Sensitive, educated, obsmervant

Franzy (to student hired to do envelope stuffing): Okay, so, if you want a coffee or anything, the kitchen is just there.
Student: Thank you.
Franzy: No problem. I'm about to make a pot of coffee, would you like some?
Student: No, thank you.
Franzy: Tea? We have tea too.
Student: No, no thank you.
Franzy: Water? Milk? Anything you like. Please help yourself.
Student: Thank you, I'm fine.
Franzy: Okay - let me know if you need anything.

Fifteen seconds later.

Helpful colleague: Did you know that Ramadan started yesterday?
Franzy: Sure thing.
Helpful colleague: Did you notice that student's hijab?
Franzy: Huh.

Burqas, priest's collars, skull caps and digger's hats

I've been thinking about this issue for a while now.
I think I might have boiled it down to something equating to ideology vs culture.
Yes, burqas oppress these women and are a symbol of that oppression.
No, I don't have to understand it to accept. I understand the cultural significance of the burqa (and dozens of other religious/cultural symbols), but that doesn't mean that it doesn't offend my own cultural sensibilities.
Burqas are bullshit. I say so. I hate what they stand for and the fact that they symbolise ownership and control of women.
I can feel like that and say it because that's the cultural attitude I was brought up with and I've considered my membership to my own culture and accepted it. If I was convinced that the culture which supports the burqa is the right way to go, then I would pop over and join in. That's Australia - I can pretty much do what I like and wear what I like. Like people who wear burqas.
If we start banning burqas, don't let's kid ourselves that it's about safety or any of that other propgandist garbage. Unless we ban all cultural and religious symbols, no matter how benign or offensive to our own sensibilities (think priest's collars, skull caps and digger's hats), then a burqa ban is pure xenophobia. And that's not the Australia I want.
We're not going to effect a cultural change in the people who expect women to wear burqas (wearers included) by banning one expression of that culture.

Happy I-Though-We-Lived-In-A-Secular-Society-But-I-Guess-Not Day!

Seriously, why the fuck have we not stormed parliament regarding the fact that because this is a Christian holiday the rest of us (and there are a lot) aren't allowed to buy alcohol?
Yes, it's true, last year I pretty much ruined day one of a family holiday because I bitched and moaned and whined about the same situation.
'It's okay,' I reassured the Yorke Peninsula general store/bottle-shop owner 'I'm not a Christian.'
'Sorry, mate. It's the law.'
'But ... but ...'
I wish I had said more. Or broken something. But it wasn't his fault. He should have just turned the other way while I left twenty bucks on the counter until the next day though.

No, I don't actually want to go out and buy beer on Good Friday especially. I just don't want to have to live in such a back-wood, no-string-banjo kind of country where religious freedom is a right, as long as you observe just one group's one kookie rule. Which you don't have a choice about anyway, because it's the law, just like not molesting children.

Topical Humour Man, awaaaaaay!!

Seriously though: Rove did free tomato sauce day. Why can't we have Ring It Through On Easter Saturday Day?

Homework? On the weekend? Groan!

Belief in fate is the refuge of the irresponsible.
Discuss.


Hint: Perhaps I shouldn't listen to Tool while waiting for a late bus ...

Had something to do with a bucket ...

I hope everybody enjoyed Single Sentence September and didn't become too frustrated with the topsy-turvy standards and themes. I tried to run with a weekly theme, but then that seemed too predictable so I went down a different path which (obviously) involved no theme at all.
I seem to have failed at that theme as well.
The biggest problem I had was similar to the one experienced by Josh Hartnett's character in the modern-day tale of religious purity, 40 Days and 40 Nights. My problem was only similar in that I really had no outlet for my nigh-unquenchable desire for pleasure. In his case it was sex. Which was why the movie did so poorly. "Man goes without sex for 40 days!" is hardly something that's going to entice movie-goers to part with their $15. I may have been single at around the time this movie came out and I can remember my initial reaction being something along the lines of "Boo Fucking Hoo. I just saw that in real life. Twice."
In my case, however, I was starved of my own natural outlet for stimulation and pleasure: writing.

