Is it still under warranty?

And one other thing: quite a few people seem to have noticed on the web that Abbott seems to have had a cough or cold in interviews for months and months now. The opinion columnist with the biggest man-crush on Abbott in the world, Greg Sheridan, even questioned today whether Abbott is working himself too hard. Is his cough always a nerves thing? Or does he have some long lingering respiratory ailment? I don't think Mr Superfit is as fit as he used to be...

Schwepped up in history

In my post a few days ago about a book on gin, I noted an extract from the review which mentioned the fountain in the Grand Exhibition of 1851, and gave the impression that it might have flowed with Schweppes tonic water.  Well, that's how I read this sentence:

Tonic wasn’t far behind; at the Great Exhibition of 1851, a 27ft (8.2m) fountain flowed with Schweppes.

But looking at a few websites about the Exhibition, and the fountain, it's clear that, at most, it was mineral water.  (I'm still not sure if there was any carbonation in it.)  Schweppes paid to have the drinks concession, and it was a great success for them.

It's been interesting reading about the Exhibition, and the history of Schweppes, which was the original large scale carbonated water manufacturer.  I was never sure of the fate of the Crystal Palace - but it was relocated after the Exhibition and then burnt down in 1936.   (Good thing it didn't make the bombing raids of World War 2, I guess.)  The fountain went with it, although it is forever incorporated in the Schweppes logo. 

It seems in those days just about anything new was seized upon as being of great health benefit, and the alkaline water craze (hello Paul Sheehan) easily goes back to Erasmus Darwin (!):


Jacob did not stay long in Drury Lane and by 1794 he had moved to 8 Kings Street, Holborn. He soon moved the factory again to 11 Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, Westminster at Michaelmas in 1795. In this street, at various addresses, he remained until he retired. In Geneva Jacob had received the fullest support from the medical profession and the leading physicians. In England, it was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin who became their advocate. For the treatment of "Stone of the Bladder" he prescribe:

A dram of sal soda or of salt of tartar , dissolved in a pint of water, and well saturated with carbonic acid(fixed air), by means of Dr. Nooth’s glass apparatus, and drunk every day, or twice a day, is the most efficacious internal medicine yet discovered, which can easily be taken without any general injury to the constitution. An aerated alcaline of this water is sold under the name of factitious Seltzer water, by J. Schweppe, at no.8 Kings Street, Holborn, London : which I am told is better prepared than can be easily done in the usual glass vessels, probably by employing a greater pressure in wooden ones.

Erasmus Darwin was part of a group of philosophers and inventors who met regularly. In this circle were men such a Josiah Wedgewood the great potter, James Watt, Matthew Boulton (who made Watt’s first steam engine) and Dr.. William Withering. Boulton had been a regular drinker of Schweppes waters from as early as 1794. He told Erasmus Darwin about them and in a letter dated October 1794, he gives a fascinating insight into the waters being sold and the bottles used to contain the:

Mr. J Schweppe, preparer of mineral waters, is the person whom you have heard me speak of and who impregnates it so highly with fixable air as to exceed in appearance Champaign and all other bottled Liquors. He prepares it of three sorts. No 1 is for common drinking with your dinner. No. 2 is for Nephritick patients and No. 3 contains the most alkali and given only in more violent cases. It is contained in strong stone bottles and sold for 6s 6d per doz, including the bottles.

That's today's history.

The disgrace that is Graham Lloyd

The Australian Newspaper’s War On The Bureau of Meteorology � Graham Readfearn
We know that The Australian has been conducting a War on Climate Science for years, but it is still utterly gobsmacking that Graham Lloyd has been publicising the dog-returning-to-its-vomit stories of Marohasy, Jonova, Stockwell and others that the Australian temperature record has been deliberately (and without using the word itself, but clearly implying it continually - fraudulently) manipulated by the Bureau of Meteorology.

Graham Readfern's article above is a good summary.

The only conspiracy going on is in the paranoid imaginations of skeptics.  As Sou notes at Hotwhopper, wannabe King of Skeptics Anthony Watts appears close to breaking point recently.  He's long been a nasty, immature man when it comes to criticism.

And yet fools believe these people.

Wittiest comment of the day

There's an interview with Michael Palin up at the Guardian, because of the publication of the 3rd volume of his diaries.   From comments following, this was the wittiest response possible to a bore claiming he's a bore:

 Lest we forget:

 

Another recipe for my future reference...

