Dana Vale; abortion; Amanda Vanstone; Muslims with a sense of humour

I like abortion. Abortion's fine. I like Dana Vale (left), because she's so conservative, and she's such a skilful own goal kicker, and I do love a really conservative own goal kicker. Alexander Downer revealed himself with his "Things that batter" speech during the 1995 election campaign (his party's slogan was "things that matter" and he quipped mirthfully at a formal dinner that the Liberal domestic violence policy could be dubbed "things that batter"). Then Prime Minister Keating called him the idiot son of the aristocracy, which he never shook, which is why we have John Howard.

I happened to be watching tv last night and there she was, Dana, explaining how Australia is going to become a Muslim state in the near future, what with the rate of mozzie refos and us "aborting ourselves out of existence" and all (which is why abortion's bad, because mozzies are pesky). She was one of 5 conservative women politicians holding a press conference to campaign against the proposal to tranfser power from the Health Minister to health professionals decisions about use of the abortion pill RU486. Out blurted her thing, and no matter how fast her fellow twin set pollie Jackie Kelly could get out words to the effect of "Hmm, well I think Dana's out on her own on that one," it couldn't be fast enough.

Dana's the Minister for Veteran's Affairs, and the Minister Assisting the Defence Minister, the same out of left field thinker who came up with the idea of a Gallipoli theme park on the Mornington Peninsula just out of Melbourne to save uber loyalists the airfare to Turkey (where there are, lets face it, far too many mozzies for safety).

Now Amanda Vanstone has called her fellow minister "dopey". Hymned by faint approbation if you ask me. Amanda is just impossible to dislike, as Phillip Adams observed on last night's LNL.

But I like the mozzie with a sense of humour who published a photo in an Egyptian newspaper of the Queen of Denmark apparently wearing a red bikini.

Jamis Sputnik: a fixed gear factory produced track bike

In my earlier post on bicycles, I talked about beautiful pared down cycles. This is the one that I found so beautiful in the store, the Jamis Sputnik. As my new bike became increasingly cluttered with lights, computer, panier rack, horn and lock, I looked increasingly enviously at the impractical matt black beauty of the enticingly named Sputnik, which is, attractively, only about $800. It looks more startingly beautiful in real life than in this photo. That's the problem with photos of bikes.

Mozart; Jacques Loussier; Mikhail Simkin

Mozart, who is 250 years old today, earned the equivalent of 300,000 euros in his good years, close enough to AU$500,000, and in his lean years during the Turkish Wars, made a third of that, according to an extraordinarily dull documentary on SBS this evening. He spent profligately, and historians suppose he lost most of his money at billiards. He never went to school. Particularly good are the bit where Don Giovani falls into Hell with an operatic scream of great dimension, having refused to recant his philandering ways when given the chance by the stone statue of a Commandatore he'd earlier murdered, the Mass in C Minor, and a blinged up version of Rondo Alla Turca played by some pianist whose name I forget.

Jacques Loussier is a French jazz pianist famous for playing jazzed up Bach. I think he was more famous in the 60s than today but at Discurio in the City today I walked past a disc of Jacques Loussier treating Mozart piano concertos. The new trio got adventurous and started jazzing up Vivaldi, Debussy, Beethoven.

I looked up Wikipedia and found out that the original trio, Play Bach, went around from 1959 to 1978, but has been relaunched with a new basist and drummer in 1985 when Jack was 51. It was also intresting to be reminded of Jack's suit against Eminem for ripping off one of his tunes, and to learn of the rumour that The Wall was filmed in his studio. Loussier's website is here.

I got onto Simkin through his "Mozart or Salieri?" quizz, surprisingly easy I think for anyone who knows a bit of Mozart. His other quizzes are fun and he is running the world's worst painting awards, though I think he has a long way to go in finding the worst.

The photo is from Selva, over at Flickr.

Heinrich Harrer, the Dalai Lama's Nazi tutor

Well, I'm beating it up a bit; The Economist's article is at pains to forgive Harrer for wearing an SS uniform at his wedding and being a member of the Nazi party. I have read 7 Years in Tibet and seen the movie starring -- spew -- Brad Pitt, but I had no idea that the Dalai Lama's tutor was even slightly that way inclined, and it is a fascinating and not entirely insignificant link between the greatest living exponent of non-violence and tolerance and the most depraved and intolerant regime of our times. Harrer's really is one of the great adventure stories of the 20th century:

"Over the succeeding months Mr Harrer became his photographer, his teacher and his friend. He taught him maths, geography, science, and what Churchill and Eisenhower had done. As Mr Harrer recorded and slowly understood Tibet, accustoming himself to barley porridge, searing cold and the virtue of stoical patience, the Dalai Lama with avid curiosity pieced the outside world together—until, in 1950, the Chinese invasion of Tibet put an end both to his political innocence and to Mr Harrer's seven-year sojourn there.

