Yesterday I walked back from the shopping centre across the road from the campus behind a woman wearing seriously high heels (at least 4 inches and she had disguised platforms as well). She was going at a good pace, but she walked like a cripple - not straightening her knees at all and her hips were moving in a weird way, not up and down but back and forth horizontally). I think that if you want to wear those shoes you need to learn to walk like a model, with a kind of swaying motion and slowly. It's not a really suitable way to walk if you're a busy modern woman with stuff to do in your lunch hour before you get back to work.

I suppose that young women put themselves through this ordeal in order to appear sexy. But really, if you're looking crippled it's not sexy at all. Probably, if you look down at your feet while you're wearing those shoes your feet might look quite nice. But when you walk, it looks terrible. Moreover, the heels, as I've noticed on many other women recently, are not genuine stilettos. They're about 2-3 times as wide as the old stilettos (probably so they don't dig holes in expensive floors) and, by comparison, they look clunky.

Also (I can vouch for this) it wrecks your feet. I've never worn shoes with a 4 inch heel. Probably the highest heels I ever wore were 2 inches because when I was young the fashion for stilettos had disappeared (so my heels were also at least an inch wide). The last pair of heels I ever bought was on a pair of boots circa 1984. The toes were not very pointy, but pointy enough, and the leather was not terribly soft. I've had a problem with my toes ever since (that's like 25 years) and never been able to wear anything more than a 1 inch heel without serious pain in the ball of my foot. In the last decade or more I've stopped trying and only ever wear flat shoes.

However, I'm not issuing a health warning here so much as advising the sisters that if they're going to indulge in this new fashion they need to learn how to walk properly and don't try to walk too far because if you walk properly (alluringly) you'll never get there!

I was discussing this with a couple of (middle-aged) female colleagues this afternoon and they both admitted having spent a couple of hundred on a pair of high heels that they never wear (even to posh events that they bought them for) because they're too uncomfortable.

Yesterday I helped my neighbour move furniture around. She had a dusty old wine rack with eight bottles of very old wine. Half of them had evaporated somewhat, but four looked as if they might be OK. She has developed some kind of allergy to wine (hence the age of the bottles) so she donated them to me. Tonight I opened the oldest one - a Rothbury Estate (Hunter Valley) Cabernet-Hermitage blend from 1978. I took the foil cap off and smelled vinegar. The cork underneath was a sticky, ugly mess and crumbled when I put the corkscrew into it. With sinking heart I ploughed on. I couldn't get all the cork out - some of it stuck to the side of the bottle and some of it fell into the wine, but it smelled OK underneath the cork, so I poured out a little bit through a strainer. It tastes great. Just like old red should - kind of light and dry. The colour of Port and lots of sediment in the bottom. No hint of vinegar. Either that or my taste buds are shot.

The last time I had a seriously old wine it was a 1969 German white (possibly riesling, but it was 15 years ago, so I can't remember). The oldest white I have in this collection is a 1984 chardonnay and there's also a 1997 White Burgundy (back then they didn't put grape names on the bottle, so I'm not sure what that means, except that it's a dry white). The fourth bottle is a 1988 Cab-Shiraz from Penfolds. If they're as good as this one, I'm in for a treat!

Was going to go out with a friend, but he put it off till tomorrow - no wellies, no brolly! Everything is wet...


... dripping wet.


What a summer!

Unlike the previous book, this was a quick read. Adiga was born in Madras (not Chennai) and lives in Mumbai (not Bombay). What's with that? In between he was educated at Columbia and Oxford, and went to work for Time, the FT and the Independent. So I feel free to put him in the category of ex-patriate Indian writers and, indeed, he seems to take the same point of view. There's nothing about India to recommend it. It's a hopeless pile of faeces, corruption and murder. He refers to one part of India as the Darkness (presumably borrowed from V.S Naipal's An Area of Darkness - Naipal was a Trinidadian of Indian extraction). The other part is the Light - it's where the rich live and, while it has electric chandeliers, shopping malls and pizza, the human spirit is no lighter than in the Darkness. Otherwise it is quite entertaining. If you found the Indian-Canadian Mistry's A Fine Balance depressing, you won't get the same feeling of gloom from this one because it's full of black humour, though the themes are similar. There's no way out of the putrid mess.

