BBC NEWS Multiple blasts paralyse London

Saved from oblivion: this week’s archived post — July 2005

What’s new

Latest version: Monday 6 July 2009

This is a sticky post. The photo and content will change week by week, so keep your eye on it. 

 

Winter

Coming up/Notes to readers

My full June 2009 blog “report” is on Ninglun’s Specials.  I have begun to participate in this: . There’s a retrospective on the Sydney Photo Blog: Four Seasons. The name change reflects my being accepted on .

Other blogs

• Photoblog: The Four Seasons 3 — summer.
•  Ninglun on Blogspot: Bus stop Elizabeth Street Waterloo.  Comment on Journalspace: “We’ll miss you here. I always look forward to seeing what piece of paradise you have captured with your lens. – Stalker”
• English/ESL: English/ESL nominated; The hidden power of language. (Cross-posted from Floating Life.) Essay writing: Module C “Conflicting Perspectives” – the introduction.
• Ninglun’s Specials: More paintings by Gordon Syron — 1.

Yet more cyber condoms

Time for a geeky entry.

I have just discovered cloud antivirus.

Yes, that is all you see when you open it up. It is always up to date without downloading updates!

See more here. So far I am pleased with it.

A while ago I reported on RadarSync and other geeky things. I eventually gave up on RadarSync – too many odd results. Instead I am giving Update Notifier a go. So far so good. I also use Secunia PSI on demand, not always switched on. I now have a 100% secure score from Secunia. The latest version also assesses browsers. Guess which one has an unpatched vulnerability, albeit rated as “less critical”?

For my firewall I am using Outpost Firewall Free.

Australia third happiest place on Earth

Well, there you go! See the story on Yahoo7.

Costa Rica is the happiest place on Earth, and one of the most environmentally friendly, according to a new survey by a British non-governmental group, which puts Australia in third place.

The New Economics Foundation looked at 143 countries that are home to 99 per cent of the world’s population and devised an equation that weighs life expectancy and people’s happiness against their environmental impact.

By that formula, Costa Rica is the happiest, greenest country in the world, just ahead of the Dominican Republic.

Latin American countries did well in the survey, occupying nine of the top 10 spots.

Australia scored third place, but other major Western nations did poorly, with Britain coming in at 74th place and the United States at 114th…

For more see UK only 74th, but Costa Rica tops ‘Happy Planet Index’.

Australia felix!

Sunday lunch: Simon H’s place, Randwick

Sirdan and Simon

View from Simon’s verandah

M also joined us. He and Simon engaged in vigorous but mutually enjoyable cross-cultural debate.

Sunday Floating Life photo 25: Gordon Syron at South Sydney Uniting Church

There is currently an exhibition of Indigenous artist Gordon Syron at South Sydney Uniting Church.

Gordon does not paint dots. "My strength in painting is political", says Syron. "I use satire and raw imagery to send a message that Australian History has left out the Aboriginal people and their stories. Art is a way to convey and tell these stories. By turning around the picture – for instance to dress Aboriginal people in Redcoats and black boots and have white people standing naked holding spears on the shore when the first fleet arrived, as in my painting The Black Bastards Are Coming, it makes people understand and comprehend history in a different way."…

Welcoming Russell Darnley OAM

My former colleague at SBHS Russell Darnley has entered the blogosphere. I mentioned Russell a while ago in Islam has about 1.3 billion followers worldwide. He was in Bali at the time of the bombing and wrote about it; the full text is in that post.

“I want to write about the overwhelming manifestation of selfless human love and care I have experienced.”

It’s obvious that the tragedy in Bali has brought great grief to the lives of many Australian families. For those of us that have been intimately involved in the tasks of ministering to the needs of the injured, attempting a body count and counselling the grieved friends and families of the missing it has been a demanding task.

This has been a task made more bearable by the massive upsurge of goodwill and the magnificent cooperation that has emerged in the face of this tragedy.

There has been little time to reflect on the intentions of the perpetrators. Our energy has been elsewhere. With the evacuations complete and the forensic process now underway there is time to write.

My first task was to survey a network of private hospitals surrounding the Sanglah public hospital for walking wounded. There were none. What first confronted me was the youth of the patients. Sure there were people of my own age but many were Rugby and AFL players from Australia. As a Rugby coach I found an immediate affinity with lots of the young guys that were lying, not always gravely injured, but bewildered about the whereabouts of missing teammates. I could only ask them to have hope and if the inclination took them, to pray for their friends…

Many thousands of people have assisted in the relief effort. Their care of the sick and dying and the respect they have shown for the dead have filled me with great hope.

The overwhelming majority of Indonesia’s 230 million people I am sure are deeply appalled by the wanton violence. Bali in particular is now confronting the prospect of a significant economic downturn if tourism is no longer seen as safe and viable.

