Whose god do I have to screw to get elected around here?

I’ve started blogging on an external site, the Insiders Blogs based around the ABC’s Sunday morning TV political treat, the Insiders.

You can check out my first post to the site here. Essentially it’s lamenting that the host of the show missed good opportunities to lynch a federal senator about his shenanigans.

It might not be that accessible if you’re not up on Australian politics, but I did put links into the post which will get you up to speed. The actual interview I’m writing about can be read or listened to here.

If nothing else, my wittiness and constant allusions and analogies should keep you entertained

Hooroo.

M

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I went out on an RSVP date a couple of days ago. Now I know I promised a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t be writing about my dating experiences anymore, but I think this is alright – I can write about this experience because:

1. I’m not going to be saying anything particularly personal or identifying about the person, and
2. It’s looking completely unlikely that we’ll be going out ever again.

Now the reason this woman and I are completely unlikely to ever go out again is something that I said about religion. Well, at least I’m assuming that was it. I mean, I’m hyper intelligent, have a wit to match Oscar Wilde and have rock-hard abs of steel (plus a tendency for exaggeration) so it couldn’t be anything else.

I should have known better, really. This is how it went.

She says she was born and bred a Catholic, which she follows up with, “and so do you have any faith?”

So I say “well, I was born a Catholic…” her eyes light up “and I still regard myself as having some spiritual beliefs…” still good “but I think religions are disgusting, unevolved and are responsible for most of the major problems the world has.”

That might have been the moment.

But then she comes back with a line of argument I haven’t heard before, about how when most religions started, they gave desperately needed order and guidance to a people who sorely needed. (She was the thinking man’s Catholic)

“Fair enough,” I say, “but they still went and fucked it all up pretty quick, didn’t they?”

If I hadn’t killed it earlier, that probably did it.

So I might have to work on my dating skills a little. Perhaps absolute honesty is not the way to go… I suppose though it was good to find out the whole clash on religion thing right at the beginning. In idle moments – you know, just walking down the street kicking an aluminium can – I’ve thought about my wedding, and have decided that there’s no way in the layers of hell (literally and figuratively) that I’m going to get married in a church. Unless it’s been deconsecrated of course. The last proper church wedding I went to I felt ill.

Just how would you go about deconsecrating something, anyway? Sacrifice a goat? Does consecration have an expiry date? Maybe it’s like a driver’s licence: you get your consecrating for 1, 3 or 5 years, depending on how much you pay, and then you have to get in a registered bishop or iman or rabbi or something to come out and do the whole thing again. If you pay enough, the Pope comes and does it and it lasts for 10-15 years…

Alright, now I’m rambling – post-failed date analysis over.

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Alright. It’s been a seriously long time since I blogged. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking about it. In fact, on my whiteboard I have a list of titles for posts that I’ve been meaning to write. This is the list:

• iphone killed the electronic dictionary
• Alvin and the Chipmunks vs mixed race marriage
• Brittany Murphy – Hollywood Fail
• Chopsticks in Thailand
• Betting on the Sumo
• Sex and Technology
• Tweet like Baby Jesus
• Barely Evolved
• The Gibberish Song

Just this morning I saw the under-siege Peter Garrett on the front pages of the abc and smh websites, and had mixed feelings I thought would be worth exploring on these pages. The nutshell version is that at first I felt sorry for him, but after thinking about it I don’t.

I think my sympathy came from the personal connection I feel with him. It was his voice, out the front of Midnight Oil, that exposed me to many of the social justice values that I now have.  And I was gutted when he entered politics he decided to join the ALP and not a party which actually had the values he seemed to embody for so long. But he chose his sleeping companions, and the grilling he’s getting from the Opposition is the kind of scrutiny and politician should expect.

The following video was the Oils performance that really hammered it home for me. I couldn’t listen to the band for ages once Garrett joined the ALP and started back-flipping on his principles. Now I see them as two different people.

To put the blogging piece of bread on top of the sandwich and finish off, writing/maintaining a blog is one of those things where a simple rule applies. The longer you haven’t done something, the harder it is to start doing it. I’m thinking that rule also applies to politics: plenty of people get into it with the right intentions, but after years of toeing party lines and compromising values, do they come out broken beyond repair?

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It’s a pretty obvious time of the year to write about food. December is the one month of the year where I barely need to go to the supermarket. As long as I have some fruit or milk or muesli to have for breakfast, all of the other meals seem to take care of themselves. It could be work parties, catching up with friends, family, lunch in the shopping centre food court as a break from the obligatory Christmas shopping, Christmas Day, the leftovers from Christmas Day… I never go hungry in December.

But other people do. This year, approximately 1.02 billion people were chronically hungry, about 15% of the estimated world population. This is up a staggering 166 million people from three years ago. The majority, of course, are in developing countries.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines chronic hunger as undernourishment. This generally covers protein-energy malnutrition which is the lack of protein and energy provided by the basic food groups. This undernourishment affects people’s ability to do basic physical activities such as work and study. Undernourished children grow slower physically and mentally than other children, and they have weaker immune systems. Undernourished mothers give birth to undersized and weak babies.

