Talibanistan

You probably missed this story, while focussing on the crime, politics and road rage articles. But this story is as close to one about the end of the world as we know it that we have today.

David Kilcullen is not a member of New Zealand’s National Party with a vendetta against the former Labour Finance Minister. Rather, he is a former Australian army lieutenant colonel who helped devise the US troop surge that revitalised the American campaign in Iraq. Well-qualified to speak, he was a specialist adviser for the Bush administration and is now a consultant to the Obama White House. His fear is that Pakistan is at risk of falling under al-Qaeda control, leading to the creation of the world’s greatest nuclear-capable power, which we will call Talibanistan.

He puts it this way: “Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country which the Government does not control.”

Given that there are waves of extremist violence throughout Pakistan, not just in the Afghan border region, does not that all add up to make one rather scary bloc? “We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we’re calling the war on terror now.”

Anything could happen when the world and its saviour are not looking. It’s Easter, a time of rebirth, resurrection and cuteness like the Obama’s new Portuguese Water Dog, Bo, deed-polled from Charlie, a world exclusive for The New York Times and reportedly a gift from the Kennedy kennels.

There’s nothing like a cute puppy to divert the eyes of the world and its president.

Poping By Numbers

Benedict’s Age: 81
Benedict number: XVI
Temperature in Angola, Africa today: 31 degrees celsius
Language he spoke in: Portuguese
Subject of his address: Converting witches to Catholicism
Number of people in the sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV: 22,000,000
Population of Angola: 16,000,000
Percentage who are Catholics: 65
Percentage who are Christians: 80
Years Angolans have practiced Roman Catholicism: 500
Number of Luandans lining up today for a blessing from Pope Benedict XVI: 30,000
Number of police officers employed to control the crowd: 10,000
Number of people taken away in ambulances at the Pope’s Angolan rally: 20
Number of people given medical assistance on site: 10
Number of people who were stampeded to death at the Pope’s Angola Rally: 2

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10562999

Talk and Die

We all know the teacher’s evil eye. It fixes the over-verbal malefactor or miscreant with a cruel sternness that says ‘talk and die’.

This week google has gone mad with people fascinated by the cause of Natasha Richardson’s death. In traumatology, it is “a clinical presentation in acceleration-deceleration brain injury, which may cause massive cerebral edema, that may have a latency period–eg, 48-72 hrs, until death. Cf subarachnoid hemorrhage” (medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com).

People suffering from “Talk and Die Syndrome” may appear fine at first, talking and acting normally as Richardson was, only to slip slowly into unconsciousness, coma and even death as blood floods the brain.

As we know from the many reports, Natasha Richardson was reported to be “fine at first” after she hit her head in a skiing accident, but the 45-year-old actress’ health began to deteriorate within an hour. The press reported her dead before she actually was, spread a fascination with talk and die syndrome, and have now elevated the actress to Heather Ledgerian ‘too young to die’ posthumous immortality. The media covered her accident, not death, death, tributes, funeral, organ donation – the full grief process of her family – in full view despite the family’s and Neeson’s desire for ‘privacy’. There is a new term for this: ‘grief porn’ (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10564063). Natasha Richardson (Redgrave Neeson) died on March 18, 2009.

She was lovely, intelligent, a Tony-award winner (“Cabaret”, 1998), a Redgrave and so a Royal, Liam Neeson’s beloved partner and, like Princess Diana, a mother of two fine boys. She was wonderful in The Handmaiden’s Tale (1990) and The White Countess (2005), a Li-lo and a J-Lo costar and now she is elevated beyond what she achieved in her career. All tragic, and now we all know what talk and die is.

It is not the wish that occurs in your brain when someone talks and talks ad infinitum without letting another person get a word in edgewise.

