Or is it because I went to Applications and turned off the switch so that Facebook's partners can't automatically customise me if and when I go to their sites??
I caught the end of a documentary on Walt Whitman just now and this is the end of it actually.
The last stanza of this poem - it had me in tears. The things he's sensitive too are nothing like what people of today are sensitive about.
But more than being able to notice these things, he was able to express them in words.
He bequeathed his anthology (35 years of work) to anyone who would have it apparently.
Unbelievable! It's one very long poem. Dare you to read it through: Here
PAGES and pages and Pages and paGES!
If you can't tell...I'm singing...
The mind boggles again.
Who needs Wordpress now?
I hate coding. Sorry to all coders but it's not my thing.
I don't hate it. I hate that I can't do it.
But now I have pages!
God I LOVE# Posterous!
I don't really care that there's no $ off my site.
Been looking at all the marketing stuff.
That's not me either.
I just want to create.
Page 43...
The first buzzard sat on the pony's head. Jody plunged into the circle like a cat.
The black brotherhood arose in a cloud, but the big one on the pony's head was too late.
As it hopped along to take off, Jody caught its wing tip and pulled it down.
It was nearly as big as he was. The free wing crashed into his face with the force of a club, but he hung on.
The claws fastened on his leg and the wing elbows battered his head on either side. Jody groped blindly with his free hand. His fingers found the neck of the struggling bird.
The red eyes looked into his face, clam and fearless and fierce; the naked head turned from side to side. Jody brought up his knee and fell on the great bird. He held the neck to the ground with one hand while his other found a piece of sharp white quartz.
The red fearless eyes still looked at him, impersonal and unafraid and detached. He struck again and again, until the buzzard was dead.
Stradbroke Weather: Squalls from Lisa Yallamas on Vimeo.
Two whales frolicked in Brisbane's Moreton Bay off Brisbane but the beaches were closed. Squally weather marred the first October weekend on Stradbroke Island.
As we waited in the car in a queue for the Big Red Cat - a ferry - the kids were concerned about driving a car onto a boat.
"Can we move around?" "Do we keep our seat belts on?" "Are you sure we can drive on to a boat?"
The Big Red Cat has a little cafe that does a roaring trade and has an enclosed observation deck as a major drawcard - why else would you pay $20 for hot chocolate and tea for five people? The view.
The cafe was calling completed order numbers out before the last car drove on to the Big Red Cat! I felt sorry for the old Stradbroke Island Ferry - we dubbed it the Blue Dog.
The Blue Dog chases the Big Red Cat over Moreton Bay ;)
Whales too far off for a Flip camera - which is now dead. Interesting phenomenon with Flips you erase the video and it tells you it's still a full disc.
I found the word "cripple" falling from my lips when explaining to a child what a buggy was doing driving down the middle of the airport corridor.
"It transports cripples and old people" - I blurted as we hurtled towards the Gate 19 - still under my own steam at this point thank-you very much, not riding the buggy yet.
I expected to be pulled up for being politically incorrect but I was wrong.
"What's crippled?" - was the child's response.
Well, there you go! - a little voice in my head exclaimed - Social engineering actually works.
The word "cripple" makes people cringe - it's so poignant and emotionally charged.
Well, not to this generation of little people. All those years of struggle to weed the word out of the vocabulary has actually worked.
And yes, the Oxford Dictionary says the term is no long acceptable as a noun referring to a person.
Disabled person is usually used instead.
I remember schoolyard bullies and jokers taunting kids with the word "cripple".
I'm betting the existence of golliwogs that this kind of behaviour still goes on today.
Has the extermination of "cripple" really changed society's perceptions?
A leopard doesn't change its spots and human beings aren't born gracious.
Can social engineering actually change the human race - not just the vocabulary?
Well, shortly after (as we wait for the plane) the kids are stretching their lips tight across their faces and laughing.
Offensive behaviour - racist behaviour - they were making fun of the shape of African people's lips.
A UNICEF poster featuring two African children was pasted on a bin - the poster was about poverty, the kids were on about appearances.
Social engineering can't breed out comparativism - the human race learns about itself and the world by comparing itself to everything.
(( And yes comparativism is a word - as is *antidisestablishmentarianism*.
I learned this word from the kids who explained that their friend found it in an advanced dictionary. ))
Civilization governs us with laws - it tries to cripple the basest qualities of human nature.
Reminds me of There Will Be Blood - starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
But you have to believe in something beyond the law when it comes to walking the walk : character is revealed in what we do when no one's watching.
Spirituality requires us to over-ride instinct it seems - and apparently people today apparently are hungry for spirituality. I'm not so sure about that either.
The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology dates the "noun" back to about 1200 as "crupel... related to cryppan to crook, bend.
It became a verb "to lame or disable" in 1694.
So it took us 810 years to decide that the word cripple causes hurt, discrimination and alienation - not people.
Interesting. Don't you think?
On Twitter I heard that there are more than 23 million mobile phones being used in Australia. How marvelous! We are so advanced.
That's 23 million in a country of 20 million people - the population figure includes babies, toddlers, and some Depression Era oldies who throw their hands up in horror at the thought of a mobile phone.
Blame the Gen Ys and the Baby Boomers - because LORD KNOWS no one counts the forgotten Gen Xers now.
Knit one, pearl one, drop one ...
Has anyone noticed how these days you only ever hear about Gen Y and Baby Boomers?
Where exactly did Gen X go?
The Baby Boomers have reaped their rewards, had their good times, continue their good times while Gen Y whoop it up, spend it up while living at home, pushing up inflation, pushing up interest rates.