The average necessary daily intake is regarded as 1800 kcal per day. In McDonald’s terms, that’s about a large Quarter Pounder Meal and a McFlurry.

From 1969 to 2004 the proportion of the population of developing countries who suffered from chronic hunger had been falling steadily, from almost 35% of the population in 1969 to just over 15% in 2004. This coincided with a general decrease in the number of hungry people over the same period, from about 875 million to 850 million. The decreases in percentage and actual number are not proportional, likely because better nutrition meant that less people died from malnutrition.

But since 2004, both trends have begun reversing. From a low point of around 16% in 2004, the percentage of people in developing countries who are undernourished in 2009 is nearing 20%. In percentage terms the increase may seem to be not that bad (or not as bad as it could be) but in real terms, in numbers of people, the increase has been astronomical, especially in the last twelve months.

When I read figures and learn things like this, I am constantly at a loss what to do It’s such an obvious deficiency in the world. I’m no expert in this area (or any other for that matter) but you’d think that if there were easy answers, they would have been found and implemented by now. Through a cursory search it seems that the world produces around 1.5 times the food we actually need, and that most people who are undernourished live in countries which have food surpluses rather than deficits. The problem would appear to be that the people can’t afford to buy the food they need.

Yesterday, Christmas Day, I ate way too much food. I’m probably not alone there. I am also a pretty hefty eater, and a little overweight. I’ve felt crap and figuratively beat myself up about my weight and eating habits before. I’ve tried a number of the methods under the sun for cutting down on both, but none to date have been long-term solutions. But maybe something like eating less and sending the money I save to an organisation addressing hunger could do the trick. Good for the body, good for the soul? It’s worth a try.

Apologies for getting all self-reflective and soppy at the end there.

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Just returned from a good feed at the Parramatta Roxy with my Wednesday Night Dinner Crew. As you might have guessed from our name, we meet on Wednesday nights for dinner. A couple of weeks ago two Crew members were unable to come because they had free tickets to the Kirin Big In Japan event at the Carriageworks in Redfern, Sydney.

From the sounds of things it was a whole lot of Japanese performance artists doing stuff. Like the guy who played guitar while a machine painted onto a canvas in response to his music. About halfway through the song the paint machine broke and stopped painting, so another guy came and picked up the brush and continued painting.

It sounds absolutely riveting, and I know you as well as I would have been overwhelmed by the level of profundity. From all reports, the Inner City Chic Crowd were totally engaged with the performance works and lapped it all up with furrowed-brow seriousness. I really wish I could have seen the dudes with electrodes attached to their faces.

Another performance that sounded unmissable was a music act called Trippple Nippples. There are many fine photos of these Japanese ladies I could share which could give some sense of just how solid they are. I hear on Wednesday they were using gaffer tape as a bra. Maybe like in this video?

And here’s a sample of their music. My friends from the Wednesday Night Dinner Crew said they were having trouble not laughing throughout the event. The main reason they didn’t was because everyone around them seemed to be taking it all so seriously.

Now I’m quite a fan of performance in many shapes and forms, but I really struggle to find words to describe things like this other than ’self-indulgence’.  It strikes me that the people who take this stuff so seriously must be completely out of touch with anything resembling reality. And the fact that these people are Sydney’s in-scene fills me not so much with horror as dismay.

I have no doubt that there are many fine performance artists out there. But I doubt they’ll be found at events put on by beer companies.

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The leadership spill in NSW last week which ended up with Kristina Keneally replacing Nathan Rees has brought up a problem that I have with Australia’s political system: someone can become the leader of a government without being voted for by the people.
I know that technically, when we vote in a lower house election we’re [...]

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Thought I’d share this flowchart of the lyrics to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart.

I found it on the always entertaining ABC Arts Blog, Articulate , and they got it from internet newspaper the Huffington Post, which has a whole section of diagrams for songs. I like this Meatloaf one.
I was going to embed the [...]

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Have I mentioned before that I have a massive crush on Naomi Klein? It’s massively superficial. I’m just crazy for the ideas in her head and the way she puts them into sentences and paragraphs.
She’s written a couple of articles recently on the upcoming Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
The first one was originally published in [...]

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Over the last fortnight, a couple of people have asked me whether I’ve been dating someone. One comment was in relation to my infrequent recent blogging habits, surmising that I’d been neglecting that in favour of devoting more time to that special someone. This would be a fair enough excuse – it appears quite typical [...]

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From time to time, I like to have discussions with religious people about their faith, be they Christian, Buddhist, Scientologist… I don’t discriminate. I find it a good way to examine my own beliefs, and given how religion has been such an important, some would argue integral, part of human development, it also helps me [...]

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