The Problem With America...

...is really simple, when you think about it. They just elected the wrong black guy to the office of President.

See? Much better idea.

Well. What Do You Know? Explains A Lot, Really.

From a 1996 article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology:

The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.

That really would seem to account for a lot of the bullshit from various Conservative government members around the world. You know the ones: by day they spend their time thundering away in Parliament or Congress or Diet or whatever, excoriating the Evils of Homo Secks You Allity... but by night they put on fishnets, rubber underpants and a gas mask and hang around public toilets with prominent holes in the walls.

It's been more or less accepted folklore for quite some time that "homophobe" is just another word for "closet case". In fact, apparently the idea goes back as far as Freud, who theorized that people get most uptight and condemnatory towards stuff they secretly want, but think they shouldn't have.

In any case, it's nice to know somebody actually investigated this, and the results stood up to peer review. I'm going to make a little note of the title of the article, the date of publication, and the authors, and the next time I'm involved in a discussion with a loud-mouthed closet case, I'll let him know that a) he's not fooling anybody, and b) there are people who can help him come to terms with his own feelings.

Mind you, I wouldn't recommend this course of action to everybody. I personally can probably survive most of the fistfights which may result from this, but then I've been practising.

School Hols

That is my new shirt. Yes. I got out the inks and paints again. Personally, I think it sums up the situation pretty well. Fair warning, I reckon.

We're at the halfway mark on the current batch of school hols. There's a big push on to change the school year to match the mainlanders next year - four terms of ten weeks each. Not sure I like that. I remember being a kid. School is dire, boring horror and you live for the holidays and weekends. Personally, I think there's too much time allocated to classroom hell already.

The snow stuck around for a surprising length of time. As we drove into Launceston yesterday for Genghis' regular bass lesson, there were still little patches of snow by the roadside along the Sideling Range. I've never seen that before. Mount Barrow was appropriately snowy, and when we came over the hills into Launceston proper, I could see that the Western Tiers were white from one end to the other. Great start to winter.

In other news... anybody got a cure for kids fighting? Genghis gets bored, the first thing he starts doing his irritating and baiting his sister. And then it's on. This has been going long enough that even my patience is worn out. Genghis has been fetching an awful lot of firewood lately, and we've literally reached the zero-tolerance point. He doesn't get the benefit of doubt any more. A single wrong word - even a sideways look, sometimes - and he's off the field. It's really fucking irritating.

We're doing our best to explain it to him, and make him understand that if he dislikes the situation, it's in his power to change it. But there's only so much of that kind of thing that sinks in when you're eight years old. And to be fair, the Mau-Mau is an annoying little gobshite too.

Well. I've had a quiet Sunday morning, but that's about to end. I've set up pizza dough for the evening feast, and I'll have to go down to the supermarket for the Sunday papers, plus a few other bits and pieces. Then I'll get back, and run the pump. Then I'll fire up the chainsaw, cut up a few of the older deadfalls and extend our firewood supply. That'll occupy the afternoon nicely, and then it's into the dinner routine.

Thanks to the redoubtable Tehani, I've been pushing Jake into various writing competitions. The school can't really help him with his narrative and creative writing skills to any great degree... he's kind of past that. Happily, his teacher is very helpful, and she understands the situation, so we're throwing different entry forms at him, and seeing what falls out. I've got his entry for the Bauhinia Literary Awards all enveloped, ready to go, and he wrote a cracker of a piece of poetry last night for the Dorothea Mackellar competition.

By way of encouraging him and keeping him company, I've written a piece for the Bauhinia awards too. Haven't done something at the 2000 word length for a while. It was kind of refreshing. I figure if he knows his old man is entering the same competition (they have different age categories, of course) he'll be more interested in the various outcomes. The only negative I can see is if I manage to score a gong and he doesn't... but I don't even think that will peeve him. He's enjoying the writing, and he's excited about being involved in a 'real competition'. If I score something and he doesn't, I'm quite sure he'll put it down to the professional experience, and roll with the punches.

Personally, I'm hoping he scores something more significant than me. That would really give him a boost. We'll see.

Damned if I'm entering the bloody Dorothea Mackellar disasterzone, though. I'm not even certain there is an adult entry... but I don't care. The 'sunburnt country' is my pink butt, and Dorothea Mackellar can kiss it.

