Categories: Meaningless Twaddle

24 Jan 2010, Comments (20)

Hello!

Author: Helen

First post for Cast Iron Balcony 2010, and the first since I took a break from it. I missed it.

Towards the end of last year, it was just getting a bit too hard. In some ways, CIB was becoming the victim of its success. I’d had requests for interviews from journos and invitations to post on prominent group blogs (haven’t been doing anything there, either.) Most people would be ecstatically happy, but because I’m a neurotic over-thinker, my response was to begin to obsess over the quality of every post and my lack of a PhD in every subject I blogged about. One of the group blogs I’m a part of is mainly composed of academics and other professionals, which made me think… well… What right do I really have about to write about stuff, anyway? And what right do I have to occupy a position as a “feminist blogger” in the Ozblogosphere without ever having taken a tertiary course in gender studies?

Of course, the answer to that that Miranda Devine, Catherine Deveny, Andrew Bolt, the De Britos and hundreds of other bloviators don’t have the slightest hesitation about hitting their keyboards about any topic whatsoever, and they get paid for it, too. So I should revive this blog and keep on doing what I started it for: writing about whatever’s interesting or angsting me at any given moment.

I think that as the readership of CIB increased my sense of responsibility increased to the point where every post on something I care about became a 10,000 word essay which had to be researched for three weeks before I wrote a word. I just made it into very hard work. Plenty of political blogs are an intelligent articulation of how the writer reacts to events or other writings, rather than a pseudo-academic or pseudo-journalistic exercise.

In other words, I needed to get over myself a bit.

Also, 2009 was a hell of a year. How was yours? I had one kid finishing grade six and starting high school, and another one doing VCE and wanting to start Uni straight away, no gap year. So we had the quadruple-whammy of: Grade 6 end-of-year stuff; Supporting VCE student through exams (like being the person in a little van who putters along after the endurance cyclist or long distance runner who is near the finish line) plus VCE end-of-year stuff, including a major formal Graduation party; Choosing, applying for, and doing orientation things for younger kid’s high school; Choosing, applying for, and doing Open Day things for eldest kid’s University.

As well, we had VCE Graduation night, Schoolies week (shudder), and various other bits and pieces to do with schools. Girlchild passed VCE with elan and has been accepted into Arts at Melbourne university.

Life has also changed a little since my Dad had a fall and broke his femur in September. He’s 89, so he’s doing bloody well considering, but he gave us a scare and spent time in Rehab (No, no, no!) and now has a wheelie walker and a community worker who comes to give him a shower. He still has reading, writing and cricket, but he’s lost bushwalking and overseas travel forever, I think. I’m going to check out disabled-friendly bush tracks for the cooler weather, but harder stuff will be out.

My mum, who’s 88, has had the boundaries of her life shrunk radically overnight. As she can’t leave Dad for very long, she’s had to give up a lot of her activities (Labor party membership, Quaker vigils; you can see where I get it from, can’t you?)

Then, also, we went to New Zealand for the summer holidays, so it’s only now that I’ve got the time to show my blog some love. I’ve had help from this talented web wrangler, who you might recognise.

Image notes: Last summer I posted a photo of our garden taken from the balcony, which is actually a deck and not a balcony at all. The apricot tree behind the perching dove is gone. A few days after I took the photo, there was a terrible heatwave which cooked every leaf on the tree. I waited to see whether it would regenerate after winter, but it was definitely dead; it was a sad job pruning it back, then back again, and finding only dead wood.

In case this becomes like a sad metaphor for this blog, I plan to plant a couple of trees and many, many (drought tolerant) plants this coming autumn as well as watering and nurturing the blog.

26 Aug 2009, Comments (7)

Hey, Chris, about that Miocene cat…

Author: Helen

I felt it was missing something.

Miocene fossil of cat footprint with LOLcat caption O HAI\

There, fixed.

25 May 2009, Comments (9)

Cack

Author: Helen

Next time you are sitting at the computer (make sure you have the sound turned up), and a dear child comes in and says something like “I can’t find any SOCKS!!”, click on the tab / extra window which you have opened with this link, and click the big blue button. Clutch your head Edvard Munch style.
 
