northbysoutheast

I felt mildly sorry for author, Nikki Gemmell when she broke down on LNL the other night. I think it caught Phillip Adams a little off guard too. It left him strenuously denying any kind of set-up in the face of Nikki's accusation of cynicism on his part or that of online guest, Dr Rebecca Peelan from the National University of Ireland. Before this I'd not taken much note of her book The bride stripped bare whose authorship is attributed to "Anonymous". But some time after publication and subsequent success, apparently including translations into several European languages, little Nikki was outed by the British press on the strength of infomation from some malicious "publishing executive" from Sydney. Since then, her identification as author of the sexually explicit roman à clef has "made her life hell." I did a bit of googling around and there was last week's article from the Guardian in which Gemmell relates all this, concluding with how her husband read it and although he was "turned on" by what he read they "haven't made love since." Hmmm. Then on a tape timeshifting Andrew Denton's Monday night interview, there she was in floral-bright cheong sam and Valley-girl intonation, her dirty-coy promotional-tour script spilling from her Luna Park mouth. This pretty much put the seal on it especially as I seem to recall the tearful breakdown on LNL coinciding with Dr Peelan alluding to issues like marketing and the Helen Darville/Demedenko fraud. It stretches credulity publishing as "Anon" and claiming surprise at getting found out. Really. LNL asked the question "What makes a writer decide to write a novel anonymously? I think the answer has to be "Sales," Phillip, "Sales".

A lot of whacky events in the week past, hey? Mick Jagger turned 60 and PM Howard finally reached his 64th (not out) the one where he said he'd consider retiremens. The fact that he has and isn't seems to have sent the journos back to questioning the longevity of Leader of the Opposition, Crean. I know I'm tired of how political analysis in this brown land seems preoccupied with questioning leadership. It's got something to do with our recent decision to make it an article of faith that whoever holds the treasury portfolio or its shadow, is annointed as successor to the leader. One of the newspapers noted the youth of our present PM relative to many of his predecessors and other world leaders. He has a good decade or more on so many of them. So when its time for him to go by choice or electoral mishap (barring divine intervention, an unlikely occurrence) the present treasurer could be long gone, or if not, looking very stale and tired indeed.

Meanwhile no sooner had runner and Olympian, Cathy Freeman announced her retirement from sport, than political leaders were canvassing her suitability for public office for their respective opposing parties. Astonishing. I have to wonder at a system which privileges image so readily. I mean the dear girl is an unknown quantity as far as intellect is concerned, but her public speaking alternates between rambling and incoherence, but then again I guess the party reps see this as evidence of her fitting in with the pack. One hopes Cathy will take more note of Mary G.

And the execrable Big Brother ends with this country's first female winner. It was refreshing however to hear "Reggie" who has become the most famous Tasmanian woman since Truganini, say that winning and the loot has changed everything. Thank god - I can't stand hearing people who come into largesse saying they'll "...still be the same as they've always been..." . I feel like telling them to back then. Fools.

Then this morning, woke to hear of Bob Hope's death. He made his hundredth birthday as did fellow comedian, George Burns and we all thought ill of the Reader's Digest dictum that Laughter's the Best Medicine.

Been spending so much time reading about events in Asia lately that I have kind of lost track of a lot of the old faithful blogsters that used to keep me from my studies. Noticed that Tom picked up on the masturbation preventing prostate cancer story. I thought it would have appeared in more blogs than I've noticed, blogsters being such wankers. But then again that term (along with "tosser" in the UK) seems to have become somewhat disengaged from its onanistic origins.

And not veering too far from the topic (one too that's close to dear Tom's heart) down south on the Murray Graham has quite the definitive list of differences between blogsters and journalists. It's in the 17 July Request a Rant© and is nicely boxed and gussied up to aid comprehension. V. Good.

Well the Beau Blair has been hard at it with his wordsmiths hasn't he? Great speech to the US Congress, and ain't it ironic that the US is the last English speaking country where such political rhetoric is taken seriously and done well...

