northbysoutheast

Here's something for May Day, unusual around these parts:

The Internationale

Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty
And give to all a happier lot.
Each at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.

Words by Eugene Pottier (Paris 1871)
Music by Pierre Degeyter (1888)

Lest the reader imagine, on the strength of yesterday's silly post that I spend my time parsing pages of purple prose, for this morning's act of procrastination I shovelled the cowshit collected some weeks ago onto a stockpile in preparation for the next compost cycle. So...

O dear. See how you go in the Lit Pop Quiz. Me?:

Scored 9 out of a possible 10
Born to be Wilde Congratulations.
You are a literary genius. You clearly have spent far too many warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. Go out and get some fresh air and buy a Gareth Gates record. (and if you don't know what we're talking about, you're a lot less sad than us)

Our Prime Minister leads a sainted existence. His government announces changes to our health system which effectively end its universality. Doesn't actually end bulk billing, just restricts it to the most economically disadvantaged as well as allowing private insurance of "gap" charges. It's unlikely the PM's poor embattled opponent, Simon Crean will be able to gain any traction with this issue, the Labor Party's too nostalgically unwilling to discipline its Medicare baby. But to make matters worse for the opposition, luck of luckiness intervenes with the suspension from trading of the largest supplier of complementary medicines, herbs, vitamins and all, because it is alleged that they have consistently and systematically distorted testing, quality control and dosage of their products. And to make woeful matters worse still, they wholesale to the rest of the industry so their brand appears on hardly any consumer potion bottles. What headline's on everyone's lips today? Not "End of Medicare" but "Pan Pharmaceutical scandal".

Makes me glad that I stopped taking all those vitamins. And since moving away from the big city and breathing real air again, I've suffered almost no illness. Giving up booze and fags helps too. So I no longer share the characteristic of so many of my vitamin gulping compatriots of having the most expensive (and nicely colored) urine in the world.

Now that we've been told that the Iraq war has all but ended the tv schedules have returned to normal. The extended news broadcasts are well gone because, apparently we like to see things exploding, burning and dying, but not reconstructed, reconciled, created. Think Afganistan and how infrequently we see that place mentioned now that conflict has been "resolved" in the minds of Western decision makers. It would be too easy to blame journalists for prurient interest in things destructive, but it would be more accurate to hit on editors with their far more intimate, perhaps anilingual, contact with the one or three media moduls who call the shots in the Anglophone world.

Anyway, by way of subliminally having all this is lead to the ridiculous, I can finally catch the Topp Twins (thanks Sarah for the link) timeshifted from the 11:30 slot their show occupies on ABC-tv. The program has that broadcasting from home quality that reminds me of Mary G live from Broome. Anyway, Camp Mother and Camp Leader hotly pursued by Ken and Ken, were on location at Te Awamutu. Alex and Simon have it listed as one of NZ's Crap Towns. I remember working with a refugee (hi Louise!) from this place who tended to agree - she also implied that she was in good company: she claimed the Finn brothers had left it too, but I have no confirmation of this bit of trivia. Still, looked okay to me, but we all know how the camera lens lies so.

Ms Davis has finally hoicked and gagged her way through the spittoon of garlic flavored butterscotch accents in the RN bookreading. Not only did it give me heartburn lunchtimes, but the repeat was timed to give me nightmares as I snoozed off to sleep in the evenings. Well actually some of them weren't nightmares. I so need a lover!

Now that we've been told that the Iraq war has all but ended the tv schedules have returned to normal. The extended news broadcasts are well gone because, apparently we like to see things exploding, burning and dying, but not reconstructed, reconciled, created. Think Afganistan and how infrequently we see that place mentioned now that conflict has been "resolved" in the minds of Western decision makers. It would be too easy to blame journalists for prurient interest in things destructive, but it would be more accurate to hit on editors with their far more intimate, perhaps anilingual, contact with the one or three media moduls who call the shots in the Anglophone world.

Anyway, by way of subliminally having all this is lead to the ridiculous, I can finally catch the Topp Twins (thanks Sarah for the link) timeshifted from the 11:30 slot their show occupies on ABC-tv. The program has that broadcasting from home quality that reminds me of Mary G live from Broome. Anyway, Camp Mother and Camp Leader hotly pursued by Ken and Ken, were on location at Te Awamutu. Alex and Simon have it listed as one of NZ's Crap Towns. I remember working with a refugee (hi Louise!) from this place who tended to agree - she also implied that she was in good company: she claimed the Finn brothers had left it too, but I have no confirmation of this bit of trivia. Anyway, looked okay to me, but we all know how the camera lens lies so.

Ms Davis has finally hoicked and gagged her way through the aforementioned garlic flavored butterscotch accents of the