If you don't have a blog and are reading this, you are probably furrowing your brow and wondering if I'm okay. You may even be considering making a casserole and popping over to do my laundry and make sure I'm brushing my teeth properly. If you do have a blog, you are probably still stuck at the end of the last paragraph,having laughed your breakfast all over the cat at the mere suggestion that I had actually stopped writing anything more than a sentence long all month.
You know what I'm talking about: every blog I've visited over the last month has been subject to at least one Big Mac-sized slab of text wedged squarely in the comments section, doubling the length of the post itself and skipping off on tangents like a gay geometry teacher. Single Sentence September should have been more accurately titled: 'Blog On Other Bloggers' Blogs September', but alliteration is always awesome and that would have let everybody know that I was coming.
I like to be sneaky.

So, by way of saying 'thank you' to all the bloggers who hosted my guest-spots (or "put up with my mutton-headed takeovers"), I will be searching back and finding a couple of the silliest examples of my blog invasions and posting them here with links to their original, more inspirational post. Yes, Writing has been reborn as an environmentalist: I am recycling my own shit.

The first one is rather special.
The formidably fantastic Poetsquib is currently hosting a competition. By a combination of luck, fate and chaos, she has acquired a free t-shirt. It's a ripper.
See?
But she is not keeping it, she is not selling it, she is not dumping it in a charity bin (lest it be burnt at a Goodwill stake) she is giving it away. Free postage. The t-shirt will go to the commenter with best reason for being given the shirt as explained in her comments section.
I went first with a mystical tale of curse and destiny and have since been both trounced, served and delivered a litany of literary smackdowns at the hands of snappy poetry and a longer, crazier sentence than I ever came up with.
I tried my hand at poetry, but it didn't really make the splash I might have been hoping for. But, since you are allowed to enter as many times as you like, I gave it another, longer go.
Bear in mind that I posted this right into Squib's comments section and what you read below is not the entire entry. You'll have to mosey on over to poetsquib's great big blue t-shirt competition to find out what happens ...

It would have been a dark and stormy night, but Franzy had locked himself indoors with all of the lights on and the stereo tuned to out-rattle the watered-down sludge which fell from the sky as what passed for God's Great Rain these days. He was band-aid ripper kind of person, unable to put up with the tediousness of prolonged suffering before the inevitable snuff. Taking his final queues from Thomas and Cobain, he preferred to leave, not with a whimper, but a bang.

The generator gauge fell like a twirling leaf in a slow motion info-sermon explaining God’s Greatest Design Triumphs. Less-than-6000-year-old fossil fuel heated, burned, died and fled to The One True Heaven from the exhaust spire. Franzy pulled on his homemade Llama t-shirt, just to be ready when the Divination And Prayer Brigade would undoubtedly arrive to claim back his mortal soul and save him from the wickedness of scientific lightbulbs not illuminating any proper moral teachings and also from the hellish sound of decades-banned secular music lest it poison the air and ears of the Good Soldiers Of God throughout the neighbourhood.

He turned up the music and peered out into the street. A few curtains swayed as hunched shapes cowered behind them, praying to their Holy Candles that this last threat to True Spiritual Peace and Righteousness would be taken from their Pure And Perfect Lives Unsullied By Controversial Thought Or Deed. Divination And Prayer would arrive soon and, with the might of God, set everything right once again.

Franzy smiled and slumped into a Counsel-issued Prayer Chair which he had carefully broken and rebuilt into a normal seat that didn’t force you to lean forward and kneel and pray to almighty God every time you wanted to sit or stand. He checked the generator gauge and plugged in his most forbidden treasure, hidden all these years in a hollowed-out illustrated Holy Book which he had sealed with canvas, claiming it was untouched by Sinner’s Hands. The Web Weaver Of Satan had held up very well for something that would have been laughably out of date had The Gentle Holy Counsel allowed personal computers to continue being developed and distributed. As such, they had been declared sinful and morally diseased: the soul-raping plague rats of the mid-21^st Century, spreading anti-Godist propaganda and cutting the hearts from The Pure Children Of God as they went.

Franzy plugged the old smiley-face plug into his home-made converter and plugged the converter into the now-icon-shaped electrical socket. Little green lights flickered warmed up as he turned on the laptop.

