“Informed” indeed

Now election day does tend to bring out some cranks, and even in Maroubra/Kingsford-Smith we tend to get them. This time round, we got these clowns:

“Informed”

Never heard of them before now but they have evidently been around for a few years. Quoth Wiki:

The Informed Medical Options Party (formerly known as the Involuntary Medication Objectors (Vaccination/Flu…oride) Party) is an Australian political party. The party’s policies oppose compulsory vaccination programs and water fluoridation. The Party states that these are “mass-medication programs” where there is “genuine scientific uncertainty about the benefits and risks in a genetically diverse population”. Australian Medical Association president Tony Bartone said the party’s views “lack the backing of scientific evidence” and that its members “should consider the harm that can ensue upon the Australian community”. It was registered for federal elections on 26 October 2016.
Party secretary Michael O’Neill said the “anti-vaxxer” label regularly used by critics was “insulting”.

Well if you don’t want to be called anti-vaxxers… maybe don’t be opposed to vaccination? I know they insist they’re only really opposed to compulsory vaccination schemes like the Covid program, but I feel that if you expressed an active interest in getting the Covid vaccine and actively wanted it, they would try and talk you out of it. Indeed, when the Covid thing was kicking off in 2020, one of their candidates made a misinformation video on the subject (claiming you can’t catch a virus unless it’s injected right into your bloodstream, which will come as news to BILLIONS of people who’ve ever had the common cold) which wound up being banned from Youtube and Facebook; before it vanished from the latter, it wound up being shared by people like anti-5G mobs and the crypto-Nazis at Reclaim Australia. Great friends to have…

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Habemus Minns

So, state election day today. It appears that not only has Labor won (Dominic Perrottet has called Chris Minns to concede), it has positively conquered… last time they won an election in NSW they did so by just one seat, whereas if current figures hold they’ll do by about 20 if not more. I took this screenshot just before 10pm from the ABC website:

Yikes!

I’m genuinely astounded by this. I mean, I thought Labor was actually in with a chance for once but that they would still face a challenge from the Coalition and that the latter might still scrape through… but no, Labor is romping home and they’ve taken a bunch of seats from the blue mob to boot. I’m actually kind of shocked by how comparatively poorly the Coalition did. That said, apparently there were over a million and a half postal votes so I suppose that may affect the final numbers… but I don’t suppose there’ll be anywhere near enough to overturn the evident result of tonight, might narrow the margins a bit.

That said, I have seen some commentary online that this was really a vote against the Libs and not for Labor, and I think that’s not entirely wrong…

The two sweetest words in the English language!

Quite. The NSW ALP has been coasting for a long time by keeping its head down and not being the Coalition, and that’s not going to be enough any more. They’ve succeeded in reminding us that they exist (with our media being what it is, it was easy to forget for some years there than the ALP was actually still a thing in NSW), now they need to actually BE something. Ball’s in your court, Christopher, please don’t fuck this up.

Anyway, even funnier than the Coalition being given its marching orders is this delightful screenshot I found on Facebook of the Sky “News” coverage:

We couldn’t be happier, really

…and then this even better closeup on Peta Credlin that I ganked from Twitter:

No.. really

I feel their pain.

And it is GOOD.

As for ye olde print media, this is what Bevan Shields from the Sydney Morning Herald said before the big day (thanks to Terry Sedgwick for catching and annotating this):

Why did I always use to think the SMH was a liberal paper? Evidently they were really a Liberal one…

I imagine that Bevan is busy wailing and gnashing his teeth right now, and furiously hammering away at his word processor to lecture us on how we all got that ultimate decision terribly, terribly wrong.

The Nicholas Brothers: GODFUCKINGDAMN

FUCKING LOOK AT THIS. Someone posted a colourised version of this clip on Mastodon, which was ho-hum enough that I went in search of the scene in proper b&w and duly found it. Not everything needs to be run through a wobbly AI to make it look “new”, especially when it’s not even convincing at doing that. But… just… LOOK at it. Seriously. Fred Astaire apparently claimed this was the best film dance scene he’d ever seen, and I’m not going to disagree with him on that point.

