Suicidegate

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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When in SF, one has to do the SF thing and cross The Bridge. Which seems to mean venturing into a fog, no matter what time of the year, or what time of the day. The top pix shows the kind of weather we had the whole time we were in the city, and was taken from the viewpoint at one end of the bridge. The other pix show the bridge at more or less the same time.
Tell you, that fog is … creepy.Note to self: next time, clean the windscreen first.

And today I read in the newspaper that the powers that be have just decided to spend $US 40 to 50 million on netting to stop suicides jumping off the Golden Gate – there were 39 confirmed suicides last year and possibly a whole lot more that slipped under the radar.

Sorry, but that seems a ridiculous waste of money to me. Most people who decide to take their lives are going to do it unless there is some kind of intervention, yes, – but intervention by way of a net at a particular site is not going to help. They will just go elsewhere. Are we so cynical that “as long as it doesn’t happen on our turf” is what matters?

Spend the money on mental health by all means, but not on a static piece of netting. Come on.

San Francisco, can’t you do better than that?

The last two photos show the bridge from a distance – taken from Coit Tower. Gives an idea of how that fog creeps up the bay and ignores the rest of the city…


What was playing the day you were born?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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If for some obscure and fun reason you should want to know what was the top song in the USA the day you were born look here.

And so on the day that I emerged squalling into a world then still at war, it was Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters singing…wait for it…
Don’t Fence Me In.

Appropriate, huh?

Fox News & a Republican Media Person insult me and Sarah Palin…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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…and all other women.

There is one thing I will gladly say about Palin. She is a beautiful woman, especially considering her serial motherhood and her not-so-young age. She is gorgeous. To say that she is not, when viewed close up, is both a lie and horribly insulting. To tell people in general and women in particular that you need your photograph to be “touched up” to appear good is in fact both grossly offensive and ridiculous.

And yet, that is what has happened.

A Republican media consultant on Fox news called the fact that Sarah Palin’s photo on the cover of Newsweek was untouched a “gross slap in the face to Governer Palin” and “any woman who sees this cover would be shocked and horrified”. The Fox news commentator remarked that “any respectable magazine” would touch up a candidate’s cover photo and that they had of course done that to Barack Obama (although she could offer no proof of that assertion and Newsweek does in fact not do so).

Well, I am indeed shocked and horrified, Ms Media Consultant. And I will tell you why. I am shocked and horrified that anyone at all would think that looking faultlessly beautiful is what counts in a leader, and that we are so brainless that we would vote on the grounds of the “looks-good” factor – and therefore it is important that “respectable” magazines should touch up photos.

Looking a bit like the back of a bus after it was rear-ended, I can assure you that my face doesn’t make one whit of a difference to whether I write a good book. Palin’s great looks won’t make her a good – or a bad – VP. And to tell us that we are the kind of morons who think it does is more than offensive.

Fox news and you, Ms Republican Media Consultant Andrea Tantaros, I thought you guys relished the idea that the Republican nominations weren’t those terrible elitist people (shudder) like the Democrats insist on fielding. That yours are just ordinary folk without a decent college degree, like Joe Six-pack. Doesn’t it strike you that maybe airbrushing away wrinkles is a tad elitist? You know, “Look, my flawless VP candidate could be a super model?”

Sometimes I despair of the world. And if I were Sarah Palin I would be really really angry – and not with Newsweek.

Great Depression this ain’t

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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There are so many mutterings going around about how this present economic dive is going to resemble the Great Depression of the 1930s. I think those who say that kind of thing have not the faintest idea of what the Great Depression was like.

“Nor do you,” I hear you say. Well, I didn’t live through it, certainly – it had ended by the time I was born, courtesy of something far worse – but I grew up with the residual effects of depression and war. I had parents who knew all about what it was like to work and never be able to afford a day off – not one day in a year – and who never wasted a thing, because you could not afford to do so. (I hasten to say that many people in developing nations already know the equivalent of this – and have never known anything else).

So, until I see in western countries:
… people who will work 20 miles to save the bus fare;
…kids who will walk a couple of miles to school and home again every day as a matter of course;
…men darning socks, and women darning stockings – ok, panty hose – rather than buy a new pair;
…people growing their own food instead of flowers in their gardens or window boxes ;
… owners feeding their cats and dogs on nothing but scraps;
…folk squishing their old bits of soap together rather than buy a new cake;
… families never using shampoo or toothpaste because it is too expensive;
…someone scrubbing floors and bench tops and baths without commercial cleansers because they can’t afford them;
… a whole family using only one light at night to do homework, darning and whatever else around the same table;
…folk mending their own shoes and shirts and belts and cooking pots and roofs and chairs and anything else, rather than pay someone else or throw the broken thing out and buy another;
…people who NEVER eat out, not even at a fastfood joint, because they don’t have the money;
…people washing out their clothes every night (by hand of course) because they only have one good shirt/blouse/whatever to wear to work the next day;
…kids who never get given pocket money because all household money goes to important things like food;
… I could go on and on and on.

Until I see families – many of them – families wh0 have at least one employed member and yet still having to do all the things I have listed above, then I will know that yes, this is like the Great Depression.

That doesn’t mean that the coming times won’t be tough. Very tough on many. But it still won’t compare with the 1930s. Not yet, anyway. The equivalent of the Depression won’t come in the West until the world is at a standstill because of a total breakdown in the environment.