I can only conclude with the words of the Denpasar (Badung) Fire Brigade Crew that I happened to talk with yesterday as a walked back to Sanglah Hospital from the Garuda office.

“Tell the Australians that Bali is safe. We can guarantee this. We will protect them. Tell them that we want them to come.”

Now he is out there for you all to read. I commend his blog to you.

 

Speaking of blogging friends, thanks Jim Belshaw for your kind words today.

Saturday again: time to go counting beans…

Ninglun on Blogspot

Sitemeter tells me this blog, which had several incarnations and a long hiatus, has at last crept past 6,000 visits. According to Google Analytics it is up 238% in visits. In the past seven days there have been 103 visits and 144 page views. Sitemeter records 66 visits and 80 page views so far this month. The top individual post (Google Analytics) has been Juice & Java Surry Hills (10 reads).

Floating Life

540 reads so far this month. Top individually read posts in the past seven days:

1. Conflicting perspectives 132
2. How good is your English? Test and Answers 68
3. UN Peacekeepers — a quiz 35
4. Dispatches from another America 31
5. Australian poem 2008 series #17: "Australia" 24

Ninglun’s Specials

145 reads so far this month. Top individually read posts in the past seven days:

1. Sequel: Art Monthly Australia July 2008 15
2. Family stories 4 — A Guringai Family Story 15
3. 10. But is it art? Responses to the Bill Henson controversy 13
4. Family stories 3 — About the Whitfields 11
5. Family stories 2 — About the Christisons 10

Sydney Photo Blog

90 reads so far this month. Top individually read posts in the past seven days:

1. 2008 in order 6
2. Sydney CBD from Prince Alfred Park 3.25 5
3. 10 best nature shots from 2008: 9 3
4. Light, texture, architecture: Surry Hills 3
5. Tree trimming – Belvoir Street Surry Hills 3

April 06 ~ Nov 07

250 reads so far this month. Top individually read posts in the past seven days:

1. Friday Australian poem #17: Bruce Dawe, 58
2. Assimilation, Integration, Multiculturalism 52
3. There are at least two movies called Swimming Upstream 39
4. Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in Macbeth… Mardi Gras 26
5. Book and DVD backlog 26

English/ESL

1,085 reads so far this month. Top individually read posts in the past seven days:

1. Essay writing: Module C “Conflicting Perspectives" — the introduction 245
2. How should I write up a Science experiment? 198
3. Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein" — and "Blade Runner" 157
4. Studying the Gothic, or Emily Bronte? 86
5. The "Belonging" Essay 60

Some serious reading for all Australians

The Productivity Commission has released a substantial report called Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009. It is important to step away from whatever ideological frames one is accustomed to applying and read the report with great care. Though we must always remember there has been progress in some areas — and for me the February 2008 Apology was a necessary and healthy step — the overall picture brings little joy.

Last night on the 7.30 Report anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton, who “has worked and lived with Aboriginal communities since the ’60s and has assisted with more than 50 land rights cases”, had some sobering words.

…KERRY O’BRIEN: When you say pragmatist and practical, does that include Aboriginal communities themselves, Aboriginal leadership accepting that they can’t really expect to kind of enshrine Aboriginal tradition, Aboriginal culture for future generations of Aborigines and lock Indigenous Australians into living in those communities and living that cultural life.

PETER SUTTON: Well I think people are voting with their feet, and there is much more mobility out of those more remote, more ghetto-like communities than there was. There are also many more outside people coming in, so they’re changing in that sense.

But to be honest, I mean, if you want a modern 20th Century health profile of the sort that you find in an advanced country, a first world country or a modern country, you’ve gotta have modern health practices, not just the instruments and the chemicals and the staff on the hospital. You’ve also got to have a settled urban or town-based kind of approach to things like getting rid of waste, dealing with personal hygiene, giving a certain modified and low role to violence in the way you settle disputes – that sort of thing…

KERRY O’BRIEN: How have you changed your views in 40 years? How dramatically have you changed your views in 40 years?

PETER SUTTON: Quite dramatically because I was of that generation of people living in remote communities who aided and promoted and took part in things like decentralisation back to outstations in the bush, who promoted cultural traditionalism and supported it where they saw it, took on interest in it, recorded it, filmed it or whatever. And there was a sort of an army of baby boomers, really, who spread out across the outback from the late ’60s onwards who I think played a fairly significant role, among other people of course, and I was one of those, that cadre of people who were involved in that. For us, culture was absolutely central, cultural preservation and preservation of knowledge of the bush and of places was absolutely central.

