you?
Jesus Or A Gun - Fuel (postal co-workers?)

23) What does your future look like?
I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow - Soggy Bottom Boys (Oh dear...)

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From In 2nd Person:

WHAT ARE YOU READING?

The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

Not the book I am currently reading, but Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. I have started it though, and am up to p86 according to the folded Border's receipt (not for this book) that I have obviously used for a bookmark.

2. Open to page 123.

("Lying no more..." say the first three words.)

3. Find the fifth sentence.

("Happening to that sort of family.") Part of a character's speech so we'll forgive the dangling participle.

4. Post the next three sentences.

"A black sheep, if you'll pardon the expression."
"I certainly will."
Shortly after eleven o'clock, the two policeman presented themselves at 54 Newhall St.

5. Tag five people

You, you, you there, you in the back, and... ... OK, you.


Didn't really get much out of this last one.

E@L

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The E@L And The Ant

The captain opened the mouth of the sack; it looked as if it contained garden loam or chemical manure, but he put his arm in and brought out a handful of what seemed to be coffee grounds and let this trickle into his other hand; they were dead ants, a soft red-black sand of dead ants all rolled up in tight little balls, reduced to spots in which one could no longer distinguish the head from the legs. They gave out a pungent acid smell. In the house there were hundred-weights, pyramids of sacks like this one, all full.

... in every garden, in every house I sensed a stream of ants climbing the walls, covering the fruit trees, wriggling their antennae towards anything sweet or greasy; and my newly trained eyes now noticed at once mattresses put outside to beat because the ants had got into them, a spray of insecticide in an old woman's hand, a saucerful of poison, and then, straining my eyes, the rows of ants marching imperturbably around the door frames.
Italo Calvino, 'The Argentine Ant', 1952.

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Ever get the feeling you're living in some modern fable-teller's macabre masterpiece?

I have three types of ant in my place. Combined, they make up about 45% of the biomass of the apartment, unless I bring a guest home from the 4FoWs. OK, 45% may be an exaggeration, but it also may be an understatement…



Who knows? Maybe Edward O Wilson?

Ellen DeGeneres (I was channel surfing and dropped the remote - OK, OK, I threw it at the TV) did a riff on ants the other day which pretty much prefigures what I was going to say today. One thing in particular: In the kitchen, you only ever see one ant but when you squash it, then there's another ant right there in front of you, and so you squash it too, and then there's *another* one right there… Must be something to do with the configuration of the optic chiasm. Or maybe it's the SAME ANT come back to life! Ever think of that Ellen, in your cozy lesbo lifestyle which we shouldn’t be showing on Singapore TV because it's against everything the heartland stands for - small-mindedness, homophobia and the "erosion of values and breakdown of the traditional family unit". [Or did I get that wrong? E@L]

Three types of ant, as I was saying. A large one that pretty much sleeps, eats or copulates wherever it pleases. Or hang-on, was that my ex-flatmate? Tiny little ones which die if you say boo! to them. And a middle size one that is for all intents and purposes eternal and can survive several finger-point squishings - they just unfurl again and take off, a little worse for wear but still haphazardly gyrating along on the pheromonic pathway of their life's annoying journey.

You think I am joking? YouTube, front and centre please!



And what complicated pheromonic pathways they lead. Calvino's line is dead right about their imperturbable march.

I took an Amaretto digestiv the other night, along with the dregs of a tub of Rum and Raison ice-cream, kicked my sandals off and watched a bit of late-night telly . No, not Ellen. As the evening drew towards morning, I stumbled to bed and left the dirty stuff on the table by my chair a la my usual bachelor routine.

When I arose next morning to clean up the place in case the Air-Con man came (another story) I found that ants had attacked the sweet remnants in the glass. Where the fuck are the buggers coming from? I got down and followed their approach and retreat route back to its source...

They came down the glass, across my huge and impressive chess book (my chess game is not so impressive) down the table leg, past my sandal to the Pakistani carpet, along the edge of the carpet past the couch where they turned and ran a crooked mile past a dropped DVD (Val Lewton's Horror Collection) towards the sliding doors to the small (tiny) patio. Bastards! How on earth did they find that glass, ant-miles from the patio, up in the air? Was it some enormous chess game of hunting/gathering for them, a move forward here, a retreat there, some invisible garden of forking pheromone paths, some rising gradient of atmospheric molecules for their twitching antennae.




Composite photo (with close-up insert) to show their path. If you zoom to full size you might see the little blighters in the close up section.

Motherformicas! Let's spray their formic acid arses (cloaca?) to antdom-come.



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There was this Monty Pyth'n episode - I remember seeing it 1976, in my first year of work at the old X-ray department. Let's Talk Ant The restaurant has normal waiter and a normal patron pretending to have to talk with antennae wiggles and foot stomps - very funny.

