Haneef - and Downer

There was a very strange quote yesterday from Alexander Downer (foreign minister), saying that the immigration department and the federal police were right not to apologize to Dr Haneef:

"What do you expect them to do, fall on the ground and grovel - eat dirt - I mean, get real. This is a quite common situation,"

Where to start? It's a common situation? You mean this sort of thing happens all the time? People getting locked up for 15 days for no reason? Also.. "get real"?

The thing that does give me some joy is that my daughters can sing along with the song about Alexander Downer from the musical "Keating". It goes, in part:

"I'm too freaky... I'm a greasy-cheeked freak"

Now only half the size..!

86.8 - which is 1.2kg less than 2 weeks ago, or, if you prefer 2.6lbs. At this rate I'll be dangerously studly by September.

On the news, they were talking about how US armed forces recruiters are getting a bit more relaxed about recruits with criminal records. So if you've been a burglar you can still enlist and go to Iraq. They, however, draw the line at "violent crime". Now, I know that I'm waaaay too keen to see irony and humor everywhere, but does this strike you as being a bit much?

4 back-to-back?

I was reading a review of the new Simpsons movie, and it said that watching the movie was like watching 4 episodes of the TV show back -to-back. They meant this as a bad thing, but to me it sounds pretty good. D'oh! I just hope we get to see (and especially, hear) Snake, my favorite minor character. My number 2 son (who kicked 2 goals playing football on the weekend - AFL that is) can do an excellent impression of Snake. Who, by the way, went to Bennington. As did Donna Tartt, Brett Easton Ellis and the wife of a friend of mine. Not that you asked...

Not quite a greek god

A weekend in Melbourne and I fell off the wagon a bit - I react to stress and anxiety by eating, and my kids make me very stressed and anxious. It wasn't as bad as the March school holidays (I was reduced to eating butter out of the fridge - imagine, a man standing by an open fridge, reaching in, grabbing something, anything, and shoving it in his mouth. That's me!) but it still wasn't great.

I had a session with Quentin today and so I feel quite studly. No, he's my personal trainer. Don't get too excited. My other news is that my back/butt/hip is pretty much sorted out, so I'll be able to go back to yoga soon. That's naked yoga.

Yet another sign

Chadstone Road, just near Chadstone shopping center (yes, I know) there was a sign that said:

BREAST HEALTH
PODIATRY

I didn't have my camera, unfortunately. But the mind boggles. A podiatrist who decided to run a 'breast health' thing on the side? It all sounds a bit implausible - which is it: feet or jubblies? Or can you get both done at once in a special chair or something? That's a pretty compelling image (for me, anyway).

It's like when you see restaurants that do Mediterranean and Thai food (there's one in Woodend. have a look if you don't believe me. It's called Flavours.) The guy who cuts my hair, an old-fashioned greek barber in the MLC center, has on his card 'specialising in individual styles' which sets my mind spinning for about an hour each time I see it. I still can't work out what it means.

Haneef case. There's always a funny bit...

News just out that they've dropped the charges, apparently it was all a mistake. This isn't really a surprise. But in the New York Times writeup there's a lovely detail: the prosecutor in Brisbane is called Alan MacSporran. No, I'm not making it up. He really is called MacSporran. Not only does it sound comically scottish, it literally means 'son of sporran', which itself is an image to conjure with.

Also, in today's Financial Review, there's an article about foetal alcohol syndrome in indigenous children. They quote an expert who says, among other things, that these kids start off 'ten yards behind the eight-ball', which is an unfortunate sporting mixed metaphor, what with a billiard table not being ten yards long and all. Mind you, I doubt anyone else noticed or cared. It's just me, isn't it? (By the way, ads for the AFR magazine describe it as being the love child of the AFR and Vanity Fair. I reach for the bucket.....)

