A festival best avoided

The New York Times has an article on the small but enthusiastic culinary following in parts of America for "mountain oysters":

The cooking of testicles — also known as calf fries or lamb fries — is a living tradition on ranches throughout rural Nevada and the Intermountain West down through Central Texas (the annual fry here is nicknamed the “testicle festival”). ...

Liz Chabot, 77, who grew up on a ranch near the fly-speck town of Paradise Valley, Nev., described the delicacy as “a taste like none other,” and recalled how the fries were thrown into the fire at branding time, pulled out with a stick and then peeled and eaten like a fresh fig.

But hey, there's an Australian connection!:

Seven teams of up to four chefs each had two hours to prepare dishes using 20 pounds of the jiggling raw ingredient (flown in from Australia this year).

Evidently our testicles are world class quality.

Even Ken prefers a carbon tax

A carbon tax is the way to cut emissions | theage.com.au

The very Green left Kenneth Davidson supports carbon tax over emissions trading. Will he support the Liberals blocking Rudd's ETS then?

Do this experiment

Plus, a large yellow orb in the sky burned me somehow - Daily Telegraph Tim Blair Blog

It's funny that Tim Blair should post about the travel complaints of the British.

Just the other day, after spending quite some time on Tripadviser reading hotel and resort reviews in various Australian and near Australian locations (just how much of Kevin Rudd's generosity is going to spent supporting the economy of Fiji, I wonder) I observed to my wife that it is a pretty confusing exercise. Often a resort or hotel will have many good visitor reviews, but suddenly someone will give it 1 star and complain that it was absolutely filthy and the most disgusting room they have ever been in. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of one star reviews (often the first one in the list) seem to be by someone from England.

Here's an of example: The Warwick Fiji: the first 20 reviews give it 5 or 4 stars. It clearly pleases many people. In the second set of reviews, there are two 1 star reviews: one from England, and the other (go on, guess): a New Zealander!

The Outrigger on the Lagoon: first page has 5 star reviews, one 2 star (by an Australian honeymooner), but the first 1 star review is from Norfolk (England, I assume.) She's even moved the bed to take photos of the dust bunnies beneath it. (Sad to say, I have to admit the bathroom photo doesn't look flash, though.)

Still, even if the bad review is not from England, I find the words often automatically play in my head with an English accent, for some reason.

UPDATE: I was just checking random Australian hotel reviews on Tripadviser, and I must say reviewers of all countries, when they have an unhappy experience at a hotel, really like to talk it up. For example, someone (an Australian, but maybe her parents were English) says of the mid-range SeaWorld Nara resort:

The website is very flashy, as is the foyer of the resort. That's where it ends. When you walk out past the reception and foyer you land in a block of flats out of a Dickens novel.

I haven't actually stayed there myself, but that comment has just a touch of exaggeration about it, I think.

Then there is the person from Sydney who had this experience at the Holiday Inn Surfer's Paradise:

We arrived in the room and had a quick sleep for an hour, when I woke, the eye which was touching my pillow could barely open, it was so swollen. My eye was perfectly normal before coming into contact with their bed and I don't suffer allergies to frangrances or lotions or anything, so it is unlikely to be a reaction to the laundry detergent.

Dangerous bed linen?

But maybe I should apologise to the English after reading these comments from someone in Redfern (Sydney) reviewing Brisbane's Sofitel:

The bathroom, similarly was five star standard but what is that poor suffering piece of ornamental bamboo in a vase about....doesn't clutter equal lack of clarity about customer service....

Oh diddums, that ornamental bamboo ruined your five star experience? He also takes exception to the (usually rhetorical) matter of being asked if he would like something fixed. This is what happened when he tried to get into the Club Lounge:

One needs to swipe ones room card, and mine didn't work. Imagine my pleasure as the staff stood inside looking out at me like fish in a bowl...while I signaled to them..then it became my problem that the card didn't work. 'Would Sir like me to fix the card?' 'You bet he would, immediately, and why do you need to ask?' Strike one.