There was no point in having it on really. Just for memories. Satan’s Web had long been dismantled and banished as the Evil Cancer Which Rotted The Souls And Minds Of God’s Pure Children. There was no Blogger, no Google, no Boingboing. No electrical pulses carrying information of any sort.

But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still look at the old cache files he had madly saved during the internet’s final days before it was bricked up in a cold tomb, along with free media, non-religious texts and anyone else who tried to stop the entire place turning into a mega-sized puritanical village run by power-mad elders and assisted by God-fearing zombies praying for righteousness and good at whatever cost.

Over the polluted rain pounding on the roof and the throbbing metal wailing from the speakers Franzy could just make out the furious pounding of horses’ hooves and rusty farming tools banging together. Out in the street somebody was singing a shaky-voiced prayer as they assembled a large wooden frame.

He scanned his old blog posts, noticing a missed plural there, a spelling error here and a bunch of absent apostrophes that had gone to join the twenty generations of floating fathers who crowded into the room with him, hands stuffed in ill-fitting pockets, plucking at poorly-cut shirts, shuffing amateur-grade chain mail and rewrapping badly tied loin-cloths. They shook their ghostly heads and peered out of the window at the chanting mob, jabbering in unison as a man stood in front of them on a make-shift stage, yelling and waving a book and a torch.

Franzy finally found what he was looking for and a couple of the ghosts gathered over his shoulder.

I command you. Go to poetsquib! Live the heightening drama!

***

Guess The Header - Oh yeah. You thought I'd forgotten. I haven't.

Inaugural winner is The Mighty Other, other Sam, who may now refer to himself by his Nom du Bling (or 'Rap Name'), T-MOoS. Two points. Two comments. Two points. Plus two chest thumps and a fist pound.

Is that how it will work from now on? Maybe. You'll just have to suck it up and see to it.

It was just after the owner of the caravan park said that she didn't like my t-shirt because of her "strong ties of Buddhism" that I stopped communicating with fully-formed words and started using my wide command of grunts, nods and smiles.

Religion is like abortion: a personal decision which should be influenced by no one else, ever.

The Queensland tradition of giving everything Aboriginal names after carefully removing all traces of Aboriginal from them is like Muslim extremists colonising Manhattan and renaming it Twin Tower Tumble Island.

Irony at its most beautiful is terrifying

On our ill-fated and extremely expensive trip to Queensland I bought a couple of t-shirts from the famous Eumundi Markets. They weren't bought for style (although they did come in a delightful shade of blue) so much as for their value to society. Mine declares, in large capital letters "MEAT IS MURDER", then below, in a smaller tasteful italic lower case, "Delicious, tasty murder". The double takes I get while wearing it are wonderfully heart-warming. Especially from vegetarians. And I always know exactly who they are - the expressions of comradely admiration they beam upon me after reading the first line always melt into impotent humourless scowling when they have finished reading the second. As you can imagine, a man who dines on pig-nipple sauce is apt to find this as satisfying as the sound of crunchy cracklin' fresh from the spit.

The other t-shirt I gave to my father, for it was infinitely more appropriate.
What does his have on it?
Well, I'm not just talking about them for nothing - I have an anecdote to recount of Dad's trip to the market this morning:
He sets off, dressed in a stylish suede jacket and underneath it, his t-shirt.
He's going to meet a friend for coffee and to do some shopping, but he turns up early and his friend isn't at Lucia's yet. No problem, thinks Dad, and he decides to go to the health food store first - get himself some bran. He makes his way to the health food store and circles its aisles a few times to find the bran bin because there are no staff around to point it out for him - they're probably out the back thinking up ways to combat that wicked "Delicious, tasty murder" t-shirt. At last he finds the bran bin, scoops himself a few scoops and straightens up to discover a young man standing right next to him. The young man is dressed in long denim shorts, pulled up socks, t-shirt and peaked cap.
"CnIvvrrlkwhtyrt-shirt?" mumbles the young man.
"What?" asks Dad.
"Can I see your t-shirt?" he asks again, pointing at Dad's t-shirt, which is partially obscured by his jacket.
"Oh," says Dad. "Sure."