On a final note: I saw a rather enjoyable movie the other night - a loaner, from Q-Dog of the Shite Team. It's called "The Warrior's Way", and it's a hybrid Korean/Hollywood piece with CGI courtesy of Weta. It's a heady mixture of samurai/ninja and Western B-movie, and it's very cool. It never takes itself too seriously, but still manages to hit all the right notes. Homages to the greats of both Eastern and Western cinema, decent performances all round (and what is Geoffrey Rush doing here? My! I guess he wanted to add 'ageing drunken Western outlaw with a heart of gold' to his 'Ruthless Pirate Captain' B-movie chops) and strong story arcs for all the more important players.

Very definitely worth an evening in. Find it on DVD and enjoy hell out of it.

It Got Cold Today

Seriously cold. As in maybe record-breaking.

At about 1000 this morning, there were big, fat flakes of snow swirling around the yard. Admittedly, they were mixed with rain and sleet, but the only other time I've seen snow here was a brief flurry of very little flakes at 0800 one morning, about eight years back.

The kids and I layered up like Matroshka dolls. We were planning to set out for Mt Barrow, where the snow usually falls. However, we only made it a hundred metres or so from our driveway before the snow was noticeably piling up on the road. A few hundred metres later, we saw it all over the big tree ferns. And then there were small trees, bent under the unaccustomed weight, leaning onto the road and disrupting the traffic. Fortunately, since the snow was maybe five cm deep on the road by then, there really wasn't much traffic to disrupt.

We made it as far as the lookout, which has perhaps two hundred, maybe three hundred metres of elevation on this house. This is what things looked like up there.

A few minutes later, the police turned up from the direction of Launceston. They were driving very slowly. They weren't impressed by the plan to drive to Mt Barrow.

Later, by the time I went shopping to Scottsdale, they had closed the highway. I didn't find out about it until I came down, round the sweeping corner, and discovered 'road closed' signs facing the other direction across the road. Being the scofflaw I am, I drove around them. Then I went to the bank, the post office, the butcher, and the supermarket. On the way home, I drove back around the road closed signs. Mmmm. I am a rebel. And illegally obtained roast pork and vegetables taste much nicer, anyway.

At first, the Mau-Mau was having a good time. But then she took off her pink gloves so they "wouldn't get wet." Then she complained about her cold, wet, hands. Then she fell on her face, and howled quite a lot. No snow expedition is complete without a good Mau-Mau faceplant.

Young Genghis, on the other hand, just couldn't be stopped. I suspect he has veins full of superheated antifreeze, not blood at all.

Check it out! That is very nearly a real snowman. It's a bit leafy, and there's some wallaby shit embedded in it, but it's much bigger than any of our previous efforts, and it actually held together.

By the time Mr Snowman was a reality, the Mau-Mau had hunkered down in the car, never to emerge again. Everybody else was cold and soaked, because at this altitude there was still some rain among all that snow. We decided not to go for Mount Barrow. Pity.

An interesting thing: across the road from the lookout is a commercial plantation of Douglas Firs. They're pretty sizeable, and they've been there as long as I've lived here, so I guess they're probably fifteen years old or more. Anyway, despite being evergreens from a snowy ecosystem, they've been growing here without yearly snow. Because of that, the unexpected weight of the falling snow was too much for them. As we mucked around in the snow on the lookout, we kept hearing big branches snap and fall. It sounded like a giant, stomping about in the forest.

And finally: this is Jake's Youtube footage of the winter adventure.

May not mean much to those of you from real snow country... but for us, it was pretty mindblowing.

So Stupid It Gives Stupid A Bad Name

By now, you'll be aware that I think Australia's policies towards asylum-seekers and refugees are disgraceful in the extreme. Now, however, Gillard's government has shown me that no matter how obnoxious and stupid a government is, there's always a way to fall even lower.

We're letting Australian soldiers die in Afghanistan on the pretext of 'nationbuilding'. We're supposedly helping the Afghan people create necessary infrastructure and civil order, and in so doing, theoretically building a relationship between our two peoples. You know: so as to undermine the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric of the Wahabi idiots behind Al-Qaeda and other largely Islamic agitators.

We talk about engaging with moderate Muslims. We talk about tolerance. We talk about finding ways to cross the cultural divide, to promote understanding.

And then we send unaccompanied children off to Malaysia.

Check the article.

There's stupid. Then there's Pauline Hanson moronic. And then there's subhuman, brain-dead cretinism the like of which I don't think I've seen from a government in this nation before.