After overseeing the terrorist breakout from the slammer in Manilla, no sooner does our intrepid PM set for in Seoul than the whackos from Pyongyang start firing machine guns across the DMZ. I envisage a time when the countries of the region will be offering money for him to stay away. Might contribute to the upkeep of our mobile forces as they engage in the apparant re-colonisation of the Solomon Islands. By invitation what's more of the S.I. Government, such as it is. Not that I can fault the need for some kind of action that might give the people some respite from gun toting boy soldiers. I have to wonder about the inclusion in the bureaucratic division of some from Papua-New Guinea. That country's surely heading in the same direction. I think the Western model of governance perhaps needs some adjustment to accommodate the cultures of the Pacific and Melanesia. Don't ask me for any suggestions though.

Another crisis in a Christian church over admission of gay people to the clergy. Does anyone in the real world give a damn? The gay proportion of any religion is a minority and I think I'd prefer to see the newsprint saved from reporting this boring crap. Get a life chaps - these people believe in a god whose got so little to do that he'd worry about where you put your pink bits. Naff or what?! Surely not holy.

Interesting moments in this week's West Wing ep. that once again seem to reflect on events in the real world. It was one of the things that made the show initially compelling and now is even more uncanny when you think of the lead time between scriptwriting and airtime in the US, then the lag before each ep is shown in this country, squeezed as it is, between inane "special events" and the Nine Network's endless sports broadcasts. This time, Pres. Bartlet's writers are trying to beef up his commitment to foreign policy and the new boy's digging up of an old speech rejected from the official archive presents a change in doctrine which is suspiciously like the one adopted by the current incumbent: that the US should be willing to pursue what it considers right and humane wherever on the globe it sees the need. Meanwhile a senior politician repeats the old joke: Democrats want a small military and to deploy it everywhere, while Republicans want a huge military and keep it at home. It seems that the Bush doctrine has combined the two but unfortunately doesn't appear able to engage the moral and ethical discourse that backs the fictional Bartlet administration. Perhaps they could borrow the show's scriptwriters when they dump Cheney, Rumsy and Condy?

Meanwhile, PM Howard's standing in for Bush in the dress rehearsal for the latter's Phillipine visit has fizzed rather awkwardly, hasn't it? I wonder how he went having to actually write his own script, following their prime Islamist terrorist strolling away from custody, rather than rattle off GW's phrases? It's sad really, despite my loathng of him, I readily concede that he can delive a good speech on formal occasions. Off the cuff, he's no better than the Sydney radio hacks he prefers to use to communicate with his constituents. Anyway in these trying times, the Triumvirate of Liars seems to be mouthing the same tired, duplicitous phrases. Odd though how blame seems to be heading towards the security analysts, while the information bandied about to justify their next adventure in North Korea is attributed, presumably to these same spooks. And I notice the Beau Blair is keeping quite mum on the Korean end of the Evil Axis - just hope the PM isn't getting ahead of himself here. The last Korean war wasn't pretty.

Well it's been about a week and all I can say about "new Blogger" is that pour moi, it's old Blogger with an easy to miss color change.

Last night finally got a chance to catch up with the second season of Grass Roots. The transition from the previous actor playing Biddy to the new went incredibly smoothly, and Col is as wonderfully shifty as ever. Due to a gremlin in the taping, missed the machinations surrounding his accession to the Mayoralty once more, but irony was the time-shifted news items which popped up after the program on the tape featuring the lead up to the Iraq adventure. Interesting how solidly the material reasons used to justify the war were being promoted. Now of course, the three luminaries of the Coalition of the Willing have coalesced into a Triumvirate of Liars. The argument here is one of ends and means and that old debate about whether one justifies the other. From where I sit, any moral justification has been fragmented by the unwillingness of the Triumvirate to construct a truthful argument at the outset. Obviously there are no WMDs and from what last night's old taped news showed, Hans Blix and his team had pretty much reached that conclusion. If removing the regime was so important, why couldn't these "leaders" construct a truthful justification for their actions, say, one related to that country's failure to conform to the many previous UN declarations. Too unpalatable to reveal the real agenda to we, the people, eh?

Mundane reality: comforting while it lasts. The wee cat's dental work went smoothly and her return home dosed up with pussy painkillers had her wandering around the house, dazed, trying to find somewhere she felt safe. Put her under a fave rug on the bed which lasted for a while. Didn't really settle until I bedded down for the night and she found her way under the covers. And silly folk still say cats don't develop any meaningful relationships!