I'm so parochial. Or Sydney/Melbourne

(For those readers from Bulgaria, the Dominican republic and whereever else: Melbourne and Sydney are two Australian cities, each of about 4 million people. Indistinguishable in most respects to the visitor except that Sydney has a natural harbour that puts Stockholm and San Fransisco to shame.)

I was on my usual QF409 this morning, SYD -> MEL. During the inflight video (by the way, I heard something about Deborah Hutton today that's ruined my life) they run these annoying ads from Australia Post. There's seven of them , one for each day of the week. They're quite nicely shot, and the voiceover is some platitudes about each day. Song is "everyday people". This would be annoying enough - because after the first two the intelligent listener realises there's a pattern and there's going to be five more - but there's two other things. For a start, the post office isn't actually open seven days a week. Also, they say that Thursday is late-night shopping night. (A bonus third: they mispronounce "Beijing", it's got a a hard J. But I've given up on that. I dread the olympics.)

Well, it's always been Thursday nights in Sydney. But in Melbourne it's Friday night. Yes, it does leak a bit into Thursday, but that's not the norm. The ads were written by someone in Sydney (probably not far from where I live, I imagine). This doesn't seem like a big deal, but Melbourne people are very touchy about this. A few years ago The Australian had a big headline "How I lured Crosswell to Norths", over an article by Ron Barassi. Of course in Melbourne it's North, not Norths. The newspaper's sub-edited in Sydney.

I could go on about the differences between the two cities, but the stereotypes were captured very nicely in a thing in Crikey by Guy Rundle. Sydney's mayor had urged all citizens to put together a "Go Bag" of stuff that would be handy if there were some sort of disaster in Sydney (two boats in the harbour at the same time, that sort of thing).

Here's Crikey's take:

-------------------------
Every city should have one. But if it's going to be stuff that is essential to survival, things people can't live without, contents may vary:

Go Bag (Sydney)

* Yoga mat
* KY
* 2 dodgy eckies
* SMH Saturday property liftout ("The terrorists have destroyed Punchbowl". "How can they tell?" "It looks better")

Go Bag (Melbourne)

* Foldable espresso machine
* First issue of Dromos, thrilling new journal of postmodern architectural theory
* Film festival program, so that survivors can act out Summer of the Naked Monkey a story of culture clash from the Burmese New Wave and other now lost classics
* Winter wear (black skivvy)
* Summer wear (black skivvy)
---------------------------
(translation: skivvy = turtleneck, SMH = sydney broadsheet newspaper)

Sinister or funny?

Just near my office is an old building which houses part of the education department. It has a lovely honeyed sandstone facade (as many good buildings in Sydney do), but what struck my eye the other day was a strangely-worded commemoration plaque on the corner.

Not that exciting, huh? Take a careful look at the second-longest line. It's the Minister for Public Instruction. Now that's a title I'd like. Years ago my friend E and I (the one who broke his leg) invented an organisation called "The Peoples' League for Taste and Decency", and even devised a logo for it. It's amazing what bored suburban teenagers get up to.

In other matters, I told my shrink, Peter, about my incredible alcohol consumption over the weekend (see earlier posts. 2 glass red wine, 4 beers) and he thought it was, on balance, a good thing.

Clarification, Re: greek God

Apparently I do look like a bit like a greek god, but only from the back. The front needs quite a bit of work still. I was having lunch with my friend J (no, the other one) and she remarked - unneccessarily I thought - that I had bigger boobs than she does. Mind you, it wouldn't take much...

I'm stepping up my sessions with Quentin (I've outsourced my willpower)and so long as my shoulder/wrist/elbow all holds up I'll be in respectable shape. There's an old New Yorker cartoon, a couple are leaving the house to go out, the wife adjusts the husband's tie and says something like "Men will fear you; women will admire you". That's what I want!

slightly less massive

77.4kg, which isn't bad considering i had pizza, chocolate, ice-cream and red wine on friday (hello J!). At this rate I'll be a greek god by about september. I will post evidence!