Now, I really think we have to start with three-year-old children, what’s essential for them. If it works for them, that’s the way to go. If it doesn’t work for them, no matter how much it might be about keeping some cultural practice going, the practice needs to be questioned and people need to work out whether they’re going to drop it or not.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Peter Sutton, it’s a very complex issue and we could go on, but we’re stuck for time. Thanks very much for talking with us.

Read the report: Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009.

There is a central fact we all must recognise. Most of us are the beneficiaries of a dispossession that has occurred and in many respects is ongoing. It cannot be reversed, and we would be hypocrites to think it could be. I speak as a fairly typical old Australian, a hybrid myself of Dharawal and settler. Our historians have to confront that dispossession squarely; it is a complex story and often not a pretty story, but it is the only story on offer. The point is the present and the future. What are the best ways to both cherish the often neglected wisdom our Indigenous Australians do have to offer and guarantee that this really is a country of fairness, justice and equity for all? These are not easy matters.

First July reviews – mainly comic

Dante’s Cove 2 (2007 DVD)

I watched just 15 minutes of this heap of crap. If one was drunk or drugged and with friends it may work. Fortunately my copy was free, thanks to Surry Hills Library.

 Julian Halls, The Museum, Hobart, Knocklofty Press 2008.

This gets two rather dismissive lines on SameSame.com.

Halls’s strength as a comic author lies in his sharp, crisp and snappy lines. Unfortunately, the novel sounds like a guidebook in places, and a boring one at that. This probably explains why the Tasmanian government gave the project its support.

I agree about the “sharp, crisp and snappy lines” but was certainly not bored. In fact I found the novel hilarious.

It is indeed “old-fashioned”, as the publisher says.

This is a most unfashionable book: it’s funny, it’s well written and constructed — and it has a happy ending.

It’s that rarest of things in an increasingly sad and troubled world: a comic novel, a genre which has almost disappeared under the weight of political correctness, post-modernist claptrap and the self-regarding seriousness of far too many authors.

Julian Halls has created an unlikely assortment of oddball characters — and they’re all people we’ve met or close to it — and placed them in and around a mouldering, half-forgotten regional museum in Tasmania.

The complex main plot concerns the relationships between two same-sex couples, one male, one female, and the whole thing is set in motion by a blowfly; it gets even more bizarre after that, although it’s never incredible—just like real life. Several curious sub-plots emerge and they are skillfully woven into a surprising conclusion…

The museum itself reminded me of the Australian Museum in Sydney in the 1950s, even down to the enormous whale skeleton in the entrance hall. Its sudden descent begins the series of crazy events. You can tell Halls cut his teeth in theatre – the novel is nothing if not a farce, but a pungent one.

The artist Benjamin Duterrau (1767-1851) is an important element in the plot.

Duterrau, “The Conciliation” 1840. Click on pic for more.

I liked this book.

 J G Ballard, Millennium People, London, Flamingo 2003

Ballard’s Empire of the Sun is one of my favourite books, and the 1987-8 Spielberg movie of it one of my favourite movies. Millennium People is a dark comedy whose targets include the romanticism of revolution, the mindless violence of events such as 9/11, and the sacred cows of the middle class on England – though there may well be a degree of endorsement of the latter.

One could also add, with this very perceptive profile in a source I don’t often agree with, that another target is the reader who, given Ballard’s profile, is probably in that same middle class. Joane McNeill writes:

In Ballard’s slapstick satire Millennium People (2003), the bourgeois residents of a gated community commit terrorist acts. They riot, clash with police, and bomb upper-middle-class establishments such as the Royal Albert Hall and the Victoria and Albert Museum. What are they protesting? “Double yellow lines, school fees, maintenance charges…cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security.” They are rebelling against, in one character’s words, “the barriers set out by the system. Try getting drunk at a school speech day, or making a mildly racist joke at a charity dinner. Try letting your garden grow and not painting your house for a few weeks.”

Like most of Ballard’s fiction from the last 20 years, Millennium People uses the framework of a middlebrow English novel as a way to parody the reader. For Ballard, as he explained to Salon in 1997, the novel is “the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It’s a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader and at every point offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate’s court. I think it’s far better, as Burroughs did and I’ve tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

I have his last book, Miracles of Life (2008), in line for reading. Millennium People joins my 2009 top reads.

June roundup in brief — Sitemeter

The details from WordPress and Google Analytics for the individual blogs are on Ninglun’s Specials.

• The only blog to grow during June was Ninglun on Blogspot with 474 visits and 617 page reads. Last month it was 237/280.
• The Floating Life (WordPress) blogs had 9,085 visits and 11,539 page reads. Last month it was 10,835/13,780.
• English/ESL had 6,613 visits and 9,088 page reads. Last month it was 7,422/10,233.