With my crossbow, I shot the albatross

A Woman's Weekly Story 2009

In Glen Eden, West Auckland, Adele Curran, 42, was watering pot plants on the deck in January. Suddenly, a crossbow arrow fired by her neighbour whizzed through the air and embedded itself 3cm into her skull. As Women’s Weekly readers so graphically see, it wedged between her right eye socket and nose. At first Adele thought a bird had flown into her, an albatross perhaps? Then it hit her and she saw the bolt’s shaft sticking out of her head. “I could feel the blood going down my face and in my nose and throat”. Said her father John, evoking something nautical rather than botanical, “There was a lot of blood on the deck and she was screaming and screaming.”

It was indeed all hands on deck. Her heroic son and the wonderful St. John’s Ambulance people saved the day and the amazing surgeons saved her eye after weeks of operations.

And good on her, like Jade Goody the Patron Saint of Exploiting Ill Fortune, for getting money for this. Goody died today. RIP.

As for the neighbour, he was only playing with his new toy, a Christmas gift from his wife, readily available in New Zealand from your local hardware shop, when it suddenly went off. A fool and his bolt are soon shot, as the saying goes.

Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10562885

Wife for sale and other hypocrisies

Advertisements about men selling women are funny today. You saw the one who put his nagging wife in the ‘Free to collect’ column after a dispute about TV-watching? (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/for-sale-nagging-wife/2009/03/13/1236447434263.html). Here’s some more about women for sale. One of the first things I noticed when I opened a newspaper shortly after my arrival in Melbourne was that brothels are legal. The word ‘brothel’ appears brazenly in those unavoidable classifieds that you see when you’re looking for a plumber or a glazier and instead you see pout-lipped sex objects, mostly Asian or unreal-looking pile-haired blondes with that glacial look that makes their profession stereotypically doubtless.

The topic is so démodé, and 30% of men have admitted to using such premises (yawn), that there was even a TV Series, Satisfaction (2008) set in a Melbourne brothel.

A Sydney Example

Satisfaction, Season 2

Back in Auckland the city councils still measure the number of centimeters between sex-on-site premises and schools and have strict bylaws about what sorts of neighbourhoods are and are not allowed bordellos. The other ‘b’ word dare not ever declare its name there, hiding behind weirdness like The Pelican Club and The White House. The associations of the latter with sex might be evident – the adjoined bar is Monica’s – but the pelican one always disturbed me, with its image of a suited middle-aged mail with tie awry in the blubber-beak of a pelican. They eat their young don’t they? In Auckland, you could see those ads for Busty Kayla and other individuals, but establishments would seldom declare themselves in print, though everyone knew what Flora’s was: a sign at the top of Grey’s Ave beside the lube bay. Everyone knew what Julie’ts was because it was used by schoolteachers for years to illustrate the misplaced apostrophe.

Melbourne and Sydney have a history of ‘No brothel in my backyard’ too, particularly in the light of 1999′s Anti Slavery law, as ABC investigate in this charming expose of council hypocrisy:

Need for change to brothel laws
The rather disgusting thought of having a brothel operating next door to a home or school was recently highlighted by the fact that investigators hired by councils had sex with prostitutes in order to gain evidence needed to prosecute the brothels.
— NorthSide Courier, Need for change to brothel laws, 31st January, 2007
(See: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1882076.htm)

Further hypocrisy still resounds in the Melbourne psyche when the name Wei Tang is mentioned. A 44-year-old originally from China, she was a brothel keeper who forced five Thai slaves to work six days a week without pay and given them A$50 bonuses if they agreed to work seven days. It came out in the prosecution that between August 2002 and May 2003 each woman was forced to perform between 800 and 900 unpaid sex acts. Anyway, back to today.

Now we can read quite blatantly, perhaps frankly, of Melbourne’s sex trade. The United Nations ranks human trafficking as the third largest transnational crime, after drugs trafficking and the arms trade. Melbourne is a “major destination” of trafficked women in Australia. This story is a case study, and all very familiar and sad, and puts Josef Fritzl see: http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-monster-beneath-20090315-8yxm.html) and other notorious imprisoners of women as sex slaves in context,

For seven months, she was locked in a brothel, seeing 15 men a day, in around the clock shifts. As she speaks tears stream down her cheeks and her breath shudders. More than five years later, the memories still haunt her. “It was like in prison,” she says.

