Journal Entries
Yay, it's bin night! Or, not much happens on Sundays when I just stay home.
Posted Oct 23, 2011
Well, I guess I've identified the main problem I'll face during post-a-journal-a-day November. I can generally dredge up a journal topic out of the recesses of my addled mind on days when I've been out and about doing things and watching people (one of my hobbies). Unfortunately, on days when I'm just at home and I don't see anyone and I don't watch the news or listen to the radio I end up with very little to say.
Which isn't to say I'm not content. 
But you'll know I'm having a very quiet day if I post a journal about radical new ways to stack a dishwasher or, indeed, the fact that it's bin night.
Which reminds me of my grandmother. She would scour her house and garden on bin night searching for things to throw away. You see, she wanted to make it worth the binman's time. There's logic in there somewhere, hiding in a burrow, just showing the tip of its nose and a couple of whiskers, but it's still a bit odd.
Proust wrote of madeleines triggering a long, long sequence of memories. I'm writing of bin night. At least you don't have to pay to read this.
Ivan.
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Latest reply: Oct 23, 2011
What would be in a garden based on h2g2?
Posted Oct 22, 2011
This journal was triggered by a comment someone made offsite. I was chattering away about my plan to get some more plants today and do something to revitalise my back garden. I mentioned that I'd thought of 2legs as I planted a Giant Badja. (The feeble jokelet does work better with an Aussie accent that's a bit broader than mine, but you get the idea.) The response was that I could have an h2g2 garden.
So I've been thinking about this, partly because the concept seemed odd enough to be viable, and partly because on day four of my journal-a-day week I'm scratching about for ideas.
What *would* be in a garden based on and/or inspired by h2g2?
In broad terms I've decided that it would be a number of robust specimens, some climbers, some creepers, some wallflowers, some shrinking violets and a fair quantity of, um, manure. 
Suggestions for actual species are welcome. 
I might even do this, if the plants are available.Ivan.
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Latest reply: Oct 22, 2011
In which the world becomes a slightly better place
Posted Oct 21, 2011
Although it sounds odd in the context of chronic fatigue, I sometimes suffer from insomnia. Last night was one of those nights... In a fit of exasperation I groped around in the dark and switched the bedside radio on, wondering what time it was. It was just before 3am and the presenter said 'there are reports that Gaddafi has been captured hiding in a drain.' Suddenly I was wide awake. A few moments later the 3am news bulletin started with the news that he was, in fact, dead. My thoughts were:
1. That is great news for Libya.
2. I'll always remember where I was when I heard the news - tucked up in a nice comfortable bed.
3. I'll get points for this one in the Celebration of Life/Deathlist game. Hurrah!
Then I fell asleep and slept soundly until the normal getting-up time.
Now, at the other end of the day, I'm having thoughts about the validity of the old platitudes about not speaking ill of the dead. If a madman has terrorised his people and occasionally other parts of the world for more than four decades, it's pretty hard to find something positive to say about him. (Snazzy uniforms? Nice use of the colour green?) Sometimes we can only speak ill of the dead, or say nothing at all. I'm hoping it won't be long before he's consigned to oblivion.
I'm also thinking about Libya. The 20th century was not kind to Libya. Indifferent Turkish rule, Italian colonial rule, the battles of the Second World War which put 'Tobruk' just behind 'Gallipoli' in the Australian military psyche, further colonial-lite administration by Britain, a bogus monarchy, then the dictatorship of a madman. I hope this century is kinder to the country.
Mostly, though, I'm thinking about the media. While some people - Libyans, mostly - would have had a need to see this bastard's corpse to be sure that he was genuinely dead, I'm not convinced the rest of us needed to see it. Some media outlets here are getting quite pious about this. Unfortunately for their credibility, these are the same outlets whose websites offer video of a two-year-old Chinese girl being run over twice and ignored by passers-by. This poor child has now dies. That video is essentially a snuff movie. Yet the sanctimonious indignant noises about the sight of a dictator's corpse goes on.
The dictator is dead. A small child is dead. Hypocrisy lives. But despite the vibrant liveliness of hypocrisy, the world is a better place than it was at this time yesterday.Ivan.
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Latest reply: Oct 21, 2011
In which the Queen goes to see some flowers
Posted Oct 20, 2011
We're in the middle of a royal visit. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, Queen of Australia, has come to see us for, apparently, the 16th time and is spending a few days in her capital city. Although she chooses to live permanently on an island off the coast of Europe, she is our Head of State.
I've seen her before. I was six years old and was loaded onto a bus with my classmates and driven to Port Adelaide to stand along a narrow street near the Royal Yacht, waving small Australian flags, which I recall were made in Taiwan, waiting for a chance to see this mythical lady. In the event, all I saw was a gleaming flash of a speeding Daimler and a gently waving white-gloved hand. Now I'm 40. I have known no other Head of State. In fact, very few people younger than my mother can remember that there ever was anyone else notionally in charge.
The royals arrived last night and were greeted at the airport by the usual throng of schoolchildren and various dignitaries including the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory. It has been noted that all of these positions are now filled by women, and some commentators are saying the papacy should follow suit though they note that this is unlikely. The Queen was presented with flowers by a retired woman who had given her flowers as a six-year-old when the Queen first visited in 1954; I do think this was a nice touch.
