The hidden effects of global warming

I was thinking today about a person who used to hide liquorice allsorts in her glove box. But (sigh) global warming has stopped all that.

It used to have class

I spotted a review on the weekend of a book called Striptease: the Untold History of the Girlie Show. Of course, before reading anything I arranged for a priest to sit beside me, mash his rosaries, rock backwards and forwards, catch globs of milky vomit in his mouth and sermonise interminably about blind people with "overworked fertility instruments" (in his case "futility", I jested). But when, eventually, I was permitted to read the sinful bits of the review free of millennia of trans-generational guilt (he fell asleep), I was quite taken by the following description of a couple of old time burlesque acts:

Blaze Starr tied small pieces of steak to her bra and panties before allowing a black panther to slink onstage to nibble them off. Diane Ross ... did an act in which her pet monkeys, Tweaky and Squeaky, took off her clothes, and sometimes their own.

Move aside Sam Kekovich. Fearsome and funny animals, scantily clad women and meat. I see a whole new concept in vegetarian vilification. And good on you Tweaky and Squeaky! If you were alive today, you could have shown Bubbles a good time (bless him).

Grievous Bodily Vomit

KP, a dangerous love

Huddling past your big house
Doubling on their craving
While you who have it all
Gnaw their last life saving

Blackeyed and breathing
Slavering on their (good) name
While you who have it all
Stalk their unsouled shame

But a back will turn eventually
On perimeters and stone
While you who have it all
FLAILHOOT their hunt to own

And a fire will feed eventually
On greedy little feet
While you who have it all
Burn them off your street

Glyphs in space

Imagine a place where everyone is known by a single letter or symbol. Imagine coastal nursing homes filled to bursting with reconstructed battlers dying slowly of affluenza, all or most of them still choosing to be known as "I".

Uranus's symbol is upside down, surely, and Pluto's, fittingly enough*, looks like a pre-teen protesting about the cold. My favourite is the moon's, obviously.



This reminds me of a spirited (read sad) discussion I once had with a group of friends about the personalities, mannerisms, morals, lifestyles etc. of each letter of the English alphabet. I won't go into the details but I remember getting particularly passionate about the letter "E". This was a conniving little fellow, I argued, who was always looking for an advantage and never respected other letters simply for who they were.

Changing the subject, here is more of the devil spawn Yogi Logo warned me about. Lunar Brogue, projected onto spheres and shot into deep space. Don't know why my bedside radio caught fire this morning. Or perhaps it was all in my head.



* Just before you have your milk . . . "Since Pluto is the furthest, darkest, coldest planet, it was given the name of the god of the underworld, where the Romans thought the souls of the dead went after they died. The name also honours Percival Lowell, who was responsible for the search for the new planet. (Sadly, however, Lowell's search was unsuccessful as he suffered a rare illness called Ingemar Syndrome which prevented him from distinguishing with any consistency between planets and tennis balls.)"

Yogi Logo, the people's prophet

Most people who buy into them (and don't we all) seem to be happy. I asked the Yogi and he said this is not true. He said people are fools and cannot be told. He said that they are being used by The Brand to promote unattainable ideals. He sold me a t-shirt which read "People are Fools and Cannot be Told". The dye runs but I'm too ashamed to do anything.

Persecution peps the muse

Rosemary Neill interviewed a certain Bunyah resident for the Weekend Australian. Here's my take.

Les Murray, word contortionist and sometime preambler, was mercilessly bullied at school, "mostly at the hands of girls who sexually humiliated him". At the same time, when he was 12, his mother died. She was "tired of living after three consecutive miscarriages". And while for a time the boy was able to suppress the notion that his mother had chosen death over him, his mind eventually yielded, causing a nine year onslaught of depression that started when he was in his late 40's.

A symptom of this was what might be called persecution awareness (I'll avoid using the word anxiety) whose source, at least from the outside, was clear. Murray had never been shy in sharing his views on issues such as feminism, multiculturalism, aboriginal reconciliation etc. -- issues on which, it is fair to say, this country's cashmere horde has a strong consensus. Whether or not he cared about the establishment's unsympathetic attitude to his conservative opinions is a story I can't tell. But at the same time as the poet was being feted by the world's literary elite, he was convinced that he was hated: "I thought I had two or three friends in the world and that I was a national pariah".