And on for four pages: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2009/03/12/1236447369470.html. It takes a Brisbane paper to publish it. Every city has something else to hide, Auckland being no exception in spite of the brothel ban and Melbourne, despite the underbelly-openness of brothels, has human trafficking and worked hooking on ice. To joke about selling your wife is only a few footsteps away.

Postscript: For insight into how the in-your-faceness of sexualised images such as the Melbourne billboard seen above could affect your children, read this: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2175450.htm
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Animals and Real Estate Agents

I’ve commented several times on the recurrence of stories about nature’s revenge in the mass media, and usually we can contextualise these tragedies within an ecological discourse so that they have an educational purpose. But today’s headless story was just gruesome for the sake of a semi-voyeuristic, gratuitous story, fodder for people who loved Saw 5. See it at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10561356 and rank it as a tragedy disguised as horror story.

Atrocities against children are common in the media too, as part of the ways in which our emotions are contorted and manipulated by the monstrousness/ monstrosity of crime leveled against the very young and the defenseless. Today we learn that Aaron Deng kidnapped little Xin Xin Ma. This was a media-grabbing 2008 story that seemed all the more relevant in the wake of the ‘little Pumpkin’ abandonment and tragedy that the media reported with soap opera-like glee. Little Chinese girl victims make good sympathetic media fodder in New Zealand. Read the story of the little girl found in a cupboard wrapped up in a blanket and hungry here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10561282.

For me the atrocity was not merely about opportunistically kidnapping a member of your own community for pecuniary gain, but the fact that the perpetrator was a real estate agent! This solidified my belief that real estate agents, unreformed and unreconstructed ones, are the lowest form on life, almost as low as the crocodile. My week’s experience (let’s not go there) certainly testifies to it, and made me which that this related story – and it’s an ‘animal bites man’ humdinger – (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10561468) was about him.

But real estate agents are not the only opportunistic vermin in New Zealand this week, although these other criminals criminalise in victimless contexts. Other pillars of the community – bank managers and doctors – are also exposed as only being in it for the dough.

The embezzling National bank manager features here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=1056125. I always thought that my bank fees were way too high when I was with that bank.

An extortionist and fraudulent doctor, one Dr Hongsheng Kong, is the star of the next story, and read it here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10561224. The latter received $1.3 million of Government funding by falsifying data about patients, even claiming that people who had died had visited him.

Let’s not even mention the Nathan directors’ trial in New Zealand this week. What happens to investors’ funds when companies fail? Truth will out. They will be hoist with their own petards. In literature, this is known as ‘the biter bit’.

‘Crocodile bites off girl’s head’ is tragedy masquerading as sensationalism. ‘Crocodile bites off real estate agent’s head’ could be comedy.

Not for the Faint Hearted

The Age is not for the faint-hearted. As a fan of Jacobean revenge tragedy and not adverse to the odd bit of classic blood horror, I still found the following story far more hideous than Silence of the Lambs or Hannibal even with its man-eating pigs. It’s the one about the Chinese immigrant in Canada, and only read it if really curious about why I put it in the same paragraph as Jacobean tragedy – http://www.theage.com.au/world/beheader-not-criminally-responsible-for-murder-20090306-8qok.html

Somehow, somewhere, I wanted to make a connection between the media and horrorporn; anime and those Japanese horror media stories, and games like Carmageddon and cartoons like Scooby Doo and increased violence among children. For that story, and again it is for real, see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1159766/Cartoon-violence-makes-children-aggressive.html. A researcher into the latter link, Jennifer Linder, said: ‘There is ample evidence that physical aggression on TV is associated with increases in aggressive behaviour, but there was little until this study that has shown a link between televised aggression and resulting aggression among children.’