 
H/T: Fetch me my Axe.

22 Apr 2009, Comments (21)

Fun with ancient technology, for my brother on his birthday

Author: Helen

Jonathon Green writes about ancient technology they had when he was a boy. Ah yes, my little ones, we used to have these brick-shaped “cassette recorders” into which you’d put tape cassettes, which were easier to use and more portable than reel to reel (should I add a tag for “archaeology”?) but nevertheless were dreadful little cursed demons which would jam, break, tangle and inevitably lose their audio quality as the magnetic tape deteriorated – or they’d stretch the tape so they sounded like the dying HAL 9000, a character from a story also about ancient technology.

Panasonic cassette player, 1970s

My first cassette recorder was just like this. I got mine when our family stopped over in Hong Kong on the way to the UK. (My Dad had a job close to Oxford, and the family relocated to a little village called Ewelme for six months.) It was a primitive system. There was an attachable, not built-in, mic which we used to record “radio programs”. My brother R, whose birthday it is today, was eleven at the time. I was thirteen, or “old enough to know better”, as you’ll be muttering darkly when you’ve finished reading this story.

Ewelme was the cute English village from central casting to a ridiculous degree. Think Midsomer Murders (in fact, it’s been used as a location for filming MM on occasion.) We had fair-dinkum stone cottages, narrow hedged lanes, streams full of watercress and a lytel church going back to Chaucer’s time. My stepmother, being the bright and sociable person that she is, started enthusiastically forming friendships with people nearby.

One rainy weekend, my brother came up with a wicked idea for the tape recorder. He put a blank cassette in the machine, fast forwarded it to about ten minutes in, then he shrieked and howled and moaned for a minute or two like a soul suffering the tortures of the damned. So, you had ten minutes or so of silence and then all hell broke loose.

That morning, mum had invited one of the nice local ladies over for tea. R hid the tape recorder behind the sofa, plugged in with the tape rewound to the beginning. When he heard our unsuspecting visitor coming in to sit down, he pressed Play and we scarpered upstairs to await the ensuing consternation and LULZ.

We were horrible children. I apologise to my parents, to that poor woman, to everyone, really. Happy 50th Birthday, R.

2 Apr 2009, Comments (9)

Walkin’ back to Happiness

Author: Helen

The AGE: “The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has begun distancing himself from his controversial internet censorship policy in what one internet industry engineer has dubbed “the great walkback of 2009″.
 

 

He laid aside his foolish pride, learned the truth from tears everyone he cried.

Of course, it’s another example of where a politician revises a bad decision and someone who wanted that outcome nevertheless mocks him, for doing a backflip, or a backpedal, or in this case a walkback, which is an artefact of an old software language. IT humour, hurghhh hurgh hurghhhh. Hilarious. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT: UR DOING IT RONG. But I guess he just couldn’t resist coming out with something so side-splitting.

Helen looks very Amy Winehouse in this clip. Mess up that scary, scary beehive and apply the thick upswept kohl eye makeup and you’d have doppelgangers. The resemblance doesn’t end there, either. They’re both London girls from vaguely similar backgrounds and they both started performing very young, but while Amy’s crashing and burning, Helen only looks in danger of perishing from wholesomeness.

Never mind. The Clean Feed is dead: Let’s talk, hep cats! Work that tweed jacket.

28 Feb 2009, Comments (15)

The writer and the cartoonist

Author: Helen

Last year, some cartoons which accompanied two of Miranda Devine’s articles caught my attention. One article (they’re both in the SMH, as always) is about feminists – they all hated Sarah Palin ‘cos they’re nasty. The other is about cougars. You know- women of a certain age who are desperate to partner.

In the Sarah Palin vs. feminism article, Devine asserts – and I hope you’re not eating breakfast while you read this – “in her brief starring role on the global stage [Palin] has been a powerful psychic enema, flushing out the poison at the heart of establishment feminism for all to see.” Now newcomers to Devine World will be saying “But, Sarah Bernhardt and Kathy Lette are not exactly spokespersons for feminism. And US feminists defended Palin against sexist commentary while a lot of male commentators wallowed it it”. Well, Devine is Strawfeminists R Us, so let’s not waste too much time on her under-researched opinions.