Tonight's recipe - Spiced Shepherd's Pie with Pumpkin - found here,  was nice. The spice combination was not overpowering but went well with the mashed pumpkin.   The recipe is too low on the salt, though, and I just used frozen peas instead of silverbeet.  I baked the pumpkin instead of steaming, too, and then mashed it.
 

Ingredients – serves 4

• vegetable or olive oil, for cooking
• 1 onion, chopped
• 500g/18oz minced (ground) lamb
• 2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon dried chilli flakes
• 400g/14oz can diced tomatoes
• 1/2 cup chicken stock (preferably salt reduced)
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 4 silverbeet leaves, stalks removed and leaves shredded
• 1kg butternut pumpkin, coarsely chopped
• 1 cup grated cheese
• black pepper, to season

Method:

• Heat a little oil in a non-stick frying pan and cook the onion over a medium heat for 3-5 minutes or until softened.
• Add the minced lamb to the pan and cook, stirring to break up lumps, until browned.
• Add the ground coriander, cumin, cinnamon and chilli flakes to the pan and cook for 2 minutes.
• Stir in the tomatoes, stock and tomato paste and simmer for 10 minutes.
• Heat the oven to 200C/180C fan forced/390F.
• Meanwhile, cook the pumpkin in a large pan of boiling water for approximately 8 minutes or until tender. Drain and then mash the pumpkin in the pan.
• Add the shredded silverbeet to the lamb, stir and cook for a further 5 minutes.
• Place the lamb in an ovenproof dish.
• Top with the mashed pumpkin and spread to cover the lamb.
• Sprinkle over the grated cheese and pepper.
• Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the cheese is golden and bubbly.

Why Saudi ridicule deserves to be ramped up

Readers may rightly note that I'm feeling particularly down on Saudi Arabia at the moment, and John Birmingham in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning helps explain why:

Where, then, are the battalions of those who should be concerned? The Saudi King warns that IS will be in Europe and America within months. The Saudi King, the closest thing we have to an absolute monarch outside of North Korea these days, has at his convenience an army of 75,000 men, including a 1000-strong tank armada which might even give Vladimir Putin a moment's pause if he found them sitting astride some patch of turf he might like to place within his possession. The Royal Saudi Air Force, deploying from bases somewhat closer to the Islamic State than Williamstown, boasts more than 300 combat aircraft, including F15E Strike Eagles and shiny new Eurofighter Typhoons, barely out of their bubblewrap.

And yet, in spite of King Saud's fit of the vapours about the threat of IS, there is no suggestion that these formidable war machines might do anything like deploy from those conveniently located Saudi air fields. No. His oil slaves will do that work. And many in his Kingdom will go on quietly supporting their Sunni brethren in IS.

So why are we going to another war? Surely not because the last one went so well?

What a country - again

I was Googling around looking for photos of the shopping mall at the Riyadh Kingdom Centre which featured in a post a couple of days ago [checking out the similarity of shopping malls in wildly disparate parts of the globe is an interest of mine - so sue me] when I stumbled across some 2012 news from Saudi Arabia   which I had missed:

I didn't realise that not only women suffer from not being to do things they've done in the West for, oh, like forever (such as being able to travel alone without being presumed to be a prostitute), but that the society also had such an intensely infantilising attitude towards single men too.   "No no no, you may be an adult but we know we cannot trust you to control your sexual urges when you are confronted with the alluring sight of a mall full of scenes like this:"

And yet, even the married men had gone all Stockholm Syndrome with talk like this:

So this is a society where young men cannot drink, cannot go to a cinema (apparently, they get one movie every 30 years, but there is a rumour that the government might be about to allow cinemas to be built).  Cannot (until recently) go to a mall because there might be a lot of women there. So what does the young man of Saudi Arabia do for entertainment?   Well, by the looks of this photo from the NYT in 2008 - go on a desert picnic with his best (male, of course) friend:

A thrilling day was had by all.

That NYT article's actually pretty interesting, by which I mean appalling, in the attitudes quoted by one of the young male subjects:

“One of the most important Arab traditions is honor,” Enad said. “If my sister goes in the street and someone assaults her, she won’t be able to protect herself. The nature of men is that men are more rational. Women are not rational. With one or two or three words, a man can get what he wants from a woman. If I call someone and a girl answers, I have to apologize. It’s a huge deal. It is a violation of the house.”

Enad is the alpha male, a 20-year-old police officer with an explosive temper and a fondness for teasing. Nader, 22, is soft-spoken, with a gentle smile and an inclination to follow rather than lead.