Anyway, back to the hideousness, the media and horrorporn – and let’s add in gastroporn too (and I don’t mean Nigella). Then the day after The Age went all Peter Greenaway, fusing food, gore and grossness with the following offal story beginning “Snouts, tongues, lips, ears, livers, kidneys, brains and blood, heaps of it”: http://www.theage.com.au/national/diners-rediscover-blood-and-guts-20090307-8ryo.html. The cover picture shows once and for all that brains are better than brawn

I was vowing to return to my vegetarian roots when I came across something even more obscene: the recipe for Scooby Doo Aubergine Burgers, with or without white chocolate sauce: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/home/you/article-1032877/Scooby-Doo-aubergine-burgers.html

What DID you give up for Lent, by the way?

When there’s no news, there’s always the weather

Late February – the fading days of summer and the beginning of the times of Keatsian indolence. Every year there is a flurry and fluster of gales and mutilated umbrellas in New Zealand, and every year, like clockwork, Kaeo goes underwater as if it was always destined to be New Zealand’s answer to Atlantis. After the storms, that usually bring down trees on houses and cause a few yachts some considerable wind damage, there’s always the Eastertime desire for an Indian summer, and the hope that the days that could not be enjoyed in January (because the workers are back at work) might be replicated over Easter, to give one final focus to rest before the year descends into public holidayless toil (except for the Queen’s Birthday, bless her sacrifice in allowing her real birthday in April to be transposed to June for Kiwi convenience) throughout autumn and winter.

The unpredictability of the fires for those defending their houses has been a major theme of personal recollections. The phone box in Marysville was burned to smithereens but the mail box beside it was left intact. This image, much in the media, is a symbol of the arbitrary unpredictability of fire paths. You see the flames coming over the mountain, raging high above the canopy of gum trees, and then an alternative glaze arises from nowhere and comes from left fields and rages towards you. The blaze you are watching might not be the one that gets you. People recall being under ember attack from fires 20 km away; burning branches windborne create new fires before the mother fire reaches there. They recall fireballs overhead as if the air is on fire – a movie scene fuelled by petrol, except there are no benzenes in sight and only carbon and oxygen and the force of not gales. If you panic, jump in the car, try to get out, you’re likely to take a tree-lined road that is a fire alley in potentia. Your fire plan says stay, defend. Amazing people have. There are stories of one property being maintained while the neighbours’ one sizzled. All people in the fire zones are eligible for a good payment of immediate relief.

The Upwey fires in the Dandenongs, once somewhere I considered buying a house

The weather is of course no less of a front page headline in Australia: deadful floods in Queensland and down the Eastern coast with images of cars submerged beneath rainwater and animals up to their necks in rainwater are swamping the media. Noah’s Ark on one coast and Hellfire on the other. And don’t forget the crocodiles and the sharks, whose omnipresence this year is also connected to the weather and the dearth of food for them (perhaps it is all at Queen Victoria Market, where I see Queensland Snapper and try in vain to calculate carbon miles). The good news is that Melbourne’s expected conflagrations on Friday did not come to much, except for the work of a repeat arsonist in Arthur’s Seat, Mornington. I have four colleagues on some degree of fire watch, and you need to learn an attitude quite incomprehensible to the rest of the world in order to be able to sleep in your bed on fire ban days during these seasons. The word is that 2009 gets all the superlatives: hottest day ever, hottest sequence of days ever, longest hot sequence of days ever, driest summer, least rain, lowest reservoirs, worst public transport breakdowns, most electricity cut-outs, greatest number of fire appliances ever gathered together in one state at one time, most heroic behaviour, most generous and charitable behaviour, greatest sense of moral pride, most evident national spirit. It would all happen in my first months in a new city, but I will come through. Cliches about phoenixises are everywhere in the media. Only rain gives the real relief, and in order to get that, Melbourne needs to contact Brisbane or New Zealand.