Edd Aragon, 1

What intrigued me was the cartoon; it’s so over the top. Well, the “feminist” depicted isn’t the Full Stereotype, judging by the heels and dress, although the hair looks as if it’s long and grey – an absolute no-no for Western women- but the depiction of the “feminist” is so, for want of a better word, hectic. Mad, tongue lolling, muscles like a skinned rabbit; Over-coloured, gesticulating wildly, jumping up and down on the face of the hapless Palin.

Hmm. Now for the other article, about cougars in the city of Sydney trying to find love. Miranda begins with the well-worn old starting point that women aren’t partnered these days because they’re too damn fussy, then points to one of those risible “statistical surveys” that our MSM love so much, suggesting that these fusspots should simply move to different suburbs to beat the odds. But! that doesn’t mean they should be, god forbid, calculating, like her old School Chum from Ascham, who persists in having preferences (Devine refers to this as having a “shopping list”). Never mind that the demographer Bernard Salt, refers to men as “product”.

Edd Aragon,2

Here, the cartoon shows a woman who’s just doing femininity in an ordinary way: a nicer haircut, pearls, drop earrings, lipstick, manicure… but the image is, if anything, more terrifying than the picture of the “feminist”. The woman’s huge, over-life size teeth are actually chomping onto the tiny man. The poor, tiny, powerless man! This woman will eat you alive.

Because, remember, in the eyes of the lecturing Miranda, you’re damned if you’re feminist and damned if you’re not. (If women were so powerful and terrifying, why should they have to move house to find a partner?) The image says something else – men, some men, fear strong women. Really fear them.

I googled the cartoonist, and discovered he has a blog. Does he hate women? Far from it, if his blog is anything to go by. You can easily find other caricatures he’s drawn which don’t show the subject as fearsome or terrible. So, what gives?

Do cartoonists tailor their artwork to the piece of writing it’s going to be published with, or does the writer exhort the artist to make an image nicer, naster, scarier to fit what they’re saying? I can’t work out why these images are so horrible; they don’t really jive with the artist’s whole body of work.

As I said, no particular reason for this post except that I realised how little I know about the mechanics of articles-with-cartoons and whether, or how, the writer and the cartoonist communicate to put across the message. I’d be interested to hear from any cartoonists if there are any reading!
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

Update 1/03/2009: Pavlov’s Cat writes an interesting response from the writer’s side of the fence.

25 Feb 2009, Comments (17)

You’re soaking in it.

Author: Helen

Another little delivery of mass-produced misogyny in our inbox. For Valentines’ day, no less. This time it isn’t anyone we know, but check the hilarity:

Valentines day… secretly guys feel left out.
There is no special holiday for the ladies to show their appreciation to the man in their life.
March 20th is now officially ‘Steak, blow job & shut the fuck up day’. Simple, effective and self explanatory.
No cards. No flowers. No fancy meal.
Just a steak, blow job and shut the fuck up for the rest of the day.
That’s it!!!
Spread the word and help men feel appreciation.

To those who will immediately come in here and opine, “Well, you know, it’s just a joke! and it’s spam!” I reply that it just gets tiring, sometimes.

I just dropped into the supermarket to get bread, which is a daily habit – there’s always something running out. Bread, fruit, milk, the perishables. By “dropped into” I mean “made a detour to get stuff, instead of sitting for half an hour drinking capuccino before my second shift.” And I see this exchange between a young cannibal and a cannibal Dad on a birthday card:
Son: Look, a woolly mammoth!
Dad: No, son, too hairy. Bleugh! We’ll find something else to eat.
Son: Look Dad, a dodo!
Dad: No, too feathery. Bleugh!
Son: Look Dad, a lovely young woman! [YW is, of course, in a paleolithic bikini. What else?]
Dad: No wait a minute Son. Don’t kill her! We’ll take her home – and we’ll eat your mother.

humourless feminist! Can’t you take a joke!

Being so hated makes you want to throw the bread away and opt for the capuccino, or better still, a stiff vodka and tonic. Or just get into the fridge and close the door. At least the men in your own family don’t think this way. At least, as far as you know.