The hidden power of language

The idea that language shapes (if not determines) our perspectives, indeed what we may think, has been around for a long time. I have encountered examples of the phenomenon in teaching ESL and EFL (English as a Foreign Language). For example, some Chinese students and I once disputed the colour of something we were all looking at only to discover that our mother tongues cut the spectrum into somewhat different arbitrary bits in the blue/green section. The “real” spectrum has no divisions; our language imposes or constructs divisions.

So I am drawn (via the Arts & Letters Daily) to HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? [6.12.09] by Lera Boroditsky.

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity…

Scholars on the other side of the debate don’t find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don’t include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn’t mean that English speakers aren’t paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they’re not talking about them. It’s possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.

Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it’s distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.

Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it’s impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it’s impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can’t be true, let’s find out what is true…

I am storing a copy for future reference: Edge_ HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE pdf.

English/ESL nominated

Last year English/ESL came in at #75 in the Top 100 Language Blogs 2008 on Lexiophiles. I have just been informed that English/ESL has been nominated for the Top 100 of 2009.

Phase 2: Public Voting (July 8 – July 27)

At the end of the nomination phase, we will prescreen every blog and put it into one of the four categories (see below). In each category 100 blogs will be included for voting. If your blog is on the list you can ask your readers, friends, family and whoever comes to mind to vote for you. We will provide a voting button for your convenience before the voting starts. Every person can only vote once the voting of the top 100 blogs for each category.

  Go to the link on that icon for more information.

Indian students, racism, theatre news

Given recent concern over attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney it is fitting that Sydney’s newest theatre company, The Alex Buzo Company, is mounting two plays in August at The Seymour Centre: Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed (1968) and Alana Valentine’s Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah. The first Sydney production of Norm and Ahmed made history. Not long before his untimely death in 2006 Alex Buzo told ABC what happened.

ALEX BUZO: Those words, I mean sorry, the first word, had been used in a lot of overseas plays and so I just assumed it was OK, it was legal.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: It had been said on stage?
ALEX BUZO: Yeah, it had been said on stage. But because it happened in an Australian play, there was a double standard and they thought it was shocking and the actor was arrested and eventually exonerated.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Yes indeed, the whole matter was actually quashed by the Attorney-General. But there was some… there was a bit of a drama to go through until that happened, when the charges were laid and Graeme Blundell and Lindsay Smith were charged with obscenity. There was a great deal of discussion about it in the press.
[VT] Did it dishearten you?
ALEX BUZO: Well, I had actually been boasting in private that my aim as a writer was to put Australian drama on the front page. I didn’t anticipate this sort of front page treatment but, I thought it did have a good result in the sense that people knew that Australian drama was alive and well, whereas up until that point it had no publicity whatsoever, so it did have positive things. On the other hand it was very draining for the actors to go to the Magistrates Court and then the Supreme Court and then it went eventually to the High Court in Canberra. So, it certainly was a wearing process but it did have its upside.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: In a sense looking back on it, it’s a little disheartening, I guess, that the fight all the way through the courts had to be about two words, had to be about a swear word, rather than something a heck of a lot more important than that. I mean, you can imagine going to the courts in defence of art, but something much more important than just those words.
ALEX BUZO: Yes, I mean, I’d be disappointed if people didn’t think the play had something to say about racism and generational envy. But it is a literary play, it is an art play, it’s meant to be humorous and imaginative, it’s meant to have other things going for it other than the final two words.

I was fortunate enough to meet Alex Buzo on several occasions, most memorably when I played a Rugby League commentator in his The Roy Murphy Show for the Balmain Theatre Group in 1978.

I also see Alana Valentine quite frequently as we have some common interests. I shall go to this double bill if I can possibly do so.

Meanwhile around 4 am on Sunday a couple of Indian students were bashed on Bathurst Street near George Street Sydney. This isn’t surprising, unfortunately, as parts of George Street are notorious for this kind of thing especially in the small hours of Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. I would hesitate to wander there myself. The assailants were respectively 16 and 17.

It is pleasing to note The Times of India reporting on 28 June Indians in Australia are safe.

Australian scientist Jose (Jimmy) Botella, who is attending a three-day international conference hosted by Vinoba Bhave University in Hazaribag, on Sunday said that Indian students in Australia are safe and that reports about repeated attacks on them in Melbourne and Sydney have been blown out of proportion by the Indian media. Botella said that Melbourne and Sydney are cities like Delhi and Mumbai in India where criminal activities are no exception. "This does not mean that Australians are indulging in a hatred war against Indians. In fact, Indian students are very bright and intelligent and Australians like them for this quality."…

True enough. See also Delegation tries to allay ‘racist’ attack fears.

There is, however, another basis for complaint. Some of the “private colleges” students might be lured to are store-front operations of dubious pedigree. Students should conduct careful checks preferably with recognised education sites and the Australian Government before enrolling.