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| It is a crime to be gay in Uganda. It is deemed to be such a serious crime to be gay that it can be punished with life imprisonment. But this is not enough, it seems. You see, if being gay is, in its own right, serious enough to warrant life imprisonment, then what do you do when some is gay, and HIV positive? ‘Aggravated’ gayness, if you will? Simple. You take the next logical step, and punish it with death. That bill would also make it illegal to discuss homosexuality, or even for a landlord to rent to a homosexual person. When asked about this monstrous denial of humanity, a minister is reported to have said “We are really getting tired of this phrase human rights. It is being abused. Anything goes, and if you are challenged? 'Oh, it's my right'.
“Anal sex? Human rights. Robbery? Human rights. All sort of nonsense? Human rights.” And beyond the sheer monstrousness of this in its own right (and a vague wondering why this hasn't led the news reports here...), I have two points to make. First is that this is an entirely logical extension of the fundamentally broken thesis that some people have less rights than others. And while not being able to marry is not within many orders of magnitude of this, it is on the same continuum. The arguments are basically the same. And second: the argument is being made that this is a push led by religious politicians from another country. When I say that, I bet most people will automatically think of Wahabbist Saudi Imams. And they'd be wrong: the trail leads to fundamentalist Christians in Washington.The problem is not Islam, or Christianity, or even necessarily religion: the problem is small minded xenophobic fucks who have it on good authority that God hates the same people they hate, and it's a sin to think about it too deeply. That it's a sin to think. They are the enemy, whatever they're wearing, whatever language they're ranting in, whatever name they give to the imaginary friend they abuse to justify their prejudices.
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| Listening to rain outside, watching Rockwiz. Thinking about a beer and bed, in that order. Life has been worse. I could almost forget that Miss A has a slight fever now, and complains about a headache when she wakes. She didn't eat any dinner, but went straight to bed, with a bucket next to the bed. She used it earlier in the afternoon, but was too wiped to have the energy to get hysterical about it. She just told us that she'd be needing a bucket, used at the appropriate time, then asked for something to wipe her face while I emptied said bucket. I hope she doesn't suffer as she recovers. Miss S isn't in much pain from her stye, but when Miss A gets medicine, she wants some too. Except when it's the drops, which she absolutely hates. But there seems to be movement in the eyelid, so hopefully that's coming good too. Definitely not exposing Nanna to any of that.
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| Miss A has chickenpox. Miss S has a stye, for which the ointment has been recalled and no-one will have any for 4-6 weeks. Needless to say, our plans for the weekend have been somewhat derailed... not least tomorrow's, wherein we had been planning to visit my Grandmother in the morning, and have friends (and their two boys) over in the afternoon. Not gonna happen now. *sigh*
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| Islamism is a serious problem. The world would be better off if Islamism were defeated, robbed of its power. I don't think anyone seriously disputes that. The argument, then, comes down to the means. There are two possibilities: - We could bomb the fuck out of brown people until they are dead or acknowledge the West as their betters and masters, or
- we could not be rampaging dickheads and steal the force of Islamist propaganda by, and this is an amazing concept: proving it false
Guess which one works? The radical, xenocidal Islamists base their rhetoric and theory on ignorance and hate. Maybe, just maybe, what the saner of us (in our millions) have been trying — to whit, extending education and hope — is the way to solve the problem, in a way that justifying that hate does not. Of course, this relies on bloodthirsty lunatics in power and their equally bloodthirsty but far less well informed useful idiots to get back in their fucking box and stop fucking up a winning strategy.
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| So, last Friday — Friday the thirteenth — was sufficient to make Richard Dawkins superstitious. First, I hear that there was a burst water main on Punt rd, and traffic was likely to be horrible. Then, I am passed by a police car on its way to a car accident just up the road (and on my way), where a car had gone into a front yard over a brick wall, and ended up on its roof. This was not long before I passed it, and Hatzolah (the Jewish ambulance service) already had the driver on the lawn. That's all I saw as I passed, and I know no more of the matter. Then, at work, I find there's a small crisis. The previous day I had investigated the troubles of one of my users, who had trouble with her roaming profile. (A common situation when the users go over quota and don't realise, which they don't with roaming profiles until it's too late.) As part of this problem, there was a directory which shouldn't have been there, where her profile was being put, which means she had two copies of her profile, which made her that much more over quota, and in my efforts to figure out what was going on, I made her account unusable. I asked the sysad what was going on, and he got curious and fiddled (with a very old, very complicated, very brittle Samba v2 (!) installation, and managed to break it, and several people were unable to log in. And for about a year, that Samba install has been broken, such that we couldn't actually join any computers to it, which means we could fix those users until the other problem was fixed. Luckily, he did, and fixed the other problem too. But the morning was written off. And the afternoon was given over to a machine with (I think) a virus which made the machine unusable, and while it did work in safe mode, the virus checker didn't, and and and arrgh. And there was Drama in a certain list. And I thought that was that. Then on Saturday morning, I got a phone call from my Grandmother. It seems that while I was having a dies horribilis, my Grandfather's ashes were being interred, and my family hadn't even bothered to tell me. Neither did my mother know about it until Friday evening. And my Grandmother was very upset when she discovered that I wasn't there because no-one had told me, which is why she called. Leaving out any other family drama on that front, it feels very much like that branch of the family is writing us (my mother, sister and myself) out of it. And it seems that they aren't extending the favour to the third branch either. My cousin only found out and was able to attend because he coincidentally asked his mother the night before what she was doing that day. I don't even know where he is interred, beyond ‘Eltham’. Yes, I'm upset. But what really is pissing me off is that this isn't an isolated incident of forgetfulness: I had to chase them up to find out when the bloody funeral was, and when there, discovered that they had divvied it up between themselves. I wasn't even asked if there was anything I'd like to say. Only the children of that branch of the family got to speak. I was willing to overlook it then, give the benefit of the doubt. But this just pisses me off. And I have had no contact from them since, either. I intend to have a quiet word at Christmas. Let's see what they say.