Back to the delightful Valentine’s day “joke”. See, even on the day they should love you the most, they really do hate you. Googling it for research purposes, surprise, surprise, of course it comes up on a news.com.au “blog” thread – Kate De Brito. The agony aunt. (e.g., “We came home to find the babysitter half nude. What do we do?” errr… not hire that particular babysitter again? “Should I tell my partner about a breast enlargement?” Oh Murdoch, you’re all class.)

The comments are about what you’d expect:
“You’re very lucky if the girl makes any effort other than parting her legs at the end of the night.
SO…I hereby propose MARCH 20th to be…
“STEAK, BLOW JOB and SHUT THE F*CK UP DAY”
“It reminds me of a quote a very old man told me many years ago. “ All women are prostitutes, we all pay for sex, at least with real “working girls” one knows the cost and what one will get”
…”In purely monetary terms, hookers are actually cheaper. Depending on your personal cost structures (housing, transport, rates, flowers, movies etc) your average man would need to get sex at least 4 times a week to break even on a “normal” relationship.”
…”pity any guy if it happens to be that time of the month for his girl. It’s like putting some money in the bank with no interest on your deposit.”

Etc.

This comes shortly after another news.com.au story on Amazon.com and its extraordinary social conscience:

ONLINE retail giant Amazon has yanked from its virtual shelves a Japanese computer game that lets players simulate raping girls…

…”after it was brought to the US web firm’s attention”. Of course, it’d be too much to expect that a successful retail giant could possibly afford to vet the quality of its merchandise in the first place. While some of the commenters on that article are groping towards a realisation that all isn’t right with a “game” like this, some of them are more concerned with a perceived insult to their platform.

…news.com.au, change the thumbnail photo on the homepage. This has nothing to do with console gaming, at ALL.

…Why is there an Xbox 360 controller in the picture? This has nothing to with Xbox 360 or any other console for that matter

Touching, no? If only I were an X box. I’m feeling the love there.

Also on news.com.au:

SLEAZY men are taking advantage of Sydney’s rental crisis by placing online advertisements offering women free rooms in exchange for sex.
The zero-rent ads, targeting desperate women looking for somewhere to live, are becoming increasingly common on popular “share house” rental websites.
Although there have been numerous complaints about the ads, which some website users have dubbed “offensive”, they do not breach policy guidelines for sites such as flatmates.com.au

And oh lord, the comments thread on that one.

So what’s the point, you say? This stuff is all over the place every single day. Yes, exactly that.

26 Dec 2008, Comments (22)

‘Tis the season to be gritting our teeth and smiling gamely and maybe reconsidering the Vodka supply to the younger ones

Author: Helen

I don’t believe in interbreeding, myself. We need to preserve the Aryan race. That’s what I think.

…Actual conversation at the annual Christmas party of the Eartha Kitt Memorial Dog’s home and Cattery. She’s a relatively recent starter, has been there about a year. Has young children but looks all of twenty-one, bubbly, pretty, enthusiastic like a golden retriever. She’s already done and said one or two things that make me go “hmmm”.

Yeah, I know some people think it’s a bit shocking. Hitler. You know Hitler? Well, basically his philosophy. (Deprecating laugh). Well, I didn’t agree with the things he did, of course, but yeah, his philosophy pretty much. The Aryan race has to reproduce itself and not be bred out.

Of course, I can’t talk. I’m a bit of a fuckup myself, my husband’s a Kiwi, my kids are mixed race, so I’ve fucked up there.

I sit, clutching my glass of champagne, staring out over the city and wondering what her beautiful kids would think about being a fuckup. Next to me is R, second-generation Indian Australian. His profile gives nothing away. I’d say he’s been here before.

“So, A. Do you know what Aryan means?” he asks.

“Yeah! It means blonde hair and blue eyes.”

R. turns to me. “Do you know what Aryan means, Helen?”

“Um, well, as far as I know “Aryan” refers to people originally from the subcontinent.”

“That’s right. A: Aryans were asian.” A. looks doubtful, but defers to R, who’s a manager.

This woman doesn’t just work where I work. She lives in my suburb and we bump into each other regularly on the train. Her boys play sport with Exploding Boy.