The guy's jaw drops. He's speechless. He coughs.
"He gave his blood for you!" exclaims the guy.
"No he didn't,' replies Dad, glancing around the store.
"He did!" retorts the young man. "He gave his blood for you!"
"No. He didn't," says Dad, calmly wondering how Chuck Norris would best employ a bran scoop in this situation. "It'll be okay, just increase your medication."
With that, the antisartorial evangelist turns heel and flees the health food store, proving that
A) Religion in the wrong hands is a scary thing, and
B) Jesus does not respond to t-shirts.

***
GTH - The points go to River for her multitude of goodbyes. Not for actually saying goodbye because it's the internet and no one actually leaves, least of all me, but for relating it back to my earlier post about languages. I'm sure I said that flattery would score points somewhere.

Monday Morning Spook-Out!!

Did you know ... ?

That creationism is being taught in science classes in increasing numbers?
That these same schools are teaching sex education to their students through a program called "No Apologies" that asks their students to sign pledges that promise that they will remain virgins until marriage?
That this isn't one of those Only In America! bits of whimsy that normally gets trotted out by chortling bloggers from the rest of the world to snigger at a superpower, but are actually facts culled from an in-depth story from The Age about Australian religious schools?
That I'm actually shaking a little as I type this?

I've written about religion before and decided that it was largely a good thing for those who used it to find personal happiness. This report found that under the Howard Government there has been an increase in independent schools because of the educational funding models he brought in that were an attempt to get exactly this kind of thing to happen: lots of little religious schools setting themselves up so that education would either be cheap or espousing of the kind of teachings that would make more Australians fall under Johnny's ideal of what makes an Australian Australian.

And now we've actually got classrooms in this secular nation where this kind of thing happens (taken from The Age's in-depth report on faith-based education in Australia):

IT'S Friday morning and the combined year five-six class at Red Rock Christian College is conducting its Bible study and Christian living class. It's straight to the point: a reading from Peter's second epistle. "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to Hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons ..." a child reads out loud.
"What are the consequences of us making the wrong choices?" asks teacher Victoria Carey.
"Death!" a cheeky boy shouts.
Ms Carey moves on: "And what are some good choices?"
"Watching movies you're allowed to and hanging out with the right people," comes the answer.
"That's right, it's easier to do the right things when you're hanging out with people who are doing the right things," Carey observes.

Anybody care to join me for a good shudder in terror?

***
GTH - And Murphy is, of course, the winner, but only slightly because of two reasons: one) he missed the point of connecting the photo to the post and two) he might have actually spotted himself and his own good old Dimage G500 in the picture ...

Sometimes I use the shard to pick my teeth

It's been a day for writing all around. The blog is really coming into its own name! Well ... the blog's author.
In keeping with the last post about the long essays I tend to bombard other people's comments pages with, I duly posted a long screed on Audrey's latest blog post (an article about the criminal human rights abuses that take place in Iran under the banner of 'religion') that actually concluded in an imaginary conversation between a Christian fundamentalist and a Muslim fundamentalist.
I present it for your puzzlement below:

Sometimes I think it's a good thing that fundamentalist christians and muslims hate each other SSOOOOO much, because can you imagine what it would be like if they actually got together?
FC: Ah think thayt women should NOT be allowed to drive! No suh!
FM: Me neither! Those dirty sluts are always choosing their own clothes and thinking their own thoughts! It drives me crazy!
FC: Ah'm with you pardner! Drahves me raht up tha wall! Women in public ... hrm hrm ... BLASPHEMY!
FM: Yes! Blasphemy! Stone them! Stone them to death!
FC: Really? You can do that?
FM: Yes! Our holy book says it's okay!
FC: Is that true? What a great idea! Where does it say that?
FM: It doesn't ... really. Strictly speaking ... but if you read it in the right way it does!
FC: What if'n a woman tries to find out what's goin' on and change that law?
FM: Stone her! To death!
FC: Awl Raht!
FM: Let's be best friends and lock up all the women!
FC: Put her there pal!
FM: Death to the infidel!
FC: Let's get some ribs!
FM: How about KFC instead?
FC: Deal!