They are more than cousins; they are lifelong friends and confidants. That is often the case in Saudi Arabia, where families are frequently large and insular.

OK, so how do you sum up gender politics in this society:   women don't trust men; men don't trust men; men don't trust women; all men think women are stupidly pliable;  but - I don't know, I'm looking for an upside here - everyone likes camels?

Good to see someone keeping tally

From the Australian Financial Review today:

The Abbott government has broken more key promises than it has kept during the Coalition’s first year of power, an analysis by The Australian Financial Review has found.

The government has delivered on 13 promises and is making progress on 11 others – but has broken its word on 14 pre-election pledges.

Tony Abbott promised on the eve of last year’s election that there would be “no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS”.

The Abbott government has since proposed changes in all of these areas – except the GST.

 And the reason why the government is on the nose - it breaks promises to everyone, on both the Left and Right, meaning that it keeps no one happy. 

Update:  Lenore Taylor's summary was longer than mine, but pretty good too.

Quite a serious First Dog today...

First Dog on the Moon on ... hierarchies of oppression - cartoon | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Et tu, Barrie

Report card: strong ambassador, dud budget - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


Barrie Cassidy on Tony Abbott today:

Whether it be repairing a damaged relationship with Indonesia,
responding to the Malaysian air crashes, standing up to Russia, or
confronting the brutality of the Islamic State, Abbott has been
exemplary.

Nothing impresses me about Tony Abbott, including his rush to embrace security issues as something that might be his saving grace in the public eye (as he thinks happened to Howard.)

And let's be honest - there has been nothing particularly brave about any of his responses to security issues - not like Howard and his gun law reform.  Rather, they been boiler plate responses, and not always hitting the right mark, but sounding just a bit too incautious and hairy chested.  Also, his personal popularity rating has not increased since these events happened, so it seems to me the public is not entirely convinced as well.  (Although, I suspect, the more dangerous international situation may account for some votes going back to the Coalition in polling, regardless of its leader.)

So I beg to differ with Barrie, and the only good thing about his column is it again makes a mockery of Andrew Bolt's moronic repetition "the ABC is out of control" (because they don't agree with him on politics.)

Poor old Ludwig, revisited; and the lives of the artistic, generally

A couple of months back, I posted some extracts from a review of a biography of Beethoven about his often unhappy life.

There's another review out on a different biography, and this paragraph is blogworthy:

This physical suffering was intensified by his inability to find the partner he craved so fervently. Beethoven kept on falling in love with women whose higher social status placed them out of reach. After the final collapse of his relationship with Josephine, Countess von Deym, he fled to the country estate of another aristocratic lady, Countess Erdödy, and promptly disappeared. It was assumed that he had returned to Vienna, but after three days a servant found him hiding in a remote part of the palace gardens, apparently trying to starve himself to death. Prudish in his attitude to the sexual behaviour of others - he even disapproved of the 'lascivious' subject matter of Mozart's Don Giovanni - he resorted increasingly to prostitutes for his own gratification. 'I am always ready for it,' he told his friend Baron Zmeskall, 'the time I prefer most of all is at about half past three or four o'clock in the afternoon.' His attempt to express his need for a lasting human relationship by adopting and then micro-managing his nephew Karl ended in disaster, when the object of his affection first ran away and then tried to shoot himself.

So, there you have it:  you now know the timing of Beethoven's sexual appetite down to the half hour.

I have to also say that it surprises me, this frequency with which the use of prostitutes (or at least mistresses) features in the lives of the artistically successful.  I've said it before, but if you're married by age 30 and have a long and happy marriage in which you never sleep with anyone else, it seems you can just about guarantee that you will not be a literary or artistic success.    I'm trying to think of a possible exception to this rule:  the 20th century's most famous Catholic writers certainly don't fit the bill - Graham Greene particularly, but I think Evelyn Waugh is thought to have been a frequent customer of brothels during his overseas travels.  CS Lewis is thought by most to have had a weird mummy thing going on with his deceased mate's mother.   Possibly GK Chesterton (although he's not considered exactly top of the range in the artistic ranks)?

A quick check of some biographic details indicate he did enjoy happy domesticity,  and this (rather interesting) essay about him generally argues with direct autobiographical quotes that whatever temptations he considered himself prone to, he specifically denied they were homosexual.   But really - with his rotundity, you would not expect him to have easy access to sexual liaisons of any kind - prostitutes would have feared for their lives, most likely.