Today the Queen and the Duke travelled by boat along Lake Burley Griffin from the Governor-General's residence at Yarralumla to Floriade, Canberra's annual spring flower show. The boat in question (The Admiral's Barge) is a motor launch that had to be brought up from Sydney by road and then reconditioned and checked for soundness before being put onto the water. I can't help thinking Elizabeth Tudor would have cruised the lake with more panache – there would have been trumpeters and oarsmen and carollers and rose petals and a throne with a mass of brocade and lace containing a red-headed political genius. This Elizabeth, by contrast, is a sensibly-dressed mild-mannered lady in a lilac suit and hat. Pageantry is dead.
I had occasion to cross the lake just before the royal boat was due to go past and I had a good look at the set-up. The shores of the lake were lined with spectators, but not as many as might have been there in past years when we were all less cynical about monarchy. My offsider was somewhere in the crowd with his five-year-old daughter. I expect I'll get a report from him tomorrow. He's a monarchist. I'm a republican.
Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against the Queen as a person. She is a very dignified, gracious lady and she's very good at what she does and I don't doubt that she's sincere about it all. It's just that she is a foreigner, her home is in Britain, she is a figurehead for the Commonwealth of Australia though she doesn't even sign our Acts of Parliament and there’s no real need for her to perform any role at all for Australia.
I'm not talking about her role as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, either. That's an entirely separate matter. The fact is, having a Head of State who lives elsewhere and mostly spends her time promoting the interests of the country in which she resides rather than the interests of Australia does not seem particularly sensible.
Norway and Sweden shared a monarch up until 1905. Whatever the shortcomings of that arrangement – and the Norwegians certainly thought there were problems – the two countries are at least next to each other. By contrast, for Australia to share a monarch with Britain and (I think) 14 other countries scattered across the globe is bizarre.
The fact of the matter is that the Commonwealth of Australia is, these days, essentially a crowned republic. We're democratic and egalitarian and awfully disrespectful of authority and rather cynical. All of our institutions and modes of government are republican in nature, but we still have this anachronistic Crown as the notional source of all authority. We just get on with things without all this ceremonial frippery, for the most part, but sometimes the royal cavalcade comes to town and all common sense goes and hides under a rock for a few days.
It would be an easy matter to consign the Crown of Australia to history. It has no physical existence after all. Nobody would come to any harm, and most people would notice no change except that we'd have to redesign the coinage and the $5 note, and rename the office of Governor-General. Monarchists say that there would be fire and brimstone and doom and misery and mass murder and gulags and rampant communism and sharia law and people kicking corgis in the streets if we were to become a republic. I think this just proves that we need to spend more on logic and critical thinking classes in schools, and possibly make more resources available in the mental health field.
The general consensus is that we're unlikely to become a republic while the Queen lives. I wonder if I'll see an Australian republic in my lifetime. I do hope so. But I also note that the Queen might outlast me if she takes after her mother. Ivan.
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Latest reply: Oct 20, 2011
A perfectly normal morning commute.
Posted Oct 19, 2011
I've decided to see whether I can manage a journal a day for a week before I commit to writing a journal a month. So here's today's effort; it involves the local wildlife in an awkward conjunction with public transport. Tomorrow's journal will be vaguely political. Did I say 'vaguely'? I meant 'blatantly'.
Anyway. On with the show, as it were.
There's a lot of magpies around here. Australian magpies, that is. They're aggressive and territorial when they're nesting and before their chicks are fully-fledged, which of course is what happens in Spring so they're especially feisty right now. Here's a media item with a lovely photo: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/blood-and-feathers-sydneys-angry-birds-take-their-toll-20110923-1kobr.html It's a Sydney story rather than a Canberra story but you get the idea.
I haven't been swooped this Spring, but there are a couple of nests between home and the bus stop so I do try to be inconspicuous in the morning when I leave home. This morning the dear little feathery things all ignored me, which probably means they're used to my routine. I caught the 6:35am bus without incident.
Two blocks further on, the driver stopped abruptly then drove on at walking speed. I looked up from my book and saw a kangaroo just by the front door. It was a young male, adolescent I suppose, doing what adolescent males do - roaming around aimlessly. He seemed to be alone, and a little confused, and was hopping here and there with no particular destination in mind. Sometimes he was on the road, sometimes on someone's front lawn, briefly in a carport, and once right on top of someone's azaleas with significant effect.
The bus driver kept crawling along. The last thing anyone needed was a panicked roo crashing through a window. Roos do panic easily.
And this is where the magpies come in. One of the local magpies has no problem with people, but a confused roo was strange enough to annoy it. So the roo got swooped, which made it panic, which drove it onto the road where a magpie from the other side of the street joined in.
There was a running (hopping/flying) battle for the next 300 metres. A small car had a lucky escape, the roo crashed through a 'For sale' sign and wrecked a hydrangea bush, the magpies persisted... Then the roo almost crashed into a jogger who was somehow oblivious to all of this - I'm not sure if she was more startled than the roo or not, just as I'm not sure who had the greater intellect.
The magpies retreated. The roo stopped in someone's driveway, trembling slightly. The bus drove off around the corner at that point so I have no way of knowing what happened next but the poor dopey thing was only another 50 metres from a grassy bit of parkland. I hope he went there and had a good lie down.
The kangaroo looked in need of a hug to be honest, but that's the last thing one should do with a wild animal that's as tall as oneself. So I let the opportunity go.
The rest of the day was quite dull by comparison.Ivan.
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Latest reply: Oct 19, 2011
Ivan the Terribly Average
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