But that isn't the only writing in what I promised would be a blog full of it. 327 sent me an excellent link to a writer called John Scalzi, a very successful freelance writer, who has just published an article called 'Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money'. As I wrote to 327 earlier, I'm quite proud to say that I both know and have followed most of the ten excellent pieces of monetary advice he sets out in the piece.
All except number three. And I'm darn proud of it.

And finally, after sharing a sad coffee last night with The Shorter Ginga before her departure for greener, quieter, more round-about-filled pastures this morning, I found myself heart-thumpingly awake and full of caffeinated vim at 2am. So I Googled myself of course (*insert smarty-pants reference to masturbation here*) and I discovered that my first ever properly published story, and also the reason Mele and I met, is now online in the form of a Google Book!

If you haven't read it before, then I must assure you that the main set piece is based upon a true story.

***

GTH - River and Milly went neck and neck with this one, so I'm awarding a point to each (from hazy boozy memory it is the Port Augusta chimney you're looking at there. But I'm also going to award double points to Jono for the most interesting comment. Thus is a new rule added to the GTH Points Tally! Yes, aside from guessing the picture, I'm giving out kudos to the person who leaves the most interesting comment. Correspondence will be entered into, bribes will be taken.

One size fits all my butt!

I have long considered the possibility that I may be religious.
Allow me to pause a moment while those who know me well wipe whatever it is that they were drinking from their screens, keyboards and sinuses.
It's true, I don't tend to hold religion in the highest regard, although lately I've come to think that it's perhaps not the nature of religion itself that causes so much torture and pain in the world, but the silly people who use it to justify cutting off their own testicles and forcing other people not to enjoy themselves.
I've just finished reading Robert Winston's The Story of God, which, apart from being very informative and a wonderful companion to Sophie's World (a young adult primer on philosophy from Socrates to Foucault), seemed to hold the view that religion resulted in the quite evolutionary need for soft pink monkeys to hang around in groups in order to survive. This, coupled with the evolved monkey brain's need to explain the things it couldn't (ie. What's the sound? and How did this banana get here?), formed a sort of mud-map of existence and meaning.
A + B = C
Water + Dirt = Mud
Og + Punch = Fight
Dancing + Chanting = Rain
Sacrifice + Gold = Prosperity
No Prosperity + More Virgins = More Sacrifice
That kind of thing.

Read in conjunction with Sophie's World, The Story of God allowed most religions I had heard of to make sense. Religion is very similar to philosophy in that it attempts to explain the world. I think religion is a bit more proactive in that it attempts to explain what to do once you've explained the world, which is probably why it gets into so many fights with science. Science is still stuck on the first bit about how the world works while religion seems to behave much like the impatient maths student I once was, throwing the answer sheet on the teacher's desk and bounding out the door without bothering to show all working out.
I admire that in religion. It's a very selfish philosophy, really. Not in a bad way either. If the answer seems right to you, who is anyone else to say any different? We're not talking about numbers here folks, we're talking about whether you should steal, swear or have sex with certain kinds of people! It must be very gratifying to follow a religion and be right about these questions all the time.
Swearing? No! Never!
Sex with boys? No! Evil!
Fish on Fridays? Yum yum yum!
See what I mean? Always the correct answer! You don't get that kind of positive reinforcement anywhere else!
I do have a tiny philosophical issue with religion in that since I regard all people as different, I think that every single person needs their own code of practice. What's great for one person isn't necessarily wicked cool for someone else. That kind of thing. Religion doesn't really provide for that diversity of people in society. Each religion has its own set of rules to be followed and most religions have great rules: don't hurt other people, be nice to your parents, be nice to your children, don't steal, etc, etc, etc. You see where Robert Winston got his enthusiasm for the theory that religion developed out of a need for physically defenceless monkeys to form groups to survive. The monkeys that had the best groups survived and the best groups tended to have least number of thieving arseholes in them - hence the rules. 'Follow these or you're on your own the next time a sabre-toothed tiger turns up'. Good incentive, that.
But these days sabre-toothed tiger numbers are down, sadly. Monkeys are up. Yet the rules remain. They're still great rules, but mostly self-evident, I feel. The problem is that the rules still seem to be under some kind of moral copyright, as though the values and modes of nice human behaviour were held in holy patent offices, stamped and traded to the thankful consumer.
'Oh, thank [insert deity] I did not kill my parents!'
'Praise [insert deity] that this beautiful day exists/my lotto numbers came up/I got the job!'
It's entirely ego-centric of me, but having lived a life entirely without religion, I am yet to come across a moral conundrum that I couldn't sort out myself. Of course, there have been a few fuck-ups along the way, but I own those. They were all part of the learning process.
And here comes the schism between my own beliefs about correct moral behaviour and religion: I don't think that you should tell other people how to live.
That's it. The difference between my perfect ethos of life and religion is that I don't think other people should follow this rule, because it's not even a rule yet. It's just a philosophy, a theory that could be proven wrong at any second! But I'm pretty confident it won't be.
Religion has a whole set of these rules and explanations that have kept billions of people happy for thousands of years, so it can't be doing too badly for itself . But it's still telling people what to do and how to live without letting anybody figure it out for themselves. This might seem tough to live by, just letting people do what they want and trusting that they will do the right thing, but remember, I'm not peddling answers and explanations here - this is all about me.
Get your own.