This has taken me a whole month to read, on and off, partly because some of the passages are difficult and partly because racing from one style to another completely different one is a bit hard to do. Also the more modern the writing, the easier I found it to digest. While I'm seriously impressed by the length and variety of Sicilian history, I'm not really tempted to go and read Cicero or Homer. I need to go find a good secondary source - as this one has definitely whetted the apetite. I do have a list of things I would like to read - I had no idea that so many great writers came from or wrote about Sicily:

Andrea Camilleri, The Snack Thief
Giuseppe Tomaso di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Carlo Levi, Words are Stones: Impressions of Sicily
Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl
(In this list, only Levi, is not Sicilian. Pirandello and Quasimodo were also Sicilians.)

Maybe some others: Peter Robb, Midnight in Sicily; John Dickie, Cosa Nostra and Norman Lewis' account of the allied invasion in 1943 and the role asigned to the mafia by the US (hard to know if Mussolini was worse in that context!). But generally the section titled 'The Curse', of writings about the mafia, was pretty depressing.

Despite the freezing weather in the northern hemisphere this winter, the area of Arctic sea ice continues to decline. "The linear rate of decline for December is now 3.3% per decade."

December air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean region, eastern Siberia, and northwestern North America were warmer than normal. In contrast, temperatures in Eurasia, the United States, and southwestern Canada were below average. The strongest anomalies (more than 7 degrees Celsius/13 degrees Fahrenheit) were over the Atlantic side of the Arctic, including Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, where ice extent was below average.

The Australian government reintroduced its emissions trading scheme this week. It probably has less chance of success than last time now that the Liberals are all united behind the Mad Abbott. Two of them crossed the floor last time and if the Greens hadn't been so stuck up on purity, it would've got through. I was listening to the Senate debate yesterday and one of the SA Libs walked out of the chamber when a government member pointed out that in the previous go-round he'd been an enthusiatic supporter of an ETS. The denialists, however, have not yet been heard from: the Mad Abbott seems to have convinced them that planting some trees and funding the odd renewable energy scheme will solve the problem (not that they think there is one).

Meanwhile, in the premature celebration department, cotton growers in the upper Darling are thrilled to bits by the once-in-a-decade floods. They're taking as much water as they can, talking up the revival of the local economy that won't last, while the rest of us have to wait for the next bad season to make our point. Water is flowing in the Darling again, but as a grazier from Wilcannia pointed out, it's not actually wetting the flood plain. In short, the drought has not broken. People have become so inured to no rain at all, that when it does rain - even a teensy weensy bit - they think their problems are over.

Barnaby Joyce, now shadow minister for Finance, has become positively inarticulate. He's way out of his depth - much more at home pronouncing on the positive value of ignorance in the climate change 'debate'. The question is not if, but when they all fall apart again.

I haven't had a reply to my latest rocket to the UN people. Maybe I did tell them to jump in the lake after all. I hope that it's just that they're trying to find a solution, because I would like to do the project. But I cannot do it the way they want to do it. So that's it. It's not as if I don't have enough to keep me going already.

I'm having a good time talking to my PhD students - I learn new stuff from them every day.

I also have some really nice colleagues who are open minded and willing to be helpful.

I'm having a less good time, but still really busy, on Faculty stuff. There are some challenging issues ahead, but I know my boss pretty well by now so I don't expect to get my way on very much. It bothers me less and less.

Arsenal got thrashed by Man U on Sunday. This was already depressing and we have to go to Chelsea this weekend. Hull City held them to a draw yesterday. I don't have any faith that Arsenal can do the same or better :( Some commentator described them as 'brittle' the other day which was spot on. I have now discovered two friends and one colleague who are Arsenal supporters.

I also had a bad week with the walking - average under 5000 steps per day - not helped by the sickie I had to take yesterday (due to something I ate from the student cafeteria at lunchtime on Monday). Still I'm edging up the coast. I am (virtually) a few km past this place. For those in the know, it means I'm nearing Macksville/Nambucca Heads. However, I really want some cool weather to get back into the walking properly. Itching to finish the harbour circle, but not ready to get heat stroke in the process.

That's two blessings, three grizzles and a neutral. Probably an above-average week!

...because we had a thunderstorm earlier. But it was my fish frying and spatttering.

ETA: It IS raining! It's lovely and cool.

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Thomas Crapper. The claim is made that the word 'crap' does not derive from Mr Crapper, but is a much older word, brought back to England in WWI by the Americans. I'm seriously disappointed by this news.

Some old friends of mine lived, back in the 1970s, in a flat in Clapham Common that had one of those red chain-pull cisterns like the one in the video, with the name of Thos. Crapper on it.