It's scientific!

The gym I go to (with almost manic determination at the moment) produces a monthly magazine. I've never read it, but it's there. It has the usual exercise, dieting and lifestyle tips (red wine - a glass a day can be good for you! 10 ways to get that ski-ready body etc.). I only know because they play ads for it over the video setup every, I'd guess 45 minutes, so on a decent visit I'd have listened to it a couple of times.

As part of the spiel they say "and all our usual features, including out new astrology section". Now I really don't care that they have an astrology section in the magazine as I'd probably never read it, but I don't like having to hear about a couple of times ever workout. Plus, in a more general sense, it detracts from whatever authority the thing has anyway - I mean, if I'm reading an article about how some study says that red wine's good for me, I'm a little uneasy with it being in a publication that also carries horoscope. Is it evidence-based research or just something someone made up?(This also explains my qualms about the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. How much can you trust a paper that, in the same breath as telling you about unrest in government ranks over industrial relations reforms, also tells you that people born between May 20 and June 20 are all going to have a good day but should be careful about making major decisions?)

The PR woman wrote back to me saying "there is a science behind astrology". So that settles it then. I probably should write back asking for evidence, but she probably has better things to do that enter into pointless email correspondence with grumpy middle-aged men.

Where's that witch...

I was at the gym and someone said something to me that they prefaced with "No offence, but..." which of course means that it's going to be something that will offend me. In much the same vein, whenever people are gathered together and told "Now, please understand, this isn't going to be a witch-hunt.." you know that it will, in fact, be a witch-hunt for sure.

Speaking of witch-hunts, I'm especially fond of the expression "blamestorming".

Bacardi by night...

Someone sent me one of those tests, "How kinky are you?", and of course I couldn't help myself, I just had to do it. (And no, I'm not telling how I did on it. You don't need to know everything.) All very amusing and whatnot, but what annoyed me (and there's always something, as you've noticed) was that you got an extra point for every tattoo you have.

Hang on... tattoos are subversive? Not in Sydney in 2007 they're not, and they haven't been for a decade at least. I was out of the country, but there must have a been a day when the government rounded everyone up and made them all get tattoos. And I don't mean drunken sailors and armed robbers - no, it's the bankers and lawyers at the gym. All the guys have either a tattooed ring around their upper bicep, or a 'tribal' thingy on their shoulder. (Lachlan Murdoch has the bicep one. But he's a very handsome trillionaire and can do what he wants.) The women have a bird or a flower - why not a skull? - on a shoulder blade, ankle, or the small of the back. The 'tramp stamp', except that it's not even trampy any more. I have some respect for the down-and-outs on Darlinghurst Road. A guy with a spiderweb tattooed on his face - now that's baaad.

Years ago, probably at the start of the tattoo fad, there was a series of Bacardi ads. The one I remember most had a photo of a young woman (a not entirely unattractive young woman, based on what little you could see) shot from the back. She's in party clothes, her back is bare, and she's holding a glass. She has a tattoo in the small of her back. The tagline says "Lawyer by day, Bacardi by night". But that's it in the sad little nutshell, isn't it? She's still a lawyer, the tramp stamp
doesn't somehow unlawyer her.

On a housekeeping note, I think I've fixed the comment thing - see if it works. Please, no potty talk. And please be a little bit fabulous...

"I don't know"

I'm feeling slightly seedy today, as a result of having had 4 (yes, count 'em, 4!) beers last night with a neighbor of mine. It turns out we have a shared love of music, art, philosophy and a few other things - or, more likely, we were just half-tanked and middle-aged. (No, I'm being too cynical. It turns out we did, in fact, both like a number of very obscure cultural artefacts, and he burned me a CD of Brian Jonestown Massacre songs, and bizarrely enough I'd been telling another friend about BJM earlier that day because she's a big Dandies fan but had never seen DiG.) It reminded me of a time when I actually used to care about music and art very deeply. No, that's a lie, I never cared about art and I remain an absolute philistine when it comes to the visual arts.