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| I just (like, literally five minutes before I posted this) got an SMS, which came up as a “Push Message” in my Samsung. Apparently on Nokias it displays as being a “Service Message”... no other sender details. The subject is “ Video Message” The contents are: Video Message!
Click:
http://w03.v762.net/app/v4/......../..................../....../. (alphabet soup elided to protect the curious) Naturally, I was suspicious, so I googled for “SMS video w03.v762.net”, and found that this is a known scam. Summary: if you see this SMS plop into your inbox: DO NOT FOLLOW THE LINK. Be safe out there, people.
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| Today is my father's birthday. He invited us to his place, then told us that his brother had invited us all to his farm. Today we went to my uncle's farm, past Alexandra. That's a two-and-a-half hour drive, one way. Put it another way: it's half-way to Beechworth. We thought we were horribly late, but we arrived just as my uncle was finishing up mowing. Then we spent several hours there. It's a very nice house, and a lovely farm, and he has three B&B cottages there as well, and it's all very nice. Except the girls were bored out of their skulls. We eventually went to help move the cows from one paddock to another, only my uncle couldn't start his quad-bike, so he used the tractor, only the cows found a shady tree and refused to move further, even after having a bale of hay waved at them. Eventually, we discovered that the bike had just been turned off in a way my uncle didn't expect, and he got it started, and moved the cows, and I took the girls down to see them, and then we had to see the new sheds and his excavator, and, and, and... We left more than two hours after we would have wanted to, which means the girls didn't even get dinner until 9:00, and to bed immediately thereafter. The girls were utterly exhausted. Mim and I are utterly exhausted. We missed out on Halloween, completely and utterly, which had been looked forward to. We didn't get dinner, and the girls got drive-through and some milk. I'm heat-stressed, and dehydrated, and have a headache, and gah. It's a lovely farm, and it was great to see my uncle again, but still, I could really have done without today.
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| Let's see... Saturday morning we rose early to get the kids ready so we could go to Kerry Greenwood's book launch for her latest Corinna Chapman tale. We were stressing a bit about this, as we had been hearing dire warnings that the Westgate and Kings Way would be blocked solid due to interminable roadworks on the M1. I tried to allow as much time as possible, and checked the traffic on the web, and didn't quite believe it when the route showed as green the whole way. Mim wanted to get back in time to go to her bellydancing class at 1:00, and decided at the last moment that she would forgo the launch so that she could get to one class in three weeks (last week we were at my Grandmothers, next week we will be at my uncle's farm past Alexandra). As it turns out, the way in was clear. I was worried that the girls would behave themselves (given the mentions in the book of obnoxious kids and their obnoxious parents), but I think they did quite well. Miss S wanted to see the goings-on, and demanded to be held up (at which point she would shove her tiger in my face and ask “can you see a tiger?”), and she could smell popcorn, and wanted it, and generally was bored out of her skull and just wanted to explore. But she is four, and she didn't run too far, and came back when asked. Abi was probably bored too, but was quieter about it. And they've had an experience that not many kids have. But still. They started showing signs of low blood sugar, and flat blank refused to try the rose-water muffins (and I didn't get a chance to try any myself...) or christmas cake, so I went to the cafe next door and got them some cake there. That fixed the blood sugar, but they were still antsy after the signing, so we vanished. (Sorry, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bar_barra... without mimdancer there, I didn't feel competent enough to risk my luck, even to find people to give goodbyes to.) And Mim hadn't needed bother miss it after all. Not only did we get back in time for her to leave, there was a Sooper Special event on at her bellydance studios, and normal classes were cancelled. Notification? Why would you need that? Surely everyone is excited enough to be going to the weekend-long series of classes as to not even bother going to the classes, and not need to be told, no? No? Needless to say, when Mim returned, she was very calmly spitting blood in blank-faced fury. If she had known this beforehand, she could have gone to the launch, met our friends, we could have had a chance to talk, but no. That night we went to dinner with Mim's father, as he was celebrating his ‘anniversary’ with his girlfriend. We arrived at the restaurant right about the time the girls are usually going to bed. Mim's father suggested we sit over in the corner. We sat near him. Not that it mattered, because when his friends turned up they just sat in the kids' chairs, and we were shunted off to the corner anyway. Mim's father's friends, by the way, are some of the ugliest people I've met. Selfish, crude, cold, arrogant, pushy, ugh. I would be perfectly happy to never meet them again.The kids, when we got them out of there at 9pm, were exhausted, but had been well behaved considering. Mim's father's response was to inform us that ‘it's good for them’, and seemed perplexed at why Mim is so angry with him. Sunday morning, Mim and the girls were going to go to a craft market in Mornington with MiL, but they decided instead to go to Mim's sister's place, to help look after her, as she was unwell. I went to the Kindergarten working bee, were I worked, and thence to the Scribes' Guild meeting. Where I handed over a GoA scroll, and Þorfinn told me he would recommend to the provost of scribes that I am ready to take on a Peerage scroll. And then I went home, and we had pizza delivered, and we sat and stared into space, and then we went to bed. Next weekend looks almost as full. And the weekend after that. And after that, and... Um, yeah.
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