We report, you decide

How have I managed never to see this before? Thanks to Lucy Sussex for the link.

Welcoming our new feline overlords

Bits

are all I'm good for at the moment.

* Am up sharp pointy end of Adelaide book, lurching from one paragraph to the next as deadline looms. One's student days come back to one at times like this: have vivid memory of sitting on my bedroom floor in 1971 crying over Philosophy 1 essay requiring all-nighter (FAIL) and of the four other long-essay all-nighters -- on Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, American Southern Gothic, medieval church music and psycholinguistics (not together, though it's an intriguing interdisciplinary proposition), and all the all-nighters writing lectures over the years, and wondering why the bod won't do that any more, just because it's in its late 50s and I don't feed it properly or give it enough sleep and exercise. Text yesterday from younger sister: 'Don't make yourself sick. Better the wrath of your publisher than the wrath of Mother Nature.'

* Wonderful piece by John Birmingham on what the Brisbane floods are telling us about human nature here.

Delicate, porcelain-skinned little vegan girls in bonnets with flowers muscled their way into the thickest, filthiest torrents of river mud next to bogan footballers, Army engineers, and tough-looking tattooed lesbians. This being West End there were travellers, too. Three French backpackers somehow managing to make their accumulated filth look stylish. A couple of Americans who'd come to Australia to surf and instead found themselves running wheelbarrows of grey, stinking ooze down to the water's edge from where it had come.

Gorgeous.

* New post at Read, Think, Write on second-guessing the publication process if you're interested.

* Garden spider that spins its gorgeous orb directly across path from front gate to verandah every non-wet and non-windy night is twice the size it was on Christmas Day when my friend R came to dinner and as she was leaving I had to take the torch out to show her why she needed to avoid the path and jump off the edge of the verandah in order to get to her car. Goddess knows I too have put on a kilo or so since Christmas but doubling in size in less than a month is awesome. I know for a fact that the insect pickings in that part of the garden are pretty good; the other night the web snared an entire moth. (No doubt the spider equivalent of a tub of Sara Lee Irish Cream and no I can't believe I bought it either. I'm as shocked as you are.) It's all a bit red in tooth and claw out there.

* Speaking of claws, the tortoiseshells are well, as is Papa Cat, who will be 84 on Feb 1. I'm told that for the birthday dinner we're having Chinese, which my adventurous ma taught him to like at the Silver Dragon Restaurant in Rundle St, Adelaide, circa 1955. Sadly she is now long gone, but his pleasure in Chinese food lives on.

Nothing like a good visualisation

Genetically cursed as my sisters and I have been with not just one but two bad-tempered extroverts for grandmothers, I at least (my sisters usually don't bother) spend an awful lot of time trying to be patient while my patience is tried. (And, usually, found wanting.) It's not just irritability, it's a full-on propensity to breathe heavily like Marvin the Martian and say in a posh high-pitched robotic voice 'You have made me very angry. [pant pant pant] Very. Angry. Indeed.'



Bugs Bunny And Marvin The Martian via Noolmusic.com


Unlike the sisters, however, I regard it as a major failing and character flaw, and -- as with other curses of the human condition, like migraines -- try very hard to stay out of situations that might bring it on. Unfortunately I have now failed to do this two days running, and find myself wanting to scream obscenities at two completely different lots of people -- one online, one off -- which is some kind of a record even for me.

And so there is nothing for it but housework therapy. By the time I've wielded the vacuum cleaner the length and breadth of the house, including the special attachments for curtains and sofas, I'll have vacuumed them all up in my imagination, consigned them to the disposable vacuum cleaner bag where they can be smothered by the kilos of cat hair, and chucked the bag in the bin.

Bonding: just some slurry in bunny ears

Mere days after the volcanic explosion of a giant and pulsating boil on the muscular Aussie arse (otherwise Sarah Ferguson's 'Code of Silence' on Four Corners on May 11, including an interview with the girl who was pack-raped by involved in so-called "group sex" with a number of players and staff from the Cronulla Sharks in Christchurch seven years ago) and the resulting dismissal by Channel Nine of former player and 'personality' Matthew Johns in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy by a TV station that has done more to promote and legitimise misogyny and sexism than any other single entity in the country (I originally mistyped 'Bonding' as 'Boning' in the title field up there)... Mere days after said explosion, as I say, with blood and pus still dripping from the walls of TV studios and football clubrooms everywhere, a Melbourne non-league Australian Rules football team has been fined $5,000 for hiring a stripper to perform before a game, as -- and this was how I heard it described by a club official on the radio -- 'a team bonding exercise'.

A team bonding exercise?

Some of us think it's more just a variation on the theme of bukkake. Or possibly not even a variation. And they'd probably think that was a team bonding exercise as well.

I mean, 'bonding'? How does that work in this case, exactly? You get together to degrade a woman; that much is clear. From the Four Corners transcript (this is a different woman, talking about another different woman):

SARAH FERGUSON: There is an even more sinister side to this technology, Charmyne claims to have been shown a video recently, by a young player on his mobile phone.

CHARMYNE PALAVI: He goes we picked up this one girl and there was like seven of us on her and everything and he goes to me, and we um, but I said you're going to get in trouble for that type of thing, like you can't do that. And he goes, please, he goes we just filmed her to say that she consented to it.

And that freaked me out. This girl was actually in her 20's and told me what they did to her. He said they made her put bunny ears on cause Easter's coming up and made her give head to all of the players one after the other. Made, like I don't understand the term, like we "made her do it."

SARAH FERGUSON: Yeah, and do you know who she is?

CHARMYNE PALAVI: No, I asked him who she was, not knowing that I would even know her, and he goes oh just some slurry from around Cronulla.

So, you get together to degrade a woman ... and that gets you together? Que? How does that work? Apparently the idea of the stripper was to 'gee them up', or, as some commentator unselfconsciously but hilariously put it on the radio last night, 'pump them up', which would seem to support what some of us have suspected all along: that sport is really only a slightly more organised substitute for the raping and pillaging that all manly-men would want to do all the time if only there weren't a lot of silly laws against it.

I was offered a unique insight into the way a certain kind of male mind works when some slurry from around North Adelaide (and a total stranger to boot) came up to me in the pub one night many years ago and said, and I quote, 'Do you f*ck?'

Not 'Where have you been all my life?', 'Hello', 'What's your name?', 'Nice haircut' or even 'Nice tits', but 'Do you fuck?' The correct reply to this, which I gave, is 'Not with the likes of you, shithead,' but I later gave this question and its wording a great deal of thought. To a certain kind of man, there are only two kinds of women. A woman either 'f*cks' or she doesn't. And if she does, she f*cks everybody. Which is, like, consent, right?

And in the meantime, given the height, weight, strength, fitness, world view and subcultural norms of most rugby players, and Charmyne Palavi's own, erm, unique take on these matters, there's one thing of which I am very sure: it's only a matter of time before she finds out what "made" means.

There must be some kind of psychoanalytic logic to this 'team bonding around the degradation of one woman' business, but I'm too tired and too revolted to work it out, so I offer Prahran and Cronulla this truly charming, subtle and hilarious little video instead. I'm sure they'll just love it, and it'll give them some great new ideas.

'Perhaps they should let her run the country'

This story was on the news last night. They had to evacuate and close the Adelaide Zoo. Hundreds of Mothers' Day outings were derailed.

I was in a few traps myself when I was 27, and I didn't tackle them as intelligently as this. I wish I'd known her then; I would have called her on her mobile and asked for some advice.

One commenter here suggests that if she were preselected for NSW Labor it might boost their credibility.

If it's got a brick in its mouth, it must be a vampire

Only last night I was saying to a friend that vampire novels still seem to be hot (I cannot believe they've made a movie of Let the Right One In*) and I ought to try to make some money by writing one ... and behold, this morning someone turns up with an absolutely cracking story just begging to be used.

I'm thinking a marriage of genres. Vampire romance has been done, and so has vampire crime, which is practically a tautology, but has anyone written a vampire western yet?

All ideas gratefully received.


*Here's my review of it for the SMH in March 2007:

Let the Right One In
By John Ajvide Lindqvist
Text, 528 pp, $32.95

This is an energetic, noisy, highly imaginative novel that blends the most extreme kind of vampire-story schlock-horror with a complicated and triangulated love story, a profoundly gory sequence of murders, and some rather good domestic realism about life in suburban 1980s Stockholm.

A number of contemporary scholars and critics including Melbourne’s Ken Gelder have written in detail about the complex cultural meanings attached to vampires, and Lindqvist, while he seems to be mostly having fun with the idea, has clearly also thought carefully about the issues of blood, death, infection and starvation that sit at the heart of the vampire myth, to say nothing of close connection between vampirism and eroticism.

Vampires aren’t the most logical creatures in the world nor the most emotionally straightforward, which makes for a certain amount of confusion in a book where so much happens, especially considering the violence of most of it. The book is clever and well written, but some of it is sufficiently gruesome to give even a strong-stomached reader pause.

BELATED UPDATE: James at City of Tongues saw this more than a week before I did, which just goes to show that I should update my blogroll more often.