Four beers doesn't sound like a lot, but it's the most I've had to drink since August 1998, when the week after my second son was born I went to Cuba. And I had two glasses of red wine on Friday night, which is doubly unusual because I never drink wine, when I had dinner with a charming and attractive young lady (who reads this, so I might say that anyway. But she is. Hello J.)

I didn't do anything silly when I was drunk. No fights with sailors in a bar, no stealing a car and driving to Florida. The best one of those I ever heard was a phone call I had with my friend 'E'. I was at work one day - this was in the mid80s. I picked up the phone, it was E.

Me: "Hello, how are you doing?"
E (sounding a bit awful): "Not so great..."
Me: "Why, what's wrong"
E: "I broke my leg"
Me: "Gee, that's a bummer, how did it happen?"
E: (pause): "Err...I don't know. I just woke up like this"

To go..

There's a new girl at the coffee place downstairs at my work (the old one left to have a baby - I didn't even notice she was 8 1/2 months pregnant..). Every afternoon we have this dialogue..

Me: A latte please, to go

Her: Is that to take away?

Me: Yes, to go.

It's been going on for 2 weeks, and I quite look forward to it now.

The 'F' word

Peter, my shrink, used the word 'fascinating' again yesterday. But at least this time it wasn't about me, it was about one of my issues. Which is some consolation. When he says it about me I worry that he sees me as funding for his beachhouse.

Easter Island

Feeling Marvellous in Melbourne (as one does).

There was a headline in the North Korean news the other day: "Statues of Kim Il Sung erected in different places". Which I guess is as opposed to all being erected in the same place, which would give it a bit of a doomed easter island sort of look. I went to Pyongyang once. One day I'll post some pics.

They do!

I was walking home from having dinner out with a mate when I went past a shop that had a sign that said "MEN SWEAR". Well, I thought, that's pretty f&*cking obvious. Of course it didn't really say that, after a split second I realised it just said menswear. I was pretty disappointed, as you can imagine. Is it just me, or are there ambiguous signs everywhere? I remember the ones in pubs that said "Ladies Lounge", which was certainly true, or the ones on ashtrays that said "smokers please", which wasn't.

In a similar vein, I'm still recovering from seeing the truck with "WASTE RESOURCES" written on the side (somewhere in this blog.. Feb?).

Chunky

Bizarrely enough, twice in the last week I've run into people I haven't seen in ages and they both said (and this is totally without prompting or solicitation) that I was quite a bit more muscly than I was before. Unless by 'muscly' they mean 'fat'. On one of these occassions I was almost naked, which is even more perplexing.

Massive!

A very ugly moment at the gym (first time in 2 weeks, was on vacation). 88kgs! All-time high. I'm never eating again. But at least I no longer have the sore butt/back/hip excuse. In 3 months I'll be like a greek god again. Bear with me....

Perfect vs Good, and the parable of the dishwasher

A little while ago I came across the saying 'the perfect is the enemy of the good', and it really struck a chord with me.

I was thinking about this when I was talking to my therapist, Peter, one Thursday morning. I started seeing him about a year ago when, to my surprise, I found that everything was all getting a bit much, and I felt like my head was going to explode - the head-about-to-explode thing is a phrase I'd heard before but never imagined quite how accurate it is until it happened. This does, also, explain why this blog is called mid-life crisis.

Anyway, we were talking about my general disinclination to confront things, and I couldn't help trying to weasel out of it by saying that you have to pick your battles, some things aren't worth fighting for etc. I pulled out the 'perfect is the enemy of the good' thing and he thought it was pretty good. (He one day described me as 'fascinating', which coming from a therapist makes me a little uncomfortable.)

I had an ex who saw things in very black-and-terms. She was a complete absolutist - things were good or bad, and she knew straight away. I found something about this certainty bracing and exhilirating, but it meant our domestic life had all sorts of strange currents. I told Peter the parable of the dishwasher.

