I went to Bondi Beach late after a work shift a couple of nights ago. I used to live there years ago, in Jacques Ave, where the Post Office is. The Hotel Bondi has smartened up.
The ocean was very noisy, though the waves were small – it roars. I loved the bracing, salty air – like inhaling a strong packet of Pringles Salt & Vinegar into my lungs. Refreshing. It’s all a bit blurry – I just got bifocals. The joys of ageing!
And I wrote this headline, was pleased it got in: It’s a jump to the Left, then a step to the Right.
And Backbenchers feign shock over PM’s F-word. My caption: Fair shake of the sauce bottle … Rudd hopes this latest outburst will be consigned to the “forgettery”.
“Stress, celebrity worship and rising complacency are fuelling a growing political ignorance.” The Fun-Herald on why no one’s interested in politics.
I think it’s because it takes so long to digest. It’s much quicker to get to grips with the finer points of Britney’s ups and downs, though I haven’t read much about her lately. There aren’t enough summaries and short ongoing narratives on politics.
For some news stories, it’s not even clear – if you’re not a newshound – whether they’re talking about state or federal politicians. And TV news just mangles everything. There’s no middle ground for people who just want to read summaries of poltics on-the-run.
Katharine Murphy’s piece “In the belly of the beast” makes it clear why politics is such a huge turn-off.
Dried rations are stashed under the desk. There are no family photographs because there are no families, dogs, lawns or detritus of any kind, apart from some long-suffering girlfriends.
… And the blokes absolutely run this show. They like football, and novellas, and blogs, and popular culture in boxed sets of DVDs they can devour down the back of the Prime Minister’s plane.
I enjoyed reading “In the belly of the beast”, though it confirmed what a pointless waste of time those staffers are with their skewed priorities.
The thing about the protesters in Ryde worrying about pedophile Dennis Ferguson is that they’re completely right to be worried. Or any pedophile.
How do I know this? Because years ago, I worked for the Perth CIB for three months (temporary job) and spent all day microfiching criminal records. Zillions of pages. The thing was, we were given the major responsibility of selecting what to record and what to throw out – though the “throw out” bins were examined and thoroughly checked to make sure we didn’t do anything wrong.
So we’d have to quickly read through the records – some had hundreds of pages – and pick out the key pages and put them on a photocopier-type machine that microfiched them. I can tell you, the ones that had done sex offences did them all through their lives. An offence at 18; still doing it at 90. Long breaks between offences, maybe cause they got married or didn’t get caught for a while. But if I found a major sex offence in old age, there were usually ones earlier in about 98 per cent of cases.
That’s anecdotal from the thousands of pages I copied. If someone wants to do a study, I bet they’d get the same results.
The SMH recently published about elderly people still having a sex drive, it doesn’t wane for everyone: “About 40 per cent of men aged 75 to 79 who replied to the survey said they were sexually active, and almost 30 per cent of men aged 80 to 84 had had sex in the past 12 months.”
Also, last year, I was at a community event where I wasn’t allowed on the same huge bus as children because I “didn’t have sex offender clearance”. I’d just wanted to get a bus ride to the next venue. And I couldn’t interact with the children playing in a park or at lunchtime – there were hundreds of people there. A 14-yr-old girl had been forced to come along to the event because “she was young enough to not need to get a clearance” and they’d desperately needed extra people to help look after the children.
It staggers me that people who don’t have a criminal record and are not recorded on any sex offender’s list are not allowed anywhere near children – to help out where there’s a shortage of child minders. I’d have to walk around with a permanent and up-to-date ”clearance” to ever volunteer to help out.
It’s easier to cry during that doco on the pets being inbred or Scooby being rescued from the cave than for the angry faced poor featured on foreign affairs programs. It’s difficult to feel appropriate empathy when they’re eyeing up the TV crew like they want to machete them. It’s not doing their cause any favours.
I remember donating to the tsunami appeal, and then reports got back that Aceh didn’t want our filthy money cause they’re radical Muslims. Bad PR. They need Max Markson.
This week’s Foreign Correspondent filled its usual quota of gruesomeness but Eric Campbell (reporter) seemed very disappointed at being unable to show workers slaving away in a treeless coltan mine. It seems the problem had been mostly cleared up before Campbell got there, though he managed to find a blackmarket seller. The tone was very heavy-handed. Like this: coltan is used by us selfish Westerners for our hedonistic PlayStations and mobile phones. Sorry – but I didn’t see that on the label when I bought it.
And reporters showing off that they know French cheeses me off – it’s so Jana Wendt. Why? Cause I think there should always be a local interpreter shown onscreen just in case there are local idioms and coloquiallisms. Native tonguesters aren’t going to speak in Language Laboratory French.
I preferred Campbell’s reports, with a touch of wry humour, on The Investigators (1987), with Helen Wellings.
Cotton Ward 