We change the subject.

I watch the evening sun creeping over the steeple of St Patrick’s. I knock my champagne back and make my excuses.

24 Dec 2008, Comments (6)

Zorsted.

Author: Helen

I hope all my bloggy mates have done all their shopping and are relaxing with a nice glass of bolly, or maybe Bombay Sapphire, and that noone suffers a meltdown or kills any of their immediate or extended family this Christmas season. FSM’s will be done. I’m off to get that glass of wine. Seeya!

And as I always say, watch out for the idiots™ on those roads.

9 Nov 2008, Comments (25)

Atlas Sulked

Author: Helen

I blame Belle.

Belle of John and Belle have a Blog trawls the streets of Wingnuttia bringing back choice bits of weirdness, like those eighteenth-century scientists who sailed to foreign parts and brought back strange things in formaldehyde, for our amazement. After snerking at Belle’s offerings I couldn’t resist the urge to don my protective gear and go dumpster diving in Wingnuttia for myself. Last week it was the Randroids: people who follow the “philosophy” of the rightwing novelist Ayn Rand, especially Atlas Shrugged, her hymn to the ubermensch.

Do you know what the Randroids plan to do now that Obama has been elected? They’re going to chuck the biggest hissy fit of all time, spit the dummy and throw all their toys out of the cot.

It’s called Going John Galt. And while, of course, Wingnuttia has plenty of scary people who are talking about assault weapons, most of these rebellious John Galts are going to fight back with…Vegetable gardening! ….Downshifting! …Canning! … Keeping goats! Oooh!

It’s almost as if they were going to turn into dirty hippies like us lefties in the 1970s, only a perverted and twisted version. Downsizing, treechanging, getting off the fossil fuel grid, but with intent to sabotage rather than make the world a better place. Taking wealth out of the system, sacking all your employees, deliberately becoming an underachiever because, of course, the Democrats plan to steal it all your money from you. Hiding your wealth offshore, finding every tax evasion scheme they can. (Yes, they plan to carry out fraud on a large scale.)
“Pete”:

I sold my business.
I sold several properties, two of them to my children at a significant “loss.” (Ka-Ching!)

(How does this make sense? He’s allowing his children to continue feeding the Beast!)

I’m raising a great deal of my own food and have taken to raising sheep and poultry. All for personal consumption, not sale.
I live in a rural area, so while Andy and Bob and Charlie might buy some sheep to be raised by me, Andy is buying swine, Bob is buying beef, etc.
Canning. Freezing.
Buying bulk.

“Heatherfeather”:

Definitely withdraw all talents from society. Doing this will increase the tax burden on the blind supporters of the exploitative government until they will be unable to bear the burden and the government will collapse under it’s own inefficiency.
When that happens, don’t be living anywhere close to a big city. My husband and I left LA three years ago, live in the country (near a small town) and try to be as self-sufficient as possible (live within our means). I know when the s#%^ goes down, nobody up here will starve.

“Militant Infidel”:

I will soon be leaving a full time job (~60 hours per week) for a part-time job (~30 hours per week). My Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) will likely fall about 25% (yes, it pays significantly better). Surprisingly though, my after tax income will only fall about 10%. How could this be? It is simple, really. My biggest expense after income taxes is my mortgage (with deductable interest) and property taxes (income tax deductable). With the deductions and 25% reduction in AGI, my income tax bill will fall by 40%!!! Not a bad start at “starving the beast”.
This does not include the opportunity that the extra hours at home would provide in regard to untaxed wealth in improving productivity of our goat herd, poultry flock and vegetable garden. The grocery savings alone would make up a significant percentage of the AGI reduction.

On a brighter note, one commenter points out that the Randroids and the MRAs, as you’d expect, overlap – and some MRA Randroids are expressing their protest by refusing to make themselves available for marriage. Where can we send donations to support this excellent protest?

Funny, isn’t it, that so many of these things are quite dear to the hearts of us Dirty Fucking Hippies lefty Greenies? Solar electricity, growing one’s own food, not working excessive hours. Working to live, not living to work, all that. And they come to that excellent conclusion for such a perverse reason.

  • Twitter- CastIronBalcony