The amazing thing about this is that there’s just so many points where something could’ve gone horrifically wrong and everything would’ve been absolutely fucked. I presume the whole thing was shot with multiple cameras cos it looks like one take (albeit edited from multiple positions—and albeit from some reasonably long shots, too, this is not super-edited), and really, anything could’ve gone wrong. It finally gets to the end on the large flight of stairs and they’re kind of piggybacking each other on the way back down while doing the splits and I just shouted “JESUS CHRIST!” at that point (I actually couldn’t watch it on my second viewing). I mean, nothing does go wrong but if you’re like me you’ll watch this wondering when something will… and then you’ll wonder how nothing did. Phenomenal.

Simpsons already did it

Florida Principal Ousted After Parents Melt Down Over Michelangelo’s ‘Pornographic’ Statue of David

I was kind of amused by the way a certain long-running TV cartoon show was described as predicting the Trump presidency, but then THIS happened:

A Florida charter school principal has been ousted after multiple parents complained that their sixth graders were made to view pornography—because they looked at Michelangelo’s iconic statue of David.
The statue was shown during a sixth grade art history lesson at Tallahassee Classical School, the Tallahassee Democrat first reported. One of the most famous pieces of artwork in the world, the statue shows a chiseled, naked man posing. But while most of the world sees it as art, some parents deemed it “pornographic” and said it “upset” their children.
Parents at Tallahassee Classical now want to take an advanced vote on any lesson their kids could be subjected to that’s deemed “controversial,” part of a growing nationwide trend to dictate education supported by Florida’s own education board and the DeSantis administration.

The Simpsons in 1990, way before they predicted Lord Dampnut

Of course, this is the only funny thing about this story; apparently the school usually sends letters to idiots parents when they’re teaching art history that may involve practical but evil parts of the body, but somehow that didn’t happen this and little Johnny got exposed to Dave’s Johnny, and now this poor woman is out of a job and Ron deScumbag’s creeping Florida fascism continues to be on the march thanks to a clerical error. And given how much art does involve naughty bits, I wouldn’t be surprised if these concerned parents decide to just remove all of it from the curriculum just in case…

Arachne

I threatened a while ago to post an example of my own poetic… whatever, and with it being World Poetry Day I suppose it’s time I finally did that. Without further ado…

“It’s not that big,” he said. The hell it’s not,
I thought right back while hovering at a distance.
It’s not that big? The size is irrelevant
When you’re the sort of arachnophobe I am.
My housemate’s not, and that’s an excellent thing
At times like this when I need his assistance,
But I don’t think he quite gets how it feels
To have this evolutionary error
Somehow make its way into your house
And lurk unnoticed, not even suspected.
It was cunningly concealed behind the curtain,
Up on the back door frame, and visible
Only from an angle lying down
Upon the couch, or else I’d never have seen
The hint of arachnid leg, the bit of body
That “wasn’t that big” but didn’t have to be,
Because even if I had seen bigger ones,
It was big enough and it was in my room.

We brought the vacuum cleaner through the back
To suck our intruder up, but it had moved:
And then we saw it scuttle to the ceiling
And then fall down, and lose itself again
Among the rustling curtain…  “There it is,”
He said as the fucking thing shot right behind me,
And paused upon my shoe just long enough
For him to draw it into the vacuum stick.
That was closer than I would’ve liked.

I hate arachnophobia, and I know
Just how irrational it is, and that
There’s little that I really need to fear;
I probably scared the spider somewhat more
Than it scared me. But I don’t particularly care;
It’s irrational, but that’s why it’s a phobia,
Not just a vague dislike of eight-legged things.
And so I suppose it’ll keep getting in my way
Whenever the next one comes inside to play.