"One needs to swipe one's room card." No, is still sounding English to me.

Teaching art

Olivia Cole writing in The Spectator (about her annoyance at the peculiar way Britain's big galleries now try to interest schoolchildren in art) has a witty line:

Online, the National Gallery’s kits for teachers show how very far they have come from the ‘visceral’. Monet’s ‘The Water-Lily Pond’ is an excuse for a lesson in engineering; ‘compare ornamental bridges with industrial ones’ is one teaching instruction. With this approach, presumably ‘The Raft of Medusa’ offers lessons in boat-building.

On bereavement and related matters

Dreaming of the dead. (1) - By Meghan O'Rourke - Slate Magazine

I've been meaning to mention the very insightful and well written essays appearing in Slate dealing with bereavement. The link above should take you to the first entry, in which O'Rourke writes:

Nothing about the past losses I have experienced prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me in the least. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. What makes it worse is that my mother was young: 55. The loss I feel stems partly from feeling robbed of 20 more years with her I'd always imagined having.

I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

That second paragraph rings very true. It is frustrating when undergoing grief to have a rational understanding of it, but still find that such knowledge doesn't seem to help at all with overcoming the emotional reaction.

I found a similar thing when, some months after my father's death, I began feeling a pain in the same location as where he first felt the effects of his cancer. It feels a little silly saying to a doctor "of course I know it is very, very likely this is a psychosomatic grief reaction, but the pain is still there."

O'Rourke's latest entry (number 5 in the series if that link stops working) talks about dreams of her late mother. Hers sound a bit different from mine. As far as I can recall now, most of mine were of the type where I found my father was alive, not dead after all, and that the news of his death had all been a terrible mistake. However, the effect of these on waking was mainly one of disappointment; not peaceful comfort. I suppose they are a little like the "visitation" sense that O'Rourke describes, but she also says that hers were comforting upon waking.

One thing they made me think about was whether such dreams were a plausible explanation for the origin of the belief in the resurrection of Christ. Did someone in his circle talk to a friend of being "visited" by Jesus during the night, and through a series of Chinese whispers it became a story of a physical occurrence?

It sounds plausible in an academic way, but it seemed to me after experiencing grief dreams to not be very likely. After all, people in Jesus' day presumably had more exposure to death in the family at a younger age, and therefore probably knew more of grief dreams than people do today. I suspect that this may have increased their skepticism of a report of physical visit of a deceased person, rather than making them more accepting of such a story.

I don't deny that it might have been a near universal belief then (as it still is for many people) that grief dreams are a real visit by the spirit of the departed. But the gospels spend a fair bit of time emphasising that it was not a purely spiritual body that was appearing. The conversion of a story of a spirit visit from Jesus during the night into a daytime bodily visit seems a rather improbable path to me.

This is not intended to convince any reader in any substantial sense, and of course I am aware of many of the other speculations on the origin of the resurrection accounts. It is just an explanation of my thoughts on the matter, perhaps of interest to a handful of readers.

Death in (or near) the bedroom

Some months ago, before leaving on a holiday, I bought one of those automated insect spray machines (like this example, although the brand is different) that squirt a bit of spray in the air every so often. (You can vary the timing: I set it for about every 30 minutes.)

This is supposed to kill all hapless insects within a considerable range of the machine. I bought it for the walk-in robe that separates the bedroom and the ensuite toilet. Silverfish like it in there, and they were the main target.

One problem I have found with the device is that it makes a bit of a whirring sound every time it goes off. It seems to know when to do it to maximise surprise, such as the other night as I was passing through the robe to make a mid-morning visit to the toilet. I know I can turn the thing off at night, but never think to. Besides, insects are active at night.