So there you go - maybe I have found a famous-ish author who didn't seem to do anything too untoward in his sex life, although his physical characteristics make it questionable whether it was even possible.   Further examples from readers are most welcome.

Update:  from an essay about attitudes to prostitution generally:   

Many great writers, composers and playwrights have regularly indulged, patronised, and befriended prostitutes, including Franz Kafka, Guy de Mauppausant, Georges Rouault, Toulouse Lautrec, Dennis Potter, Picasso, Paul Verlaine. 

 Dennis Potter seems a bit out of place in that list!

Hope it's not a fizzer

It's a James Ashby interview that looks like it will shed further light on who in the Liberals helped him bring his case, and who lied about it.

Update:  what a tease the 60 Minutes trailer for the interview is.    Another allegation of sexual harassment (but not by who - if it's poor old Slipper, people will probably say "old news, can't he be left alone?");  someone called a liar;  a claim that is "dynamite".    Twitter is full of rumour that Pyne ought to be worried, but we shall see.

Update 2:  fizzer.  Although I did miss, while going downstairs to see where X Factor was up to, the bit that was "dynamite".

Look, anyone with any sense knows Pyne has been deceptive about this from the get go, and that Abbott has lied in the past about his role in political intrigue (Hanson), and almost certainly knew more about the Slipper/Ashby matter than he will admit.   Brough comes across as a complete sleazebag.  Yet   Ashby also remains a person impossible to sympathise with because of the way he played politics too.  

It was all a nasty bit of political dirty work from a Coalition that was desperate to seize power if they could.   [And now that they have it, they're still failing to win hearts and minds.]

But we knew all of this already.

Everyone needs a hobby...

These Two Guys Studied Their Feces for a Year - The Atlantic

(Actually, it's quite an interesting science story about gut biome again.)  

Fast food every night, then?

In what's probably just another bit of Slate click baiting, this article with the heading Let’s Stop Idealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner is still a profoundly silly piece by Amanda Marcotte.

Yes, let's accept that working mothers can have a hard time juggling work and getting dinner ready every night.

But honest to God, the range of easily prepared meal components (by which I mean things like pasta or curry sauces in jars, meal "kits" in a box, pre-sliced or diced meats, even frozen vegetables) which, served up with a pile of steamed vegetables (just how hard is it to steam vegetables?) makes the modern cooking task for relatively healthy meals about twice as easy as it was 40 years ago.

And what does Marcotte or her quoted sociologists expect as an alternative?

Utopia

I've been watching most of Working Dog's new show Utopia on the ABC, and I have to say it has grown on me.

As a satire of how the public service works (well, perhaps the semi corporatised version of the public service?)  I think it does very well.  

Last night's "job performance review" co-plot rang very many bells with I saw in my exposure to the PS, although that was a couple of decades ago now.  (I doubt that it has changed much, though.)

I thought the episode on the Very Fast Train was also pretty good, in terms of how economically unjustifiable ideas can refuse to die.

But I did miss the first episode - and I am bit puzzled as to how the Rob Sitch character has ended up as the boss of an outfit in which he is perpetually unhappy and never gets his way....

A problem easily fixed?

Seeing Adam Creighton is against an increase in compulsory superannuation, I now feel pretty confident that some increase was in fact warranted.  And let's face it, the Coalition is not saying they are against an increase happening eventually, they've just delayed it.

But what I wanted to note was Creighton's argument in the Australian this morning that compulsory superannuation is a "failure" because it is failing to reduce dependency on the pension to a large enough degree.

Yet the reason he gives for this - the pension assets and income test being too generous - is surely one of the economically easiest things to change in future.   And what's more, isn't ensuring that more money is in super in the first place one of the key ways of ensuring that the tightening of the test is easier to politically and economically justify?

Surely you would have more chance of arguing for phased in reduction of government contribution to pension support if you can point to the increase in superannuation income that you're also ensuring for the future?

Update:   just wanted to make it clear again that I was saying that changing the assets/income test is economically easy - in the sense that it can be relatively clear where to set the line and what effect it will have on future government outlays - but not that it was necessarily politically easy.    However, it becomes politically easier if you can tell people their superannuation will be larger too.

And here's another thing - I've noticed small government types are pretty hot for the Singaporean system of health care which works to a large extent on forced contributions to health savings accounts.   (Someone on boring old Amanda Vanstone's Radio National show was talking up something similar the other day.)  