We've got couples all over the country who are absolutely desperate to adopt children. (Go ahead. Check out the waiting times.) We've got a precarious relationship with Islam and with various countries in this part of the world. And we've got a pool of innocent children without families -- children who ask for and need nothing more than any other child -- who come from some of these troubled countries. Some of them are certainly of the Islamic faith. All of them, without exception, are frightened and wretchedly alone.

It would take an absolute imbecile not to see the opportunity this presents. All we have to do is treat these children kindly. All we have to do is place them with decent people who want to have families of their own, in the Australian way. All we have to do is act like the fair-go nation we so loudly proclaim ourselves to be.

Children. They're just children. Are you really trying to tell me that they're some kind of security threat? Do you really expect me to believe these are heinous Al-Qaeda sleeper agents, just waiting to grow up so they can be fiendish domestic terrorists?

Why in the name of all that's sane and rational are we doing this? Why are we sending these vulnerable, innocent kids to camps in Malaysia, of all places? Malaysia, where caning is part of the official regime of legal punishment? Malaysia, whose record on human rights is spotty, to say the very least?

D'you think those kids are going to grow up as comfortable, decent people who remember Australia with kindness? Or do you suppose they might just possibly develop some kind of life-long loathing of the place and the culture which treated them so foully, and then rejected them so completely?

Are we goddam TRYING to raise a new generation of Al-Qaeda recruits?

How can anyone be this howlingly stupid? You know -- if the Opposition were to throw Abbott into the oubliette where he belongs and perhaps even put Turnbull in his place, I could even vote Liberal over this simple issue. Yep. That's right: green, anarchist me. I'd vote with the Liberals on this (if Abbott wasn't such a rabid dog) because -- and follow me carefully here -- ANY GOVERNMENT WHICH IS STUPID ENOUGH TO DO THIS IS TOO FUCKING STUPID TO LIVE.

Words fail me. I really thought I'd seen the depths of imbecility in governance. Gillard has just proved me wrong in the worst possible way.

Winter Busyness

Winter indeed. I don't know what the rest of you out there are going through, but we're having an early winter here in Tas, and a cold one. Lots of frosts; clear, cold nights where the temperature drops to freezing. We even had a good dose of Aurora Australis a few nights back, apparently. Unfortunately, with the mountains immediately to our south, I didn't get to see the display. Mind you, I've caught the Southern Lights before, so I can lay claim to having seen the earth's aurora at both ends of the planet.

I've been writing, which is good. A couple of stories, three submissions, one rejection. The other two are on longer deadlines - one is for Ticonderoga's paranormal noir anthology upcoming, and the other for Cosmos. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

And more writing: two novels at once. There's the novelisation of the libretto for Outkast Opera, and another project, which I don't care to discuss. Enough to keep me quite busy, obviously.

Meanwhile, in keeping with Sudden Winter, I have a cold. And apparently, also 'Geographic Tongue'. Which is as weird as it sounds, yes. I thought about trying to take a photo, but between the need for a mirror and a flash (which is always a bad combination) or alternatively, the need to point the camera at my tongue while vaguely hoping for the best, I decided I'd pull a photo off the Net. And here it is. Not my tongue, but more or less what my tongue currently looks like. Ick.

Meanwhile... this year isn't slowing down even a little bit. It just screams past while I'm still trying to catch my breath. Every day, every week, chockfull. Last Friday night, Nat and the boys did their first concert with the Launceston Youth and Community Orchestra. It went rather well, all things considered - all things being a tired and impatient Mau-Mau, sub-zero weather by the time the concert was finished, lengthy pause between practice and play (which we filled with a trip to Dumpling Legend for dinner) and the fact that yes, it was a Friday night concert in Launceston after a long and trying week at school, etc.

I notice they're trying to set up a four-term school year again here in Tas. I guess those summer holidays are just too long for good, industry-standard breaks. Can't have the kids getting used to the idea of freedom, can you? And those awful parents, demanding time off to be with their spawn... how dare they?

I don't think they're planning to add a lot more in the way of school days, mind you. Just redistribute the holidays. Of course, that means an extra start-period every year, in which nothing much gets done. And an extra last-week-of-term each year, in which (yes, again) nothing much gets done. But that's okay, because it will Modernise Tasmania, and Bring Us Into Line With The Mainland.

... you know, I'm kind of tired of prioritising corporate interests over everybody else in society.