Meanwhile: Eyesight deteriorates, hair falls out, teeth yellow, spine curls - hey presto! There we are!
Some of us just drifted into Bunnings for a House & Garden outing and never emerged.
The duplicitous nature of physics becomes terrifyingly apparent when applied to mobile phones, weight gain and aging.
Incident report:
5pm on a bus somewhere in Brisbane a snotty-nosed Gen Y talks into her phone.
"Hi-i! Hey, I forgot to feed the goldfish this morning. Can you feed it? Great. See ya."
I do not kid you. ETA less than 20 minutes and she calls someone at home to feed her goldfish.
You know, I may be happy to fade out of this picture.
Though some of us do insist on bright red lipstick, dyed dark short cuts with yellow streaks, dangly earrings, gaudy specs and very expensive shirts and shoes - proof of life, apparently.
Never say die when you can spend $300 on hair - not to mention perfume to reek so genteel people faint around you.
Never say die when you can buy a fast car and trade in the old ball-and-chain for a new, younger ball-and-chain - proof of life.
And when a conversation is struck? But oh, such a rare pleasure!
Hold a smile. Appear interested. And listen.
Listen to each other's minds clicking over calculations: of age (as judged by the condition of teeth); of gaul (as judged by the twinkle of smugness in a young or self-deceived eye).
There it is. Your number's up and it's not Bingo!
There is of course an alternative: ignore each other entirely using the fade in, fade out reality edit. All this energy expended on mental warps.
Based on the law of energy conservation (basic physics), energy is never destroyed it is only converted into another state - converted into what in this case?
I'm always suspicious of people who lose weight because there's a few kilos lurking around looking for a place to settle.
If you know someone who has lost weight redouble your vigilance - it's cheaper than any other aging=fading defiance.
People always think you're younger if you're agile in mind and body.
But seriously, the proliferation of mobile phones is actually much more terrifying than weight gain or aging. The more phones there are, the less actual communication happens.
I'm waiting for Apple to issue the iPhone T5 - the first phone which dispenses with the voice function. Text only. Ticketyboo.
Why can't I have a phone that can sort Optus out with a barrage of constant texts when there's a problem likely to suck up half a day of precious life force? MM-mm?!!
VanityFinance.com (2013 headline) :: Telecom-Apple dwarfs US economy
- Killer Shop App tops the pop chart: It knows what you like and it has your credit card.
DOLLY COVER HEADLINE (2013) :: How to break up with your phone.
Your phone calls you: "I found the most darling pair of shoes! And they only cost $500!"
You: "Tell me you didn't!"
Phone: "I did!"
You: "If you don't stop spending then I'll trade you in..."
NEW SCIENTIST HEADLINE (2013) :: Phone calls God.
Ticketyboo.
When I was a kid I was petrified of the Wirrn, a race of insectoids who infested a cryogenic arc that Dr Who's Tardis pops into - it was up there with vampire shows that I watched standing at the door of the lounge room, the open door.
The Wirrn converted people into embryonic slug Wirrn with a tiny brush of their slimy sluginess - stalking their prey from hidden corners and under the space ship grates - just like the Alien in Alien.
These days I watch almost anything - with the lights out by myself and I'm OK.
Thought I'd shaken off all those irrational beliefs - like miracles. ;)
But there I was, standing in the dim light of a toilet at Australia's premiere scientific institution the CSIRO - for real!
And as I wiped my hands the paper towel wrapped around my hand and I panicked because it felt and looked just like the image of the guy with the slimmed hand in Dr Who.
So there I am shaking my hand and trying to free it from the paper and I stop and suddenly I stop and stare at it - I snigger as my subconscious throws up this Dr Who image.
I'm quite proud of myself for having achieved a certain level headedness - but you know what I did when Darth Vader walked through the glass doors directly in front of my desk in the features department of the Courier-Mail?
My instinctive reflex was to duck under the desk - and I was halfway through a bob down when my brain kicked into gear: "Wait a minute! He's not real!"
No one can tell me that the media doesn't affect people's psychological states - lighting affects people's psychology. Maybe if that toilet had supermarket dazzle the Wirrn would have remained dormant in my mind.
But I believe that when people live through crisis - particularly prolonged crisis such as war, revolution, drought, destitution - it may change people's mindset and they may not even know it.
I know people who have kept people alive, kept families together, left everything they own behind and started again in a country beset by racism - Australia in the 1950s - and it affected them for the rest of their lives. They never forgot. How could you?
Earlier this year I read a social studies report about the communities which depend upon water from the Murray-Darling River Basin. It doesn't seem to be on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's new website any more. Lucky for you I kept a copy. See below.
Watching the farmers' protests on the news reminded me of this report because it explains a few important points like how farmers are getting on in years - there, in Australia's salad bowl, young people aren't lining up to farm.
At least one or two generations have left their parents and grandparents to carry on because they don't fancy being slaves to the whim of the seasons and climate.
Do you wonder that farmers approaching their retirement years are panicking? Remember what self-funded retirees felt like when the Global Financial Crisis crushed superannuation funds and share prices?
These people know that they feed the country. They probably feel like they've just been slimmed by the Greens.
They don't even have anyone to take over the farm. Farmers are as scarce as hen's teeth - or as scarce as a drop of rain in a drought.
There are so many issues all wrapped in the this proposed water management plan which has panicked the farmers and made the Greens so happy.
Everyone's minds are set. Boy do we need a miracle now Saint Mary!
The Green Photo Series.