The other thing is, given the small amount of stuff it squirts out, I have been very sceptical that it can possibly be effective, unless the bug happens to be within a very small radius of the device. In fact, I was going to do a post about my suspicions that, as a class of product, they might be a great con job. Had any consumer organisation actually tested their effectiveness? (I still haven't looked up that point.)

But then this morning, I found a large, dead cockroach in the ensuite. I assume the spray was the cause of death.

This is enough to make me keep using it, although I still feel I am being unscientific, and it continues to enjoy making me jump at quiet times when I am near it.

That's all I wanted to say.*

* This is officially rated "APoLC." (A Post of Little Consequence).

Oz as economic allegory?

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Secrets of the Wizard of Oz

I hadn't heard this theory before, but it's kinda interesting:

...the story has underlying economic and political references that make it a popular tool for teaching university and high school students - mainly in the United States but also in the UK - about the economic depression of the late 19th Century.

Read the rest of the article to get the details. It does seem odd, however, that no one published the idea until 1964.

I just always thought that the story was quite anti-religion, with its strong themes of self reliance and the revelation that the Wizard has no clothes, so to speak. Sort of a gentler expression of Philip Pullman's themes.

Which leads me to note that a Pullman interview was recently in The Times. There is one comment he makes that I have some sympathy with:

When people talk of his books and about those characters of his who carry their daemons like visible souls, they talk also of spirituality. They may know less of his views than of his creations, but it is a good job he can't hear them as this is what he says of the S-word: “I never use it. I never know what it means. It could mean any one of a whole raft of things, from vague feelings of emotional uplift...and then you're off into the realms of the ‘intense inane', as Shelley called it. I find it almost unbearably stupid when people talk about exploring their spirituality because I don't know what the f*** they mean. I think they mean ‘I'm no end of a fine fellow and you ought to respect me because I've got a higher dimension than you material people'.”

I also tend to be rather leery of the usage of "spirituality" these days, but I don't have well thought out views on this, so it will have to await another post.

Gold flush

Japan's sewers paved with gold - Telegraph

This story appeared in the news last month, but it was dealt with on Radio National's AM this morning (no link available yet.)

Seems the gold in Suwa is either from the gold plating industries, or from the water from the local hot springs, as there used to be a gold mine in the area.

But the main reason to post about it to have fun with a pun.

This is Modern Art - Part IV

What has art got to do with beauty these days? | Roger Scruton - Times Online

A good article here by Roger Scruton, although I must agree with one comment that follows it that the meaning of one sentence is obscure.

I have been intending to write about my own conflicted feelings about modern art, after being prompted to think about it by a a couple of visits to the new-ish Gallery of Modern Art in South Brisbane. It's a fine building in a great location, and together with the adjoining Queensland Art Gallery, State Library and Queensland Museum, it's a very impressive precinct indeed. (My criticism of the museum will have to wait for another post, however.)

GOMA pretty much becomes a playground for children during the Christmas school holidays. While many of the activities are fun for them and their parents, their connection to art can be extremely tenuous, to say the least. These last holidays, for example, one installation invited kids to take a quiz on a touchscreen about pretend aliens, with success giving you an alien embassy swipe card. The card activated some video machines sited throughout the building. The videos featured the artist, who appeared to be aboriginal and sounded gay, talking cheerfully about what aliens like, with someone dressed up as a silly green alien dancing around and kids also featuring in the short videos. As I say, fun for kids under about 9, but connection with art? (No kid is going to cotton on to the aboriginal/gay/alien connection which I assume was at least partly its inspiration.)

In any event, as is usual in modern art, even the "adult" exhibits and installations are often more about simply attracting attention to themselves as a high brow concept, rather than displaying particular skill in their creation, or (as Scruton writes) having much in the way of connection with beauty.

The initial reaction can therefore justifiably be cynical. But on the other hand, the "gee, even I could have done that" thought can be taken in a positive, democratising sort of way: everyone can be an "artist" if they think about what they are making and create anything with forethought. It may not be particularly fair that some can make a living out of mere concept separated from any particular skill, but there will always be the unjustifiably rich and successful in the world.