My ex, let's call her, well, 'X', had an idealised view of how the dishwasher should work. She wouldn't rinse plates or cooking vessels, and she'd leave them until they got nice and crusty. She'd then put them in the dishwasher as usual, then when they came out - invariably with bits of baked-on gunge still adhering - she was upset and disappointed. She'd then pick the bits off by hand, or scrub then off, saying that the dishwasher didn't work properly. (Towards the end I thought she was blaming me for this, but at that point we were reading the worst into everything. She wasn't. But I still cringe at the thought of how sorry - and guilty - I felt for the dishwasher.)

My approach was to compromise with the dishwasher. I'd rinse things in a timely fashion and try to work with what the dishwasher actually was rather than what it should be in some idealised world. She saw this as evidence of character weakness on my part, and would give me a look of blank incomprehension when I tried to change her ways. She was, of course, partly right. I am far too ready to compromise, but at least in this particular instance it was worth it: I got clean dishes and with minimum effort.

Cut-rate scam!

'mary' writes to me on myspace. She's in a refugee camp in Ghana but she's from Sierra Leone. She has a business proposition for me:


I am mary james from sierra leon,but based here in Ghana in
the refugee camp. I am the daughter of the late James ben.who was
killed in during the sierra leon crisis. Please I do need your help. I do want
you to help me to retrieve the sum of 3.4million USD.with some pieces
of gold and diamond. Which my late father kept in a security company here in Ghana. Please I do need your help. Is difficult for me to get to the security company, because is illegal for me as a refugee to go to the security company. And the purpose of deposit is for foreign investor. So that’s why I need you to be my foreign
partner. Which will enable me to retrieve my consignment. I beg of you in
the name of God.

I have every necessary document here with me. and i will like to inform you that as soon as u claim the boxes of money i will come to u in u country were will can invest the fund on a good business and i will give you 20% out of the total fund and after you have reply me i will send you all u need to know to enable you claim the boxes for me and please if you are ready to help me please do send me your really name the name of your country and your picture and phone number so that i will know u in person because this boxes of gold and money i my life i will not like to lose them in any way hope to hear from reply me on my private mall address
blessing.mike@yahoo.co.uk
hope to hear from you soon thanks mary james

I'm certainly used to getting these sorts of emails, but what's the deal here? Usually it's the widow of the late emperor of the CAR, and she's got $80billion in gold and diamonds which she needs my help in getting out of a swiss bank account. Or if not the widow, some henchman. But this one, it's - wait for it - $3.4million! What sort of low-rent sucker does she take me for? It's insulting!

I do like the email address though, 'blessing.mike' has quite a nice ring to it.

These boots are made for selling

There are many ways I can tell I'm getting old - my lower back, left hip and butt are giving me grief, for example. But another way is that I'm starting to feel quite disconnected from popular culture, and to the extent that I do encounter it I'm appalled.

At the gym the other day they showed the video of Jessica Simpson doing 'these boots are made for walking'. On the one hand, she really is hot, but on the other hand, she's such a wholesome and gormless woman that the whole song sounds completely wrong - it's like when you hear a talented child vocalist singing 'my way'.

As so often happens (R&B and rap videos have the same effect) instead of feeling agreeably titillated I just feel tawdry for having been marketed to in such a witless way. It is, however, much better with the sound turned off.

fog lights and distance

An observation from driving around Melbourne a bit on school holidays: the further you get from the CBD the more cars there are with fog lights. Not surprising, really.

Curried Sardines?

I was leafing through 'One Continuous Picnic' the other day, which describes itself as a gastronomic history of Australia. For me, eating's like sex; I like thinking about it and talking about it just about as much as I like actually doing it. Anyway, there's a lovely chapter about food during the Depression, and it details some dishes which have mercifully become extinct. Such as, among other things, curried sardines, marrow cream (made from marrow and sugar) and mock tripe. This last one is richly archaic. Tripe itself must have been such a common and desirable foodstuff that making something that resembled tripe (from mutton flaps!) was a selling point.