Take the current fuss with Cate Blanchett supporting a carbon tax. Madame B has been a card-carrying Green for many a year, and has put her money where her mouth is in terms of lifestyle. She's speaking up in favour of a price on carbon, designed to help raise awareness of CO2 production, and to reduce it by allowing less CO2 intensive alternatives compete with the artificially lowered price of carbon-heavy energy.

And for this Rupert sets the media dogs on her.

Meanwhile, Australia's richest individual -- Gina Rinehart -- jumps on the bandwagon against the infamous Mining Tax, howling that it'll bring roooination to us all. Oddly, Gina's massive fortune comes from... mining. Yes. But does anyone call her out on the patently obvious conflict here?

Well, not in uncle Rupert's newspapers they don't. Nor in TV-land, where the Word of Murdoch is Law.

We can afford a mining tax. In fact, it's arguable we can't afford NOT to have one, because while we're making money from resources now, the day will come when either we run out, or the demand falters -- and if we haven't done the right thing by ourselves as a nation, we're gonna wind up looking a lot like Nauru: an ugly, abandoned chunk of Pacific undesirable. But apparently the possibility that Gina might have to make do with just ONE set of platinum-forged dinnerware is too much.

We can also afford a carbon tax. And again: it's arguable we can't afford NOT to have one. But Cate has no oars in the water here. She's not making money out of anti-CO2 schemes. She states loudly and clearly that what she wants is to be able to look her kids in the eye when they're older, and say that yes, she did her best to preserve a decent world for them.

I guess it's up to you whether or not you accept that. But given that the nastiest of Uncle Rupert's diggers have yet to uncover a money-making link between Cate Blanchett and any "no-CO2" alternatives -- well, if you don't accept Cate's motives, you're going to have to scratch around and devise one of your own. Which ought to be interesting.

Well, hell with it. I'm going to go out and get some exercise. I'm heading down into the berry patch to cut back the old canes. And yes: I'm going to compost them, which will keep the carbon in the soil and do at least a little bit for the atmosphere...

More Pirates

Well, I took the inevitable trip with the boys to see the new Depp/Pirates film this weekend. And either my sensibilities have been blunted, or it really wasn't as bad as I expected.

Let's be clear: I love the first of the three films. It's a gem, a marvellous mix of homage, irony, spectacle, character-acting and sheer damned fun. The second film was a much less vivid work, aimed mainly at bringing the third onto the screen. And the third was a muddy, plodding, noisy wreck that disappointed in almost every way.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting much from the fourth. Admittedly, the fact that they felt a need to credit Tim Powers' book for the title and elements of the plot was a positive factor. I do like Mr Powers work. Nevertheless, I went in expecting little more than eyestrain (3D again, yes) so the fact that I was entertained more often than I was bored counts as a success.

The problem, for me, with the movies since #1, is that they've lost the momentum and the character interplay that carried the first from one set-piece to the next. The set-pieces are fun, sure. The complicated Jack-Sparrow-Escapes-From-The-Royal-Palace effort was positively balletic, and filled up the screen nicely, while remaining very much in character for Sparrow. But in between the shiny set pieces in the first film, we got a certain amount of character development. Minor plot arcs that kept the film from getting dull.

There's little of that here. In between the set pieces, what we get is essentially exposition aimed at moving the plot to the next set-piece.

Credits: Ian MacShane has an absolute lock on 'menace', and does a fine job as the villain of the piece -- Edward Teach, or Blackbeard. Penelope Cruz looks the part (as always), and is sufficiently fiery of mien to allow us to believe she's actually able to buckle those swashes up there in the action scenes. Depp has Jack Sparrow under his skin now, and Geoffrey Rush is reliable as ever in Barbossa's boot. (Not boots. He's had a very piratical accident.)

Brickbats: the subplot involving the preacher and the mermaid is tacked on to add something resembling complexity to an otherwise painfully straightforward go-there-and-grab-the-maguffin plotline. I didn't give a flying fart about the preacher, and my only real response to the mermaid was to wonder whether or not the Internet had any slightly less clothingy photos of her. (It does.) Keira and Orlando may not have been the most riveting actors on screen in the first flick, but they were given more room to play, more depth, and most of all, more goddam significance to the storyline. I actually feel rather sorry for the people playing Mr Preacher and Ms Mermaid.

Overall? Don't bother seeing it on your own, but if you've got kids who like the franchise, it's entertaining enough to justify an afternoon out.