The result is that I find it hard to resent the modern art I have seen at GOMA, and even if I think a particular installation is a waste of space, I still enjoy the ironic amusement derived from wondering how the artist has managed to receive recognition for their dubious work.

There are lines to be drawn, however. I will still object to the outright ugly as a legitimate form of conceptual art. (The dissected animals of a British artist, for example, or the digestion machine designed to make fake human excrement.) Conceptual art can become mere ugly tosh, there is no doubt about it.

But conceptual art in moderation, when it avoids mere ugliness or the incredibly facile, can be kind of fun:



Update: speaking of grotesque attention seeking as "art", the blood cooking guys from England (where else) are on their way to Melbourne.

Quentin's listening tour (and a grumble about sport)

Here's how Governor General Quentin Bryce recently described her African trip:

I’ll be taking a message of goodwill and renewed engagement, letting African countries know that Australia is ready to listen and learn from them, as well as to contribute to their progress and prosperity.

I await her report in the coming months on what Australia has learnt from Africa via Her Excellency's ear.

By the way, in another recent speech, the GG lavished praise on women's cricket, saying this:

This is a great achievement for cricket and will mean a lot to the 650,000 females playing cricket around the world. In Australia there are more females playing now than ever before – 70,000 – this has increased significantly over the last 4 years.

650,000 females around the world play cricket? This must only be if you count schoolgirls, as the BBC was reporting in 2001 that there were 640,000 girls playing cricket at school in the last 12 months, but only 4000 who played "at club level".

Quentin also claims:

I have observed that many successful achieving women have played cricket. It’s a sport that develops character.

Yeah? I reckon she's just buying into a generic sport's stereotype there: that it's inherently "good for character".

I've never quite understood that. When anyone thinks about their high school experience, for example, how many can honestly say "yes, all those jocks on the football team pretty clearly had the best character of all the people I knew." From my observation, they were in fact more likely to be the one showing their 15 year old girlfriend that they had a condom ready in their pocket for the evening's date, as well as being the most likely to be drinking underage and underperforming academically. They could be mocking of people with no sporting prowess (yes, that's me!) and although they could be reasonable people to meet again as adults, it was only with the additional maturity that they became reasonable conversationalists.

For every famous sportsperson of apparent good character, there is always someone you can find one who is the opposite. Seems to me to be self evidently, at best, a neutral influence on character.

Taking part in any group activity makes people feel well socialised and less isolated, so if I had a teenager who dressed as a Goth and spent most of his time in the bedroom writing poetry, I guess I would be happier if he was playing cricket. (Only just.)

But honestly, any group activity that didn't involve drugs would have the same effect.

Doctor behaving badly

A Medical Madoff: Anesthesiologist Faked Data in 21 Studies: Scientific American

The article notes that it took 12 years before a routine auditing of his studies revealed widespread fabrication.

The article makes a makes a good point at the end:

In hindsight, Anesthesia & Analgesia editors Shafer and White admit that it should have been a "red flag" that Reuben's studies were consistently favorable to the drugs he studied.

Theological question of the week

As posed by daughter (in Grade 1) last Sunday: "why can't I see God? Is it because he's camouflaged?"

(She also occasionally claims that God is not real because he doesn't give her every toy she prays for. Oh for a good Presentation sister to set her right in her religion instruction!)

It's off to court we go

The barristers will surely have little in the way of pleading precedents to rely upon as they draw up the application to have sacked but immobile parish priest Peter Kennedy taken to court in order that the Church can physically get St Mary's back.

According to the report, it's gone this way because Kennedy will not take part in the mediation the Archbishop proposed.

I happened to drive past St Mary's last weekend. As expected, a couple of tents have sprung up right in the front, occupied (I expect) by Sam Watson or other aboriginal figures who want to buy into the dispute. Or I could be wrong; it might be Raelians.