Nightmare on Elm Row!

I come from Dunedin and have long remarked that it contains more than its fair share of the creepy and the iconic. It could be due to its notoriously C-grade water, its dour sou’wester Scottish Presbyterian heritage or merely its murkily drizzly subclimate, but it does produce a lot of strange grizzled blokes in straggly beards who wear bare feet with and without sandals in the middle of winter. You can regularly see bobbing buskers, bin burglars and locals dressed as yetis in main street.

The city and its surrounds have their fair share of tragic males such as David Malcolm Gray of Aramoana. And possibly others, who I won’t name. It was here where Janet Frame was nearly lobotomised. It comes as no surprise that the media’s creep of the week comes from here too.

We all know that creepy blokes like to hide behind handsome avatars on the internet. They like to create glamourised second selves and to lure unsuspecting females into their lairs. Creepy hairy yetis can pretend to be Jasons and Kyles. But what happens when their quarry actually comes from far across the seas and visit them?

Peter Robb is now a notorious unemployed 54-year-old man. But he is also the guy who lured an intelligent, attractive German woman, Maja Gille, 36, with his poetry, photoshopped past pictures and imitation of a Keatsian, willowy PhD student. He was allowed his harmless fantasy – but not to overstep the line … Myspace and its like contain a wealth of creeps, as we’ve already seen this week.

This story illustrates the moral that everyone already suspected. People are not what they seem in Cyberland. Fantasies merge with dreams and delusions. Suddenly you are on a plane to a perfect stranger, expecting a dreamboat but end up with a shipwreck. Gille escaped from the hell house after having to spend a night in horror, texting a man she met on the plane to come and get her. “He had such a creepy aura. I was in shock. His home was really a horror house, I would say. Little roosters, cats and chickens lived in the house. There was an ugly smell, a dead animal smell, and an ugly smell [of] old clothes.” (See: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10558013).

I hope she sells the movie rights and gets Diane Kruger to play her, and Freddy Krueger to play Peter Robb.

Does this look like a photorealistic person to you?

We’re Going to Cut the Cable

The Iron Man and the Iron Giant were pylons sporting overhead cables in my childhood nightmares. Massive thighs of meccano-metal strode over beautiful landscapes marringly. The fiery danger in the cables was clear every time a worker got electrocuted. We knew that if they fell, and they did seem so vulnerable as they swayed in gales, then we were all a little more vulnerable.

Who would have thought that both New Zealand and Australia should be part of this same Zeitgeist this week?

The terrifying Marysville fire in Victoria may have been due to negligence on the part of The Electric Company according to the latest in the news (See: http://www.theage.com.au/national/huge-fire-class-action-launched-20090214-87pg.html). A two-metre stretch of powercable snapped. The location was – would you believe it? – Kilmore. We are reminded that it is not an Aussie Electricity Company. It is Singapore-owned electricity company SP AusNet. It’s a message about bloody foreign owenwership too, it seems, deeply encoded inside the story.

Meanwhile, Kiwi Prime Minister John Key has lambasted as “totally unacceptable” a failure that sent a huge power cable crashing on to houses in (please believe it, I did not make up this name either!!!) Flat Bush, Manukau. Reports The Herald, “Some residents fled when they got the chance and ran across the street, but others had to stay indoors as the live wire sent out sparks” (See: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10556727). This time the power company is called (ahem, in the light of my last Key post) Transpower.

We may have a sensation that Kiwis do like to copy Aussie disasters, even in small scale. After all, the news is just out that a notoriety-seeking copycat firebug has turned chalets and barns and lots of bush on Mt Ruapehu’s summered skifield into burnt rubble (See: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10556814). That person should be reminded that the 39-year old local man arrested for arson yesterday has the wrath of locals upon him. They want to lynch the bastard.

What are these guys thinking? This article provides insights into empty minds: http://www.theage.com.au/national/inside-the-mind-of-a-serial-firebug-20090214-87po.html