"May I take your coat?" signals the waiter(Graham Chapman).

"I don’t have a coat. I am an ant," signals the patron(Michael Palin) ending the dance with a grab at the waiter's bum.

"Aren’t we all," he signals back, also ending with the buttock clutch.

The concept was just so unnervingly surreal. You talk to me with a question appropriate to a human, but in ant language. Your question is meaningless to me because, even though I look human and AM wearing a coat, I am ant: I'll deny the reality of my jacket, because I AM an ant!

Just soooo stoooopid, but philosophically deep at the same time - Wittgenstein said "If a lion could talk, we wouldn't understand him." [Or her, presumably, it were a lioness. Not that many can understand Wittgenstein for that matter.]

Next morning at work one of the other students and I used white-out and a Texta to modify one of the radiation protection warning posters we had around the department - If You Are Pregnant, Or Think You May Be, Please Notify The Radiographer. You can guess what we changed it to...

It became - If You Are An Ant, Or Think You May Be, Please Notify The Radiographer.

We were pissing ourselves even as the Big Boss tore us to shreds. The surreality of this line just cracks me up. I still think of it when I want to cheer myself up...

I also squish ants. A lot.

E@L

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Missing Fingertip Grows Media Support System

The Pixie Dust story in which the guy probably made a fortune from selling to gullible journalists and editors is nicely debunked by the excellent Ben Goodacre at Bad Science.

This isn't a genuinely significant medical event - the bloke has reconstituted a coupla millimetres of tissue, max, including what looks like a pin-hole fistula - it's all quite normal. Hardly an entire FINGER. Check the photo again, all three joints are present including a very long section of distal phalanx - so long in fact the "wound" could possibly be a fake tip stuck on the end of the finger! (Stranger things have happened. OK, that just me playing the eternal cynic!)

Gory picture here.

Half the impression of "regrowth" is caused by the foreshortening on the BEFORE photo. For all we can tell on rather elongated view of the tip shown on the AFTER photo, there is a flat spot on the end where tissue has grown straight across the once-open wound.

A good point (no finger-pun intended) in the article is that if this IS so amazing, by performing it ad hoc, possibly on a friend, the "research" group have lost the opportunity to use this case in a larger properly constructed study which could have added to the usable scientific knowledge of the world.

Now, as presented, it's just pseudo-scientific fish-wrapping, soon to be as cool as the cold fusion pan-flash.

E@L

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Irreligious Intolerance

An atheist claims religious harrassment in the US Army... (from Creepy)

It's like the old line about the Pilgrim Fathers - they left Europe to seek the religious freedom to be as narrowminded and intolerant as they damn well could be!

To me, it's just another reminder how different things are in The United States of Jesusfreakistan.

The Catholic upbringing I had in Australia was never this tough, never this nasty, never this scary - I rejected it nevertheless. Sometime I think I'm the last remaining person whose thinking was influenced by the liberal 60's and 70's. Perhaps that's why, when I subject visitors to my Jodorowsky film archive, they never come back...

E@L

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E@L Petting Thai Girl

Sorry, apologies expecially to Mdme Chiang, I meant to say "tiger".



Tyger Tyger Doped Up Ryght

Phuket animal restaurant show reserve, 1999.

E@L

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In Quest Of The Dick's Knot

Mr Headley has pointed us all to the hilarious Richard Quest scandal, wherein he was allegedly apprehended on something of a quest for dick* across Central Park at 3am with a loop of rope around his wedding tackle and his turkey-like neck... Plus a "sex-toy" in his... wait for it... shoe and some sexual stupidity inducing methamphetamine in his pocket (natch!).

I love the bit where the methodical efficiency of the constabulary at identifying the illegal drug is explained:

The criminal complaint says the officer at the scene was able to ID the drug because of "his prior experience as a police officer in drug arrests, observation of packaging which is characteristic of this type of drug, and defendant's statements that . . . 'I've got some meth in my pocket.' "

Also, a question of procedure :-

If the defendant wasn't exposing himself at the time, as stated uncategorically, how did the arresting officer determine that there was in fact a lewdly knotted rope on the defendant's personage in the first place? Was it his experience in arresting similar late night park interlopers and his familiarity with the characteristic way *they* are packaged, or did Quest offer the other vital clue? Viz: "I've got a rope around my neck connected to one around my balls."

Quite the Gordian knot of Sherlockian deduction, officer. Well done, sir.


E@L

* How come after 6+ years of watching this amusingly annoying m-f on TV have I only just twigged to this obvious pun in his name. A gay guy called Dick Quest! Come on, it HAS to be made up.

It's like Swift's joke that starts Gulliver's Travels, it sneaks past you if you are not concentrating - "my good master, Mr Bates"; "Mr Bates, my master"; "my good master Bates"...

