I’m a graver

The UK Times: term for someone over 40 who likes going to dance parties. I still like the occasional party.

I don’t stay until dawn. I’m a short-sprinter, only a couple of hours. I don’t go to Recoveries, am tucked up in bed by then.

Breath – Tim Winton

Finished reading it today. It’s about a bloke trying to feel extraordinary and special and hanging out with the cool crowd and a cool chick but ultimately being thrown back as being too “ordinary”. And his guilty boredom with the dull people who do love him.

Years later, he regroups and sees himself as a decent bloke who’s loveable, but others see him as just “creepy”. So he has to suck it up and settle for whatever scraps of excitement and beauty he can find. It’s bittersweet but in an uplifting way.

There are autoerotic asphyxiation scenes too. But don’t try that, it’s too dangerous!

Very enjoyable, especially if you love Australian beaches or the ocean.

Haunted by Four Corners’ Terror in Mumbai

Thoughts about it keep coming back to hit me unexpectedly, like a nasty flick from a tea-towel. Those terrorists had been sold off as the “runts” of the family – sons sacrificed and their lives sold so their other siblings could use the money to get married. If the sold men hadn’t followed all the instructions, their families probably would have been killed. Maybe the cashed-up terror masterminds might have recruited their new soldiers as permanent team members, but no. So they’re rejected by their families and the terrorists and then told to shoot up everyone and they’ll “go to heaven”. The phone instructions were so chilling. Especially when the recruits were reluctant to set fire to the hotel because it has big TV screens and computers and two bathrooms and two kitchens – they were marvelling at riches they’d never seen before.

And the other recruits who kept delaying shooting their hostages – they kept putting it off repeatedly but finally went through with it as the mastermind on the phone kept ringing them back and haranguing them to go through with it.

Were the masterminds religious fanatics at all? They just seemed to be sociopaths wanting to instil fear throughout society. Resentful  rejects with lots of money which they used to buy vulnerable people and use their lives as fodder for sadistic power fantasies.

One of the recruits even asked the mastermind on the phone: “Have you done this before?” [killed people]. The mastermind says yes, and assures the recruit he’ll go to heaven. So sad and sick.

It’s at the Four Corners site for another week.

If bees can do it, so can we

Aussie researchers have discovered that different honey bee species –  using an elaborate bum wiggle to communicate – can learn each other’s dialects. They bred and combined Asian and European bees into a single colony.

“Using video camera footage, scientists discovered that not only were the two getting along, but after a time, both were eventually able to decode each other’s bottom signals.”

(Great restraint was used when I wrote the header.)

iQ debate: can the media be trusted?

Was sold out.  Line-up arguing the media cannot be trusted was Jonathan Holmes (Media Watch), Prof Catharine Lumby (academic, teaches the NRL how to behave towards women), and Stephen Mayne (crikey and shareholder activist).

The media can be trusted: John B Fairfax (FFX Media board), Mark Scott (ABC MD) and Julian Burnside QC (human rights barrister).

Team B won with a huge swing from 18 per cent of the pre-polled audience to about 45 per cent after the debate.

Burnside: “Being attacked by Andrew Bolt and Gerard Henderson is like being mauled by dead sheep – it doesn’t hurt, but you need a shower afterwards.”

Holmes: “You can find a website that’ll tell you the truth you want.”

Fairfax: “I made a mistake once. [anecdote about mixing up blokes names and getting sued. Was suspended for two weeks from newsroom.] Later on: “Oh, I made a second mistake. I was doing the shipping column and I sent a ship out a day before it was supposed to go.”

Lumby: (sending herself up] “I’m a promiscuous post-modernist so I agree with them [the other team] now.”

Mayne: described how he is enduring several 10-yr bans from various media outlets because of “petty vendettas”. Burnside thought Mayne’s worst crime though was trying to bombard us with too many facts and statistics without painting a bigger picture.

[I went to the last iQ debate on public vs private education. Brilliant. Much more audience debate, it was fiery.]