They had been, he said later, the happiest years of his life. They had also been unintended. Mr Harrer had gone to Kashmir in 1939 on quite different business, to scout out a “killer mountain” called Nanga Parbat for a possible assault by his team of German and Austrian climbers. He had been arrested instead, on the eve of war.

His purpose in Kashmir had not been entirely unpolitical. He was already a hero in Austria for having made, with three others, the first successful ascent of the infamous north face of the Eiger in 1938. The conquering of the mountain had coincided with Austria's absorption into Nazi Germany, a highly symbolic display of united dominance and strength. Hitler himself had congratulated him. Keyed up by that, Mr Harrer longed to be picked for a Himalayan expedition. To make himself more eligible, he joined the Nazi party and the Styrian SS, and was hired to teach SS officers skiing."

Chinotto and other bitters

It's 41.3 degrees Celcius outside right now and one of my strategies for cooling myself down was chugging a glass 750 ml bottle of chinotto, a bitter Italian soft drink. It was manufactured in Melbourne from "Italian chinotto syrup". It is blacker than coca-cola, and bitter and sweet with an enduring aftertaste.

An Italian's and an American's hymn to it are worth checking out (particularly if you speak Italian in the one instance, though I can get the gist of "Sono ormai oltre cinque anni da quando abbiamo deciso di colmare una scandalosa lacuna del World Wide Web, creando il primo grande sito italiano (e mondiale) dedicato alla amata bevanda." I love Italian amari digestives including Campari, and the juice of the chinotto, a kind of orange (pictured) is the essential element of most of them.

A multitude of small chinotto makers are being edged out by Nestle which makes chinotto under the branc "Chino"; a pity.

England, the BBC, and Spooks

I like England. It was at a tube station that my dad read The Times and told me, in 1976, when I was just the right age to be gobsmacked, that an old tribe had been newly discovered (I was going to type "a new tribe had been discovered") in the jungles of the Amazon. England is the home of the pub, and I like pubs. In 1976, I went to England expecting a land of rolling green hills and golden light such as was described by Laurie Lee, and conjured in my imagination more or less precisely as Peter Jackson conjured the Borough in Lord of the Rings. The presence of motorways and South American travel agents was a bit of a shock.

I grew up listening to ABC, which meant also listening to the BBC's The Goons, and Alastair Cooke's Letter from America.

I realise how I like England when I watch Spooks, a BBC drama series about MI5's counter-terrorism team where multicultural types with classical educations prevent terrorist strikes moments before they happen with their excellent ability to get into the minds of urbane Persian speaking terrorists whose classical educations inform the code words they use. The Islamic terrorists are often cultured and have coherent demands.

The audience is invited truly to hate only the far right politicians MI5 is also tasked with bringing down undemocratically. The show is both politically correct and politically incorrect; that is, those who we know are about to take lives are satisfyingly assassinated with guns, tracked down using cool gadgets, while there is much talk about democratic values and "the heart of the British nation". The Americans are alternatively corrupt and incompetent, but usually boorish. The phrase "very well" and "My office, now" feature prominently amongst other gems of English minimalist expression. Harry Pearce (pictured) is head honcho. He is played by Peter Firth. The website has snippets of video.

Bicycles

They keep you fit, keep you interesting, let you live dangerously, afford the opportunity to affix small cane baskets and loud horns with rubber bulbs, and they're the subject of an early Pink Floyd song by Sid Barrett:

I've got a bike. You can ride it if you like.
It's got a basket, a bell that rings and
Things to make it look good.
I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.

You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world.
I'll give you anything, ev'rything if you want things.

I ride mine in my suit through a park where bikes are proscribed, no hands, down an avenue of elms, twice a day. If I had a garage, then I would have 5, and one would be a fixed gear track
bike: no gears, no brakes, no suspension, just a frame, a seat, a handlebar, some wheels, and a chain. Simply, beautiful. Light as hell; expensive, and impractical.

The photo I stole from Michael Rowley also from San Fransisco, goddammit, masquerading at Flickr as