The thing I do admire about religion is its art and its rituals. To the right here you will see my favourite building ever. It is the Cologne Cathedral and is, without exception, the most remarkable thing I have ever seen. I will write about my first, exquisite encounter with it another day. Without religion, it would not exist. Would anything be in its place? The answer to that is as pointless as the question and best left to fiction, but churches can be incredible things to behold. But, being devoid of religious influence, they simply cause me to wonder at the glory and talents of human beings, rather than explain my rapture through some intangible feeling about the inexplicable.

The ritual is another aspect that I find strangely attractive; comforting even. To me every religious ritual from prayer to blessings to yearly festivals seems utterly meaningless, but soothing, fun and calming nonetheless. Rituals are that aspect of religion that causes the individual to stop all else, re-centre, re-focus and engage with whatever explanations for existence, meaning, hope, despair and life they have in their brains. I imagine it's like the comfort a mild sufferer of obsessive-compulsion feels when they switch the light off for the second time, safe in the knowledge that it didn't blow the instant they turned it off. The engagement of ritual sets the scene for a world about to be put right and its completion brings satisfaction and strength within the self.

I said at the beginning of this post that I have considered the possibility that I may be religious. I'm not, but I do have a ritual. A calming, meditative state that can be achieved only at a certain time of day and under the correct conditions. Those conditions aren't always present, but not a day goes by when, at 6pm, wherever I am, my mind enters its own little prayer-room and, if fortune is with me, my body follows. Here is my own personal ritual for calm and peace, followed by a call to prayer:
At 5:55pm I finish all activities, save all documents, close all webpages, bookmark all pages, stack all papers and remove my shoes. I go to the fridge. I select a bottle of Cooper's Pale Ale and place it in a stubby holder. I do not remove the cap, but I ensure to invert it gently to allow the yeasty mud to trickle through the sweet, heady liquid, just as my own troubles dissipate and disperse, diluted with perspective and calm. I fetch a packet of fancy chips. Never plain, never chicken. Every day needs a luxury, a treat, a reward for feeling happy and a salve for feeling sad. I banish all others, sit comfortably in front of the television and watch Jane Riley visit another part of the Adelaide microcosm to report the weather. I watch the post-news Channel Ten plug and am grateful that I don't care about whatever it's talking about. Life is good.
The music starts:



***
GTH: For those of you who just skip to the end of the writing for a grab at glory on a the world's 1,803,855th most popular website, the winner is The Other, other Sam. It was indeed taken at 2006's Adelaide Arts Festival Opening Night. There were dozens of beautiful floating globes drifting around the river, forever ingrained into the minds of the hundreds of Adelaidians who were so thoroughly disappointed at the school pageant/lighting warehouse clearance sale that was the OzAsia Opening Night. However, there are points to River and Neil for their kick-arse jokes.
I also mentioned in the last comment thread that there would be a joke-related competition this post. So: dirtiest joke wins. That's it. Make of it what you will. Nothing shall be censored, unless it's racist or in any way supports the Dutch.