(apologies for the BBC advertisement)

I have been wondering why, in my last 20 posts, I've had comments on only 7 of them - mostly only 1 comment (not including my own replies). So I looked at my flist and found that out of 41, only 14 are still moderately active and, of those, only 3-4 are still regular. Generally (not exclusively), the same people who are active on LJ are also active on FB which I basically can't stand - and people tend to post the same stuff in both places. There is another bunch of people who have friended me, but after reading parts of their journals I felt that I already had enough stuff on my friends page. Maybe I should go back and delve into that department a bit more. But my guess is that most of them are also inactive.

(I need to delete quite a few from the flist!)

I began this thing 8 and a half years ago, writing for myself and really not expecting that anyone else would read it. Then people started to comment and I changed my way of writing quite a bit - writing with the idea in the back of my mind that others, especially foreigners, would read it. I'm not at all sure how this affected what I wrote, but it was certainly there. Now, it seems, I'm back to basically writing for myself.

Writing for myself has, if anything, reduced the number of comments I get.

Also I've been commenting less - only on the handful that I really appreciate because I would like to maintain the link. Trying to be more careful about comments since ex-oblomova unfriended me, after something like 6 years, over the US primaries. That was awful because I really liked her and would've liked to meet her IRL some day. Also once got into a spat with springheel_jack over some totally trivial throw away remark that he violently objected to. It's so hard to judge people's possible reactions across the cultural divide and in the absence of accompanying body language.

I've offended quite a few people I have to say. Most notably a woman from a Filipina background who'd taken up the Jewish religion and Zionism to boot. She offered to agree to disagree, but I find that intolerable. If you cannot justify a position you shouldn't hold it. Later I got into a long argument with a person who had changed sex and was determined to be seen as a "man" and, simultaneously, as transgender. My argument there was less excusable, but it was only out of genuine curiosity about how transgender people manage to get on in the mainstream. I should have realized that for him it was too close to the bone. He was quite abusive.

I've also offended people when I effectively ticked them off for being too American - which seemed to me to say that, as a foreign reader, I shouldn't complain if the references are purely domestic American ones. One reply I got was that "it's only an LJ post" and that the author had long ago given up trying to write for a wider audience. So I gave up trying to explain my purely Australian references to a wider audience. Given that LJ - and indeed the English-language www - is overwhelmingly American, this no doubt helps to reduce the number of comments I receive. It seems that the responsibility to comprehend is a one-way street. I do understand that for your average person in the street, having a global outlook is probably not very useful or important. But for those who write blogs about international issues, or comment on American writers writing about these things, it demonstrates to me that Americans really don't have a global outlook - that their concerns are really only about what other Americans think. It's OK to have an in-group discussion on the www, even when you have 'friends' who cannot possibly know what you're talking about.

On the other hand, I don't complain at all when people who write about specific topics write from their own perspective. This is what I've most enjoyed about LJ, particularly in its heyday when lots of people were actually using it.

</rant>

Israeli doctors are working in Haiti, while Palestinians still suffer in Gaza from the war Israel inflicted on them two years ago. Fuck them.

A 57 year-old psychiatrist (I should try to remember his name!) was given Australian of the Year Award for his work in mental health/illnesses of young people. He immediately made a speech saying that "although things have improved recently", immigrant detention centres are basically "a factory for producing mental illness" and that this has been demonstrated by numerous studies in The Lancet and elsewhere. This was immediately interpreted by the media, despite the qualification, as an attack on the current government. Politicians on all sides have spent the day sayng that detention is a good idea. Opinion polls consider The Lancet a highly unreliable source.

Maggie Beer, who creates lovely, if expensive, food (my favourite is the quince paste) was named Senior Australian of the Year. I had to search a lot to find out that she is 65. Why does the age of a woman continue to be a delicate subject? She's a businesswoman, so I guess that's meant to be a blow for feminism.

The Young Australian of the Year is a 30 year-old soldiier who won the top bravery award (fighting in an American war) in Afghanistan.

Elizabeth Blackburn got an AC or something. Her speech was all about how good it is to have recognition for science. Although she lives in the US, she obviously stays in touch with the home country because she knows that these gongs usually go to businessmen, judges, soldiers and sporting heroes. Scientists have to win a Nobel prize (in America) to be thought worthy enough.

"About 100" Aborigines demonstrated against the invasion in Hobart where, in my schooldays I was taught that they'd all "died out". The idea of Aborigines "dying out" was so natural to white Australians back then that they didn't even bother to explain how or why it might have happened. Fortunately, it was a lie in any case.

ETA: I see that I can't help being the damp squib amidst the patriotic celebrations.

OK, well, it was one of those mass emails thanking me for subsrcibing to ArsenalTV, but I can tell from the language that he at least dictated two sentences of it. It's really strange to get one of those "signed" by the actual manager though. Usually it's just some anonymous bureaucrat in the PR department. They sure know their customer relations at that club.

Probably my next letter from Wenger will be asking for more money! However, I unticked the box suggesting that I subscribe to all of the spam.

I think the Haitian disaster is the worst ever. It's worse than the 2004 tsunami because it has hit a population concentration of 2-3 million people (not to mention the outlying areas where there are/were still more people), whereas in Aceh, the region that was worst hit by the tsunami, the people were dispersed and it was easier to get emergency aid delivered in a short space of time. People in the areas hit by the tsunami were mostly dead already, but in Port au Prince there are at the very minimum 1.5 million survivors. It's possible that more people died in Aceh (around 200,000), but we don't know yet. They're saying that they've already buried 75,000 Haitians in mass graves although there are still bodies lying in the streets and under the rubble. Who knows what the final total will be. But the difficulties of getting aid to the people who need it in Haiti are incredible.

When aid took this long to get through in New Orleans, people were outraged by the casual attitude of Bush and the incompetence of FIMA. But this cannot really be said about Haiti. The response was immediate and the main hold up has been the destruction of Haitian infrastructure - poor as it was in the first place. Haitians are daily demonstrating their amazing resilience and patience. Incidents of violence are few so far and the little aid that has got out has been distributed in a way that attempts to minimize black marketeering. Frustrating as it may seem, I'm impressed by the reports I've seen to date.

One of the PhD students in my Faculty sent around a message the other day. She worked for the Peace Corps in Haiti a few years ago and speaks the local Kreyol. She was there for two years in the late 1990s and said that, instead of the hardship posting she expected, she found it a culturally rich and inspiring place to be - in fact a 'tropical paradise'. She described her 'aid' as being a mutual exchange in which her meagre skills were appreciated as much as she appreciated the things she learned from the Haitians. She has volunteered to go back for a stint because the aid agencies are looking for Kreyol speakers to help out in the current crisis.

This is all good stuff, though I remain sceptical of the long-term benefits. Many people are now talking about 'crisis as opportunity'. It took Aceh two years, and the expenditure of $4 billion to get back to the status quo ante. As a result of the inundation of aid agencies and their money the inflation rate remains well above the Indonesian average, though the economic growth rate is now good and the civil war that previously raged there has stopped. Obama has only promised $100 million for Haiti, though this will no doubt increase over time, especially after the private donations put that figure into the shade. Aceh was part of a much larger state. What I fear for Haiti is that once the initial emergency is over, things will become as before.

I've got the league table on my phone where I can look at it every five minutes. Might as well savour the glory while it lasts! (which will probably be until Saturday night)

Dear ex-oblomova,
So much for the coat tails.
yrs
angel80

All cats are locked up tonight as we found this baby in the clump of lemon grass near the back door. I hope it's OK.
(apologies for poor quality photo - not enough light, but I didn't want to use the flash).


ETA: an hour later, after dark, it has moved. So I guess it's OK.

I was listening today, to a debate about genetically modified food. A Belgian scientist was complaining that although it is safe (to eat) the Europeans have refused to adopt it. As a consequence European science is falling behind everywhere else in the world (everywhere else being the US and India). When he began disparaging public opinion, the interviewer said to him "Don't you think that in a democracy people have the right to be involved in policy decisions?" His reply was that what we need is adequate labelling so that people can choose to buy it or not buy it. Quite apart from the fact that he didn't answer the question about policy, he was conflating democracy with consumer choice. The interviewer just let it pass.

Today for lunch I had a "Vietnamese" chicken salad, which was advertised as having "Thai" sauce in it! Which was OK because the Thai sauce was very similar to what you'd get in a Vietnamese chicken salad. I missed the rau ram though.

There was a swooping of swallows around here last evening. I've never seen them in Sydney before.

Today in the trees in front of the office a young kookaburra, but it was being harrassed by one of those Indian mynahs. We all hate Indian mynahs - they're driving out everything else.