So, that’s “Arachne”, offered here for what it may be worth, written in September 2021, and yes it was written after a close encounter with one of Ungoliant’s offspring in my room. (Parenthetically, Joe, my housemate, got one in his room a few nights ago, as I discovered when I heard him let loose a loud “WAAAAAARGH!”; Joe copes with spiders much better than I do, but get one big enough—as this one apparently, even he conceded it was “huge” and I’m happy I never saw it myself—and too close to him and it’s another matter…) If nothing else, I suppose this effort pretty much exemplifies the sort of thing I like in verse, e.g. not rhyming is fine (but ending on one is still kind of nice), strict-ish use of regular metre—I do like me some iambic pentameter—but not completely unyielding and unvarying ba-DUM ba-DUM etc. My body of work is not large (I don’t have a lot of ideas for writing), but this is one of the better examples of it.

Armitage’s vision

Also, for World Poetry Day, let me present a poem I’m fond of:

The future was a beautiful place, once.
Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town
on public display in the Civic Hall?
The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,

blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
like fairground rides or executive toys.
Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.

And people like us at the bottle bank
next to the cycle path, or dog-walking
over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,
or model drivers, motoring home in

electric cars. Or after the late show –
strolling the boulevard. They were the plans,
all underwritten in the neat left-hand
of architects – a true, legible script.

I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.

Oh, that hurts to read. This is “A Vision” by Simon Armitage, it’s in a collection called Paper Aeroplanes which Rachel Oates (again) introduced me to, and it touches on something that resonates with me… cos when I were a lad, I read books like this:

This is the sort of thing I grew up on (there is a distinct possibility I still own these, too, though I’m not sure exactly where), this series came from Usborne in the late seventies and I presume it was the early 80s when I discovered it. Though this book’s otherwordly city of the future may be not exactly what Armitage’s poem describes, this is why I said it hurts. Cos I kind of expected this sort of thing would happen. It wasn’t just science fiction, it was something that, one day, could be real, I might even live to see it happen… And I don’t think that was just cos I was a child who didn’t know any better, I think there was still a broader sense that the future would indeed be expansive. There was indeed a vision for the future, and it was indeed a beautiful place (assuming we didn’t nuke ourselves out of existence before we made it back to the Moon).

The future… didn’t turn out like that, did it? I mean, sure, the Internet is cool, I suppose, and it’s weird how so few of our fictional futures seem to have expected it, but… I feel like there were so many other things that should have happened. We were cheated out of the futures we could’ve had, “all unlived in and now fully extinct”. (Cf. what Mark Fisher had to say about hauntology and lost futures; can’t share his enthusiasm for Burial, though). The lost future didn’t even need to be the sort of thing on the book cover above, it could just be the sort of thing Armitage describes, a small town or suburb made better and more interesting, then consigned to landfill. It didn’t need to be a grand vision… it just could’ve been more than what we got.

Jordan B. Poetry

On the occasion of World Poetry Day, I think it’s time I finally talked about something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now.

Jordan B. Peterson’s poetry.

And I don’t mean that hideous “children’s book”, I mean something he actually posted on his website presumably quite some time ago, though I will briefly mention that… or at any rate I’ll point you to a couple of Youtube videos:

Firstly, one from José which was how I discovered this book was a thing in the first place (he notes that Peterson himself seems to be doing oddly little to promote it, having apparently deleted his own video about it and I can’t see it mentioned on his website either, which is certainly… interesting) and discovered Jurr Durr had written a terrible Edward Gorey knock-off…

…and here’s Rachel Oates, who knows poetry, writes it, performs it, understands it, and is able to explain just why it’s a terrible Edward Gorey knock-off. Enough about that, what I want to talk about instead is… this. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting the thing entire in case the good doctor remembers its existence and decides to delete the evidence that he actually wasn’t bad at poetry once…

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