Depressed? Buy a book. They are still the cheapest form of entertainment.

Believing in magic

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Here’s a true story, just related to me today over a coffee at my kitchen table.

The woman chatting to me has recently had a medical problem diagnosed (after an CT scan and ultrasound) as kidney stones, and is due to go for laser treatment in the local hospital here in Selangor. Her close relative, however, said he knows a very good traditional medicine man (bomoh), and why doesn’t she try him first for some non-invasive treatment, especially as he is renowned for his treatment of kidney stones.

Having a “try anything” attitude, she said OK, and off they went to visit the bomoh in Durian Tunggal, Malacca. Her first shock was the number of people lining up to see him. So many that he had a “Take a number” system. He was giving out between 50 to 70 numbers a day, 5 days a week, and sometimes there was more than one person to a number. The fee was a “donation”. The woman and her relative both paid 20RM (about $US6 or $AUD8 each).

Do the arithmetic. The guy is earning considerably more than my husband who has a Ph.D in science.

So the bomoh asks the woman what’s the matter, she explains and he cautions her not to have the laser treatment because it is dangerous. In other words, he is actively advising her to go against her doctor’s advice. He then massages the area over the kidneys and produces, one after the other, three “kidney stones” which he gives to her. Problem solved, no need to go for that pesky hospital visit.

Woman – highly suspicious – phones her doctor and asks to have another ultrasound. He very kindly doesn’t scold her and obliging sets one up. Of course, the kidney stones are still there, and woman is still scheduled for her laser treatment.

I dunno why I write stories about magic (which stories no one believes for a minute) and get paid so little. I should be setting up a bomoh clinic, have everyone believing in my magic, and earn a fortune at the same time (apparently immune from the law too, on the grounds of…what? Traditional cultural practices of cheating the public are sacrosanct?).

This man is a menace. He is a crook. He is ripping off the gullible public and possibly putting people in danger at the same time by persuading them to avoid medical treatment. Why is he allowed to practice? Why on earth do people believe in this crap?

Extinction is forever

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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A few pix of animals from our Yosemite trip, appropriate today because it has just been announced by IUCN that one in every four mammal species in the world is in trouble – and could disappear from the face of the earth. For all eternity. That’s right, we are in danger of wiping out one quarter of the world’s mammalian biodiversity. Half the world’s mammals are declining in number – unfortunately, one of them is not homo sapiens. One in every 12 bird species is already in trouble.

What are you doing about it? At the very least, join a conservation society.

A coyote, pix taken on our trip to Yosemite. Plus some squirrels. And no – we didn’t see a bear, alas.



I had a scientific article published last month, on the birdlife of some of Malaysia’s offshore Bornean islands, in which I wrote:

Human overpopulation could be a huge problem on Mabul Island. Families of five and above appear to be the norm, not the exception, and one wonder how much longer terns and frigates will find fish. On Bohey Dulang Island, the nests of the Philippine Scrubfowl are dug out for the eggs and/or surrounded by traps to catch the adults. Apparently no one thinks about who will lay the next lot of eggs. In Sabah, anything that has become customary seems OK, even if it is against the law. On top of that, birds do not have the legal protection they do in other parts of Malaysia. Poverty leads coastal and insular families to poach and hunt anything that can provide food.

(I understand why these people hunt, but it beats me why wealthy Alaskans think it’s fun to shoot things from a plane. And it is a fallacy, btw, to think that indigenous populations traditionally understand conservation. They didn’t and they don’t. In the past, things remained in balance because hunters didn’t have guns and other gadgets to use, and because their number was limited by poor medical care and infant mortality. Change that, and everything changes.)

Here’s a naturalist’s blog that’s worth looking at: The Scolopax Chronicles. An artist in Kent, the blogger is in touch with the natural world in a way that few of us are these days.

Thanks for Yosemite

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Thank you to all the folk who were ahead of their time – even ahead of some folk who live in our times – and decided to stop the logging and the mountain sheep-herding that would have devastated this place forever.You had vision.
And gave us something visual to ease the stress of life.
You understood how necessary it is to have balance in life and you were willing to fight for that, so that we too could have balance.
You appreciated perfection, and wanted to pass it on to people who weren’t even born.
There are still those who will ride wildlife down, shooting at them out of planes, watching as they die bloodied in the snow.
But you knew then and I know now that there is better way.
Thank you.

Perfumes of a different kind

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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The pix above is younger daughter holding the cone of a sugar pine in Yosemite. They grow things big there, remember? The white bits you can see on the cone are pieces of resin and they have a glorious smell. (Now why can’t the manufacturers of those awful car deodorizing dispensers reproduce that forest smell of pine leaves and trees in autumn? I’d buy it like a shot to remind me of Yosemite…)

Meanwhile a different kind of smell. It’s called muckraking and it stinks.

When I was at university, I spent hours of my time one year in the company of a man who the following year murdered his son in a premeditated killing. True, I was never actually alone with him, but still… He was my lecturer and tutor and I really thought he was lovely man. I have
spoken in a social setting to at least one other convicted murderer (after he was released from jail). Over the course of my life spoken and yes, dare I say it, knowingly socialised with people who have been in jail, been drug addicts, thieves, religious perverts, Nazis (real ones) and bigots.

Am I therefore one of them? Am I a murderer perhaps? Do I therefore share their views? Yep, according to some. See here.