Thesis: A bad workman blames his tools.

Response: That's all well and good, but when that workman is mandated by management to put away his hammer, and nail things together with a steam engine, is he still a bad workman when he points out how fucking stupid that is? Do you understand the concept of a ‘tool fit for purpose’? Hello?

“I'm drowning, and monkeys dressed as lifeguards are throwing me anvils.”

News Flash: Teenage girl does something stupid, suffers regret and panic when parent freaks, blames someone else.

Also, Sun rises in East.

In the letters of The Age yesterday was an impassioned plea for the government to please think of the children finally get around to making guns illegal.

I replied, and The Age printed it:

THE Government has anticipated your concerns, Mr Tsironis (Letters, 18/6), and made the possession and transport of handguns, semi-auto rifles and knives illegal several years ago.

Perhaps they read your letter, went back in time, and informed a previous government who had never thought of that. Well done: we are now all retrospectively safe from violence on the streets. Heaven forfend that violent criminals might consider breaking the law, after all.

I wonder if this one will also find its way into Hansard? Somehow I doubt it.

I just heard Pink Floyd's Waiting for the Worms from The Wall (the bit where Pink starts turning into a Fascist Dictator), followed immediately by PIL's Ich bein ein Auslander.

I LOLed.

The stupid never ends.

Waitress wins payout over 'figure-hugging' dress

Summary: a waitress is told that her uniform will change. The change is that the female uniform is bright red and figure-hugging, while the men's uniform remains loose and dark. She objects to being an object, and is fired. She sues for discriminatory treatment. She wins, as the tribunal agrees that the new uniform code treated women differently from men, but does not get the amount she asked for.

Straightforward, so far?

Only the opening line is A Muslim cocktail waitress. As if that makes the circumstances different. Surely sexist treatment is sexist, no matter the religion. She, as a woman felt like she was being advertised as part of the menu, and objected. Surely that should be enough, right? But no. She is Muslim, and thus ripe for The Daily Hate and the Scum to attack her for hypocrisy, because they found a photo of her taken at the beach.

But that is, as Ms Lemes points out, completely irrelevant. People wear bikinis at the beach all the time, but that does not make it less degrading to be forced to wear one at work.

Her religion does not make her offended where there would otherwise be none, her religion makes her more aware of when her figure is being used to objectify her. She is not a burka-wearing fundamentalist, she is a modern, liberated woman. And there was a line she was not prepared to cross.


The deliberately-missing-the-point-stupidity burns.

“I am Alfric, lord of Tir Mór.”

Or, with the appropriate proper nouns translated out of Old English and Irish:

“I am Elf-king, lord of the Great Land.”


But they can lampshade the plot like this with such confidence because no-one speaks Old English or Irish any more. I suppose I should be thankful that the writers displayed sufficient erudition to make this lampshade in the first place, I suppose.

I'm fairly sure that the ‘magical language’ they speak when they cast spells is Old English... but it's pronounced so badly that I'm not sure. Besides, I haven't had a chance to listen properly, given that miss S likes to tell stories to herself at the top of her lungs right at the interesting parts.

What a stupid cloak she's wearing. Orange and floaty, and would give not a skerrick of warmth or protection from rain. She's kind of cute, though.

If only the milieu wasn't ‘15th Century Generic’, and the old stories so ... liberally reinterpreted. All of the names, but with all of the background and context methodically stripped away. And then had the chutzpah to make Geoffrey of Monmouth one of the characters.

Still, it's entertaining enough in its own right.

I've been thinking about how languages develop recently. It beats thinking about work.

Now, I know that this is all stuff that any half-trained historical linguist will look at and go ‘duh!’, but I'm not even half-trained. This is all stuff I've picked up, and figured out, and this is just trying to put them into some sort of order, so as to make sense of them.

( Feel free to ignore this if you're not a linguaphile )

Flicking through channels, in between the end of a DVD and the beginning of the news. One channel change drops us at a wildlife documentary. The scene was of two whales, frolicking. One of the whales was male. You could tell. He was very excited to be around the other whale, if you get my meaning.

Abi: “What's that thing sticking out of that whale?”
Me (fighting giggles, as is mimdancer): “Well, when a daddy whale and a mummy whale love each other very much...”

---

And when the news does start: some guy who coaches football did something, some cricketer has come home in disgrace for some reason, and Indian students are still scared. Oh, and we're on tenter-hooks to see who gets what in the fallout from Fitzgibbon's white-anting.

Maybe it would be nice to have a mention that pretty well every single member of the British cabinet has resigned in disgrace, and that Brown is an utter lame duck. Still, we know where our priorities are, right?

(Edit: 6:24, and still no mention of Britain's governmental meltdown. However they have gone into some detail about how hot the Australian soccer team is in the middle east, and how the football went. Weather next. Hope you didn't expect the Nine News to actually inform you or anything.

Today, about 1:30 in the afternoon, my Mother-in-law's 13 year old Cocker Spaniel, Amber, was put to sleep.

She had not eaten for more than five days, and anyone who knows Cocker Spaniels knows that not eating for one day is a sign of something being very wrong. She was not getting up, and was growling when people touched her.

Yesterday she was taken to the vet, and the prognosis was good: a compression in the back. Some cortisol and painkillers, and she would be fine. Last night, Anne managed to get some food into her, and it looked good.

But over the night, Amber was throwing up, and still not moving. She was taken back to the vet, and they had another look at the X-rays. They had concentrated on her back, and not noticed the growth in her stomach. From which she was now bleeding internally. Her gums were white, and she was in pain. She was given morphine, and mimdancer was called. Mimdancer's sister was still an hour's drive away, and Amber was in too much pain, and so she was gently put to sleep.



Mim got the girls out of school early, and they got to give her a last pat, before Amber was buried in Anne's garden, under a stone. (Shit, I'm crying now.)

When, after fighting peak-hour traffic, I got home, the girls were just going to bed. Not long ago, I heard Abi crying, so we had a talk. “What is ‘death’?” she asked. “Well, I said, what is ‘life’? Life is when you're alive, when your heart beats, and your brain thinks, and your muscles move: it's all about moving and doing. Death is when you stop. When your brain stops thinking, your heart stops pumping, and you just... stop. And you can rest.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
“And Amber's in Heaven.”
“Yes. Amber's in heaven. She was old, for a dog, and she was hurting, and it was hurting her to be alive, so she stopped, and now she's in heaven eating Schmakos and chicken wings for breakfast, and she's happy.”
Some sobs.
“But if she's in heaven, she's never coming back!”
“No, darling, she's not. So we have to remember her, remember all the good things. Remember her snuffling for food. Sitting beside us at the table waiting for the scraps she always got. Being so excited to go for walks. The way she snored. And when we die, a long time from now, she'll be there to meet us.”



The girls have been quiet for a while, now. I think they're asleep. Abi's going to take some photos of Amber into school tomorrow, and will talk about her to her class. And Mim and her sister are at Anne's right now.

I've never been a ‘dog person’. Anyone who knows me will tell you that. But still, I've known Amber almost all her life, and she's Just Been There since before Mim and I were married. And she was a strong personality. And now she's gone. Requiescat in pace.




Oh, and I do know of people who would say that it is better not to indulge fantasies of an afterlife, and that we should have told the girls that when Amber died, that she just ceased to exist. My response is: fuck off. Anyone who says that six-year-olds are ready to hear that sort of cold reality has probably never had to say it to one.