So why are they so against compulsory super savings in Australia?  Is it just because of Union involvement in industry super?

And really, whatever arguments are against compulsory superannuation (due to fees and questionable tax treatment for those who need it least), do small government economists really think people left alone make adequate savings for retirement? 

I hear a lot of whining, but don't hear much about alternatives....

The old Michael Ware is back on my TV

Seven years ago I noted how annoying I found former CNN war correspondent Michael Ware, an Australian given to talking in perpetual hyperventilating Steve Irwin style.

And he's on my TV right now, on The Drum, with Brisbane's Story Bridge in the background (he lives here?) and he's still the same, and still really irritating.

In other Arab news

While admitting that I like the idea of being in charge of an Australian version of the Saudi Arabian institution known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, I would have to run it better than this:

Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on Tuesday removed four of its staff from the Riyadh office after it found them guilty of assaulting a British national and his Saudi wife....

Reports late on Friday said that the Briton was approached by the members of the Commission when he took a check-out at a supermarket reserved for women and families.

When they asked him about his presence in the special lane, he answered that he was with his wife and had the right to use it.

However, the Commission members felt frustrated by the answer and followed the couple until they reached their car outside the mall where they had a physical altercation.

Update:  a little bit of video of the guy being jumped on for being in the women's checkout lane can be seen at the Daily Mail here.

I'd hate to see what they do to someone who goes through the "12 items or less" lane with 13 things.

And by the way, the Daily Mail site has a picture of Riyadh, a city you don't often see much of:

What's the building that looks like the eye of a needle?  I'll have to check:  I see, it's Kingdom Centre, which has a shopping mall, hotel and apartments.   [And, being Saudi Arabia, public floggings in the courtyard on the hour for men caught looking sideways at women with accidentally exposed ankles.]

You can also go up to the "skybridge" at the top.  Photos at its website here. 

Update:   looking around at other local websites reporting this widely publicised story, I have to admit that most of the 40 comments at Arab News (most of which appear to be Saudis) are critical of the Virtue Police.   One comment details another incident, which I repeat for its comedy value (as long as you're not the victim):

There have been many such instances which either go unreported or no action is taken even after a complaint is lodged. A few years ago, the religious police raided a staff house belonging to a corporate in Olaya locality of Riyadh which housed a few Keralites among which one of them happened to be a friend. The religious police searched the entire flat and found a few pornographic CD's, all the flat members were locked up in the toilet from 10 PM to 4 AM and the entire duration was spent by the religious police examining the evidence thoroughly on a flat screen television. Fortunately the flat members were let out after the call for Fajr salah and the religious police left without saying a word.

Ms Popularity

Judith Sloan is having a hot run in the unpopularity stakes at the moment.  From The Australian:

JUDITH Sloan makes some false assertions about how one of my reporters does her job (“Paper’s slant against self-managed super is just so wrong”. 2/9). Sloan suggests she’s “pretty sure” the journalist did not ferret through the Australian Taxation Office website to get figures about self-managed super funds and that she was “probably fed them” by industry super funds.

After speaking to the reporter, and backed by my knowledge of how she works, I am more than pretty sure that Sloan is wrong. My reporter got the numbers from the ATO. She was not fed them by interested parties.

It is one thing to vigorously contest issues. It is another to make false claims about the professionalism of a journalist because you disagree with the angle of a story — all without checking your assertions.
Michael Stutchbury, editor-in-chief, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney, NSW

Well, this is confusing...

We seem to have a bit of a bizzaro world reversal going on in the reaction to the Abbott government putting substantial delay into an increase into compulsory superannuation contributions paid by employers.

The Australian website has been running as its headline article a David Crowe report that would not keep the Abbott government happy at all.  The subheading:

WORKERS will take a $20,000 hit to their retirement savings from a shock deal in the Senate to repeal the mining tax, with the Abbott government blaming Labor for forcing it to agree to the change. The losses could reach twice as much for young workers on high incomes, according to an exclusive analysis for The Australian that reveals the impact on millions of employees who will miss out on an increase in their superannuation over the next five years.

(Of course, the paper also contains a "You're Magnificent, Abbott!" piece by the ever obsequious Denis Shanahan about the very same deal.) 

But over at Fairfax, we have Peter Martin talking up the decision to not increase the tax contributions because it was clearly going to eat into salary growth too much.  With the headline "The Coalition helps the workers", the Martin article takes exactly the Abbott line on the issue.

It will be some time before I know what to think about this....