Speaking of Peter Kennedy, this week's "Q&A" on ABC television features him on the panel, together with Tony Abbott. (I hope they are separated, as Abbott seems to be exactly the robust kind of Catholic who might be tempted to lash out and hit him.)

And just so it's not all religion and politics, they also have sex covered too, in the form of panelist Bettina Ardnt. Thus it is covering every topic which it can be unwise to raise at a dinner party with people you've only recently met.

It's one episode I don't want to miss.

The real slippery slope

If harvesting embryos is OK, how about fetuses? - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

This story seemed to have much more limited coverage than it deserved. (And oddly enough, it seems it was the more "down market" media such as the Daily Mirror and Melbourne's Herald Sun which ran this story. Searches I've done on The Guardian and The Times appear to confirm they haven't mentioned it. What the hell's wrong with them?)

The story is that at a conference, Oxford professor Richard Gardner made it clear that he has no particular issue with the idea of using aborted fetal tissue to grow replacement kidneys or livers in adults who are awaiting organ donation. It works in mice, apparently.

The Daily Mirror quotes another professor, Stuart Campbell, as saying he has no ethical objection either:

He said many babies were aborted quite late, 'and if they are going to be terminated, it is a shame to waste their organs'.

As the First Things blog said "Slopes don't get much slipperier".

Although this would not be the first use of fetal cells in attempted treatments, the idea of directly using their partially formed organs (if ever adopted) would surely mean that the scale of fetal organ tissue harvesting would be massively increased.

Ethicists (if that is not too kind a word for it) like Peter Singer have been musing openly for quite a while that there is no real problem with the suggestion. But now it seems the doctors are getting enthusiastic about the idea too.

The culture war is are going to get more sharply defined as this century goes on.

Needlework defended

The British Medical Journal group is taking over publication of "Acupuncture in Medicine", and the doctor editor makes these interesting comments:

"One of the major problems facing medical acupuncture is preconceived notions. The perception is that acupuncture is all about chi and meridians.

"In the past, it was easy for scientists to dismiss acupuncture as highly implausible when its workings were couched in these terms. But it becomes very plausible when explained in terms of neurophysiology. Unfortunately, the scientific approach just isn't as sexy."

Scientific evidence had been building for 30 years showing that acupuncture stimulated the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, releasing "feel good" chemicals such opioids and serotonin.

Research also showed that needles placed outside of the traditional meridians also had an impact. Studies comparing needles placed according to traditional teaching and those placed randomly have shown similar effects.

"Points don't have any magical properties. They are simply convenient locations to needle," Dr White said.

I wonder why tiny needles stimulate that reaction in the brain? Does it happen with any perceived injury? But hitting your thumb doesn't make a sore back feel better, does it?

Unexpected

Jimmy Fallon Ratings Win: "Late Night" Tops, Besting Conan Average

I haven't seen much of it, but from I have seen, I thought he was awful in this format.

Meanwhile, here's an amusing clip from Colbert Nation this week (featuring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad):

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Mahmoud's Non-Consensual Endorsement Deal

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

Send a crate load to Hoyden About Town

Lady tester › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I told you there was something seriously wrong with England

Michael Jackson's 50 London concerts sell out - News, Music - The Independent

How to over-analyse

Soccer Is Ruining America - WSJ.com

Look, I find soccer pretty boring to watch too, and don't really understand the appeal of a game where the scoring of a "good" match is so low. (Incidentally, basketball has the opposite problem: too much scoring means too little drama til the last few minutes.)

But this column is still a severe case of over-analysis (with little sign of any sense of humour). For example:

...soccer is a liberal's dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability.

More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair.

Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.

Hence, it is un-American.

God knows what he would make of cricket.

Pigs and drug resistant Staph

Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health - NYTimes.com

Here's something new to worry about over the weekend. (But the story is to be continued in Sunday's NYT.)