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Holy Get Well Soon BatBitch

NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR CHILDREN OR FEMINISTS

For those not already in the know, the real lady behind the definitely Not Safe For Work flame-haired sex-fantasy avatar Batbitch, after battling off countless evil hamsters and a giant hairy Hoff, is about to be tied up genuinely with a small (hopefully) medical procedure and needs some supportive lovin', or was that some lovin' support?

Either way -- Get Well Soon BB!

Instead of kissing ass, get back there kicking ass!

(If I could use Photoshop I'd do a funny sexy photo for you!)

E@L

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Sway

Anyone read this?




Dick? Your era, early Stones, Brian Jones etc...

I sigh. I flick the kaya toast crumbs from my keyboard. I agree with Nick Hornby (in The Polysyllabic Spree) on the modern style of lean, pared-down dialogue-driven writing. It's crap - like reading the synopsis for a novel, not the novel itself. Any more pared down and you'd print it on a postcard.

There's absolutely no... I was going to say 'depth', but I think I mean 'thickness' - to the writing. There's nothing to get your teeth into - the story may be rich with potential and humming (or in this case rocking) with cultural resonance, but it's all left unstated. Purposefully, no doubt. On the altar of toughness, the lamb of detail.

Mick Jagger shrugs. Charley Manson flicks cigarette ash from the dashboard. Yeah, but why, so what?

Modern (American) writing - sometimes, I just don't know. Problem is, I've read so much of it, I often subconsciously emulate it myself. I flick the kaya toast crumbs from my keyboard. I shrug.

I don't think I can recall reading anything so specious, so disappointingly thin and superficial since the last Raymond Carver story (oops, I mean outline for a story) I read fifteen years ago, or the last Houllebecq for that matter.

It just struck me. The scenes with The Stones are wasted because I don't think Zachary Lazar understands what motivates the average English person, let alone the rock-star variety... He seems to have just outlined the stories from all the biographies he read as research for this book. We need someone like Chuck Woww (Dick's good buddy) to step up and write the definitive 60's rock and roll London novel.

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[Addendum: Which is not to say it is a BAD book, or BAD writing. It's technically excellent and no doubt it was hard work writing this way and revising down until it reached this lean, this modern, this writing-workshop A+ style. The reading of it is desperately easy, always an indicator of rigorous writing. I was up to page 160 before I noticed. Maybe that's because there aren't a lot of, um, words in there, or those things that slow you down - ideas?

I'm just a bit, you know, leaned out at the moment. Maybe it was something I wrote.

p.s. Thank heaven he's not of the diametrically opposed un-ironic William T Vollman, ultra-digressive David Foster Wallace, polymorphic Thomas Pynchon Can't-Shut-The-Fuck-Up school of modern American writing!]

E@L

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Good News

I arrived in the toilet this morning...

(there's an opening phrase to conjure with...)

... for my wake-up piss, without noticing that I had walked from the bed NOT WEARING SLIPPERS.

This struck me immediately as a Good Sign, one that indicated my feet were no longer quite painful enough to grab my entire conscious attention for 100% of my waking existence.

This is the first time I have been able to walk barefoot without limping, for over a year.

It may be my eternally upbeat and optimistic spirit (did somebody snort?) or it may be that I am so hooked on the painkillers that I am subconsciously doing a Heath Ledger, and unknowingly multi-dosing and doping myself into anodoyne anaesthetic bliss, but this made me feel better about things. Things like life in general, like the fact a 37 year-old colleague has a nasty breast lump, like the fact I haven't written a word on my novel since November, like the junk-trip tomorrow and the inevitable "Let's have an post-junk-trip shower and 'spontaneous' party at E@L's place" and the ensuing mess I'll have to clean up on Sunday...

Who cares people? I can WWWAAAALLLLKKKK!!*

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Another thing not to complain about it is the upcoming trip to Egypt, mid-May. Conference Venue is here, on the Red Sea.

Damn, my life's tough. I'll have to make time for some thallasso therapy.

After the conference, I go to Libya and run a product symposium for a few days - should be easy as no-one speaks proper English. I'll just waffle on in sales-jargon designed to hide rather than explain the advanced technological, perspicuital and ultrasound-physical related things in our equipment, with my nasal Aussie accent and my full-speed ahead delivery and they'll nod and smile like they get it (those that stay awake), and then eat all the food and quaff all the drink and ask the salesman how much discount they can get...

Then I'll come back to Cairo and spend 4 days being a tourist.

OK all you weary world travellers, send in some recommended sites to see and some unrecommended unsightly places to avoid.

No point in asking our resident Singapore blogging archeologist, as he has not even been to Egypt. Yet.

E@L

* Don't get too carried away, they still hurt a lot. But we ARE getting somewhere I feel, moving towards a better state - just a dull ache (with tingles) and less of the sharp, stabbing, searing, nerve pain I was getting frequently during the first two months post-op.

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