Archive for February, 2007
Love letters and over-fertilised roses.
“Love is a many splendid thing. And nobody has a more splendid thing than you.” That’s a quote from a Valentine’s Day message in a newspaper (I think it was in The Age in Melbourne) many years ago. I read that and nearly wet my pants with laughter one morning. That is all.
Oh bugger, we’re all going to die.
The ozone layer problem was the first environmental problem that I remember noticing in my lifetime. It hit mainstream media in the late 1980s. The greenhouse effect followed on close behind, also in the late 1980s. Both those problems have not gone away but the latter has been re-branded as ‘Climate Change’.
Environmental campaigners are very clever at getting a message across and making a certain issue a ’story’ for the modern media to consume. Take the Mururoa Atoll atomic testing in the Pacific by the French in the 1990s. Australians willingly boycotted French made goods, and rightly so in my opinion, to help stop the Pacific Ocean being potentially poisoned by radioactive elements. This drive to boycott goods was driven by Australia’s media jumping on the environmental wagon. I distinctly remember that newspapers, women’s magazines and trashy current affairs programs ran all sorts of anti-French stories and gave activists hours of free publicity.
Flipping over 120 monthly pages on the calendar and much the same thing is happening. Mainstream media, particularly in Brisbane where I currently live, is obsessed with drought, water shortages and the potential disadvantages of the results of climate change. Even today, in federal parliament’s first sitting for the year the theme of question time was distinctly environmental. Today’s local rag (that is all I consider Brisbane’s daily newspaper to be - a rag for cleaning the BBQ plate) used its familiar shock tactics to deliver a particularly ridiculous message to readers - ‘CITY STREETS TO SHUT‘. The story babbles on about the Brisbane City Council’s plans to ban private vehicles from some CBD streets and encouraging public transport use. That, of course, means that the city streets are going to shut according to The Courier SnailMail. That is simpleton media going overboard and is in no way a reflection of the issues environmentalists are trying to raise awareness of.
The simple fact is that business and government have known about the potential effects of too much CO² for decades. But still they drag their feet on making financial incentives for alternatives (like the incentives for oil/gas/coal exploration, production and transport) and encouraging responsible use of natural resources. The ball seems to be in the public’s court now (sorry for the sporting cliché) and we’ve got to give the ball a smash into the government’s side of the court. We need to live sustainably and eventually this will happen - the human race will adapt. We’re all going to die one day - but at the moment it is made to sound like we’re all going to die together in 2035 when the seas rise, the temperature hits 67ºC each summer and fresh water runs out. Environmentalists need to change the tack (shit…a sailing cliché) of the current media campaign. It’s shouldn’t be about what you can and can’t do. It should be more along the lines of thinking about what you consume and how you can consume less. Consuming less makes life cheaper after all - but it also causes recessions. Oh dear!
My house uses bugger all energy, stuff-all water and hardly any gas. That’s just because myself and my wife don’t consume too much. We live simply, without aircon, without a dishwasher (I’m the dishwasher), no heaters, no V8s in the driveway, no plastic packaging filling the rubbish bin each week. It’s pretty simple to live simply - very enjoyable too. Shagging in an un-airconditioned house helps you lose weight too!
Busy.
I’m busy watching Cult videos and freaky german stuff like this. Ha!
Ian Astbury is chubby in this vid. Woah!
And Soundgarden never sounded the same after the Moog Cookbook fucked with Black Hole Sun.
Yeah. I finally have found the time to see what youtube has to offer. The best thing I have found is an Ian Brown video (F.E.A.R) that I watched being filmed around Soho in London. I followed the filming of this when I saw Ian Brown on his chrome dragster. It was done over about 20 takes, loads of beer/drug stops and falls. It pissed rain like you wouldn’t believe while I followed this interesting diversion from my holiday.