I'm not a fussy eater, but I can't stomach (if you'll excuse the pun) tripe. I'm up for most kinds of offal, and in general will try to pick the weirdest thing on any menu. I used to do this to gross out my wife, who was very fussy, but it's also a bit of dare for myself. Mae West is supposed to have said "When choosing between two evils, I like to try the one I've never tried before". (Now i think about it, it's another parallel between food and sex.)

A colleague and I once had a themed lunch at (St John's Bread and Wine that consisted of faggots, bath chap and spotted dick. The bath chap was a bit gelatinous, but agreeably challenging. The faggots were good, as always, the highlight being when the waitress put them down in the middle of our table (we were sharing) and said accusingly 'faggots!'. The spotted dick was good, if you like that sort of thing.

Fatal

I had a strange flashback the other day. Years ago (8, 9?) I was in Budapest with my then wife. We were having dinner in a restaurant called Fatal. I would have gone there anyway just for the name, but it was good in a couple of other ways too. The food was good, and big. Huge serves of very stodgy middle-european food with lots of pork and cabbage and sour cream (my wife wasn't overly impressed, but I loved it). There was an agreeable touch of what my friend Ivan and I (who seek out this sort of thing) would call 'bizarricality' about it. But it got stranger. On the table next to us was a group of well-dressed people in their 40s. Having a good time, enjoying the food and a night out. One of the party, a fairly attractive and otherwise-respectable middle-aged woman was doing something which I caught out of the corner of my eye and registered as being a bit odd even before I saw what she was doing.

She was leaning forward, her face just above a serving bowl. And she was vomiting. Not in a big make-a-fuss way, but in a very controlled and decorous way. And noone else at her table seemed to think anything much of it.

I loved Budapest.

Melbourne. Footy.

I do like to think of myself as being tremendously cosmopolitan and sophisticated (Ivy League educated, I play piano, I know modernism from post-modernism, I've been to the Opera in Kiev and so on) but like anyone who spent formative years in Melbourne I have a strong attachment to AFL football - more so now that I've lived away for so long.

I took my sons to the MCG to watch a match. (Pies v Saints, if you must know. I was there as a neutral observer. I can't go for the Pies, and the thing that vaguely troubles me about St Kilda - my second son's team - is that nobody hates them. What's the point in that?) It was a great footy day in Melbourne. Cold, drizzly, grey. Walking from Richmond Station up to the MCG you start to feel like Melbourne's reached out and embraced you, clutching you to its bosom. There's nothing quite like that feeling of being part of a large happy crowd.

I was musing at one point about how people say that Hawthorn and Essendon dominated the 1980s. That's ridiculous. Carlton won 3 premierships in the 1980, so Essendon and Hawthorn can't both have won more. And ultimately, premierships are the only thing that matters.

Hep C - and Pamela

Peter Helliar - a TV comedian, and rather a good one (he's on my second-favorite show, among other things. And no, I certainly don't mean 'Rove') has had to apologise for a joke about Hep C and Pamela Anderson. He was asked what would be the best birthday present for Pamela, given that she has everything. He replied "Hepatitis". Then added "oh wait, she already got that last year".

This was seized upon by Hepatitis Australia, and Peter had to issue an apology. And then do a bit grovelling to boot. This seems unfair... for one thing, it was a very funny line, and while Hep C's not a great experience (I had it - and still have the antibodies to prove it) sometimes if you have a funny line you just have to say it. (If you go back far enough in this blog you'll find something I said to my PA which I knew at the time was at best ill-judged, but was also irrestible.)

For another thing, how does it humiliate or demean people with Hep C? Pamela Anderson's effectively a cariacature anyway, and she really does have Hep C.