I caught this by chance the other day heading over the Sydney Harbour Bridge into the city. It’s the cover image of Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni aligned with a train passenger. It has a dream like quality fitting for the book with the umbrella adding another Magritte-type layer.
They had lovingly pumped her full of so much food, she spent the next twenty-four hours pissing and shitting everywhere. She was the shape of a small hippo’ at first but looked more like a staffy-shaped puppy on the last day.
Tears of course upon having to return the beast to the shop.
She stayed elsewhere on another occasion and caught ring-worm. It knocked her about a bit. Eventually she went to live with someone who sounded like they would take good care of her.
Note the puppy spit in the image, she did a bit of that.
Salivary Glands… okay, so I know you need to know, a dog (or cat) has four salivary glands, Mandibular, Parotid, Sublingual and Zygomatic. Got that?
An undated - clipping from a New Zealand newspaper, some time in the early ’80s reads…
Brussells [sic]
A concert on October 28 by the Irish new wave band U2 in Brussels rocked not only their fans but also seismic equipment at the Belgian Meteorological Institute, scientists said today. Martine Debecker of the Royal Meteorological Institute said its equipment measured unknown vibrations on October 28. The culptit has since been found: U2 which gave an ear-shattering concert in a music hall 5km away that critics have termed frightening and possessed.
New Wave?
I saved this image years ago from a New Zealand news paper - a great set of characters. The text reads:
Mrs Iris Strickland - one of the few voices supporting the MP for Hastings, Mr David Butcher. Mrs Strickland said the National Government had hit superannuitants harder and she was now "living better than I ever have."
Clippping - The Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune - 1984
It has - there's not a bloody original thought left in the world. Just try and come up with a catchy name for a web-site. Someone has always been there first. Pricks!
When I was a kid I used to look out the car window on long, boring, family holiday trips and watch the lolly-pop men at each end of the inevitable New Zealand roadworks - back then the concept of roadworks was to rip up the road, dump a whole heap of rocks all over the place and let the traffic pack it all down for a few weeks.
Anyway, on one of these trips, I thought up this idea (this is in the '70s) of portable traffic lights on a trailer at each end of the roadworks to control the traffic. Wireless technology didn't occur to me but I thought it would need long cables on poles so the wires didn't get crushed. I didn't realise what I was on to.
Regan and Gorby in Iceland, 1986
...persuaded that immediate and determined efforts need to be made to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to it.
...to lessen the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, to deactivate and to destroy these weapons, and to help the scientists formerly engaged in production of such weapons start working for peace.
UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
Barack Obama Chairs the UN Security
Council Summit on 24 September 2009
That's the practical stuff that needs to be happening. Nunn is also involved with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) who seem to be doing some good work.
Revisiting Reykjavik would be a more dramatic place to start but perhaps a less idealistic proposal is to sink a few lazy billion into projects like Nunn-Lugar and NTI.
I know I'm probably being overly optimistic but there do seem to be a few glimmers of a positive new momentum for nuclear disarmament growing again. Obama is heading in the right direction by chairing a UN Security Council summit on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. It's the first time a US President has done that.
Earlier in 2009, in his first address to the UN, Obama promised three important things...
America intends to keep our end of the bargain. We will pursue a new agreement with Russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers. We will move forward with ratification of the test ban treaty and work with others to bring the treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited.We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts and reduces the role of nuclear weapons. And we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in January [2010] on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons.
I will also host a summit next April [2010] that reaffirms each nation's responsibility to secure nuclear material on its territory and to help those who can't, because we must never allow a single nuclear device to fall into the hands of a violent extremist. And we will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat nuclear smuggling and theft.
Waking up today and seeing the grey, overcast sky reminds me of working on the farm. The feeling of what the day would be like out in the the weather was tangible. What the wet grass, the frosty gate latch and crossing the ice on the wooden foot bridge would feel like. 
This puzzle was hours of fun as a kid. A box of wooden blocks with pictures stuck on each side. There was a bus, car, plane, ship, a steam train and a second newer train.
…elsewhere others were having their fun too; Woodstock was happening, the Americans invaded the moon and Penthouse was launched.
I also seem to remember Popes dying and important Americans being shot. It was worrying but it didn’t really seem to matter ultimately, because we knew the Russians were going to invade New Zealand and we would all die in a final blaze of glory fighting them off in the mountains with our .22s.
We survived though and now in 2006, the Russians still haven’t invaded. Looking back I’m not sure they knew we even existed.
The biggest threat from Russia theses days is rust; that slow but steady chemical weapon of mass destruction, eating it’s way through the hulls of out-of-work nuclear submarines.
Crack a few of those babies open in the ocean, on the way over mix it up with a dash of leaking-French-Moruroa-muthafucka-atoll-sauce and that smear will work it’s way through all the beautiful beaches of the Pacific; through all the beautiful skin of the Pacific; through all the beautiful bones of the Pacific.
Now I know I’ve got the geography and ocean currents all wrong and strontium-90 probably doesn’t even float…
But the point is to do with innocence, imposition and imperialism. It’s not anti-Russian or French. The point is, yes, it’s all ultimately meaningless and we are going to die anyway but that doesn’t give you the right to determine the mode of my demise.
Friedrich Nietzsche poetically said,1
But to feel squandered as mankind (and not just as an individual), as we see the single blossom squandered by nature, is a feeling above all feelings.
Nietzsche’s squandering
is more existential, inevitable, biological
but it’s this undeniable finality to it all that for me makes the moment
all the more valuable. It engenders a respect for life that I don’t see any
account for in the grand imperialisms and fundamentalisms of our age, or the
piss-weak ones for that matter.
Take the Howard, Liberal government in Australia as an example of the piss-weak squandering of life’s dignity and meaning. He has an opportunity in the Pacific to be the engine room of a massive renewal in human dignity for the indigenous people of the region, he has an opportunity to be setting an example of respect for the land, water and air, he has an opportunity to start the revolution in alternative energy… but what does the stain do? Nothing, fucking nothing!
It’s now more likely we’ll be invaded by the little known revolutionary group, the Indigenous Pacific Peoples Liberation Army (IPPLA) than the Russians.