And though he's mellowed a bit now, he's still an outsider, proud to be the bush bard bucking the the cultural norms of an arts community that has adopted him, begrudgingly mostly, as an errant yet magnificently talented country cousin.

This got me thinking. Maybe Murray has been enlivened by the freedom of his place beyond the boundary. A freedom which may owe its existence, ironically enough, to his persecution as a boy and later as an opinionated adult fulminating against the Australia Council and political correctness. His views about white Australians hiding their aboriginal ancestry, for example, are intriguing. "He calls the disguising of indigenous bloodlines by whites 'the great secret, covered up'". So interested is he in the possibility of a personal ancestral connection to aboriginal Australia, he's planning to undergo genetic testing!

Vaguely beachy

Accidentally ascetic

Now I know it's not proper for me to claim a word has buzz status just because I discovered it in some high brow magazine and thought it'd sound good at parties. And I accept that my insistence that such words ought to have special currency, despite what the rest of the world thinks, is a tad immature. But blame me for this indulgence: PREDISPOSED. My god, there was a time there where I couldn't walk straight without having faux-casually dropped this word at least a dozen times a day. Yes, and here comes the shopping trolley full of bricks, you might say I was addicted. Just like my father before me, who uses more superlative language than the entire Californian evangelical Christian community, I'm blind to evidence of danger until it smashes into my shins and makes me cry.

And addiction always equals danger. (Don't say "love". I really do mean always.)

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology and linguistics at Yale. (He's also a powerful spruiker for the movement (atheism) that, in a modern world floating around in clouds of ambiguity, dare not speak it's name. But that's an aside.) As well as reminding his readers about the Nun Bun (a pastry that bears an "eerie resemblance to Mother Teresa"), Bloom argues that there are sound evolutionary reasons for belief in the supernatural (more specifically, religion). He begins his discussion by considering the difficult question of the "origin of religious belief". Here are a couple of appetisers.

(1) We have "adopted religion as an opiate, to soothe the pain of existence". Serving the purposes of a god, for example, fills peoples' otherwise chaotic and insignificant lives with meaning. (Overdoses are common, however, so check the instructions. Witness Tom Cruise's paranoia about satirical representations of his "religion".)

(2) Religion is a fraternity which brings people together, "giving them an edge over those who lack this social glue". Fraternal communities satisfy peoples' existential needs by fostering -- often ritualistically -- shared values and ideals. (This partly explains foreskin snipping and the unholy application of table tennis bats to teenage bible scholars' dirty little sinful botty bots.)

But is this enough to explain why "gods, souls, an afterlife, miracles, divine creation of the universe and so on [are] brought in"? Bloom answers in the negative. In fact, all that quelling of disorder anxiety and happy clapping can be done without the involvement of religion at all (think Disneyland). And this leads to the scene of a calamitous accident.

Bloom informs us that a large body of scientific evidence, much of it recently gathered, proves we are mistaken when we perceive "the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds". For many, this is a big problem whose complexities can inspire a lifetime of philosophical cave exploration. But for many psychologists and neuroscientists such complexities are cast aside with the bold claim that the mind is what the brain does.

So this is part of the accident. We have evolved to imagine phenomena that occupy a world beyond our natural circumstances. We do not equate our mental experiences with our physical ones because this is so absurdly counter-intuitive. In reality, however, we allow ourselves to be kidnapped by reality and forced to contemplate the interior of the boot of its car (while straining to hear a distant conversation about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple). And it delights me to add that this comes as no surprise because, wait for it, we are biologically predisposed to support such ethereal imaginings.

The other part of the accident is a consequence of the first. The "natural-born dualism" Bloom describes not only enables us to "envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls" but causes "our system of social understanding [to] overshoot", which in turn causes us to "infer goals and desires where none exist".

I'll finish now with this fearless oversimplification of Bloom's argument: god is a product of the inherent (and inherently false) natural conception we all have (at least to begin with) of the separation of mind and body. We want him because we need him and we've got him because we've evolved to be pretty good at concocting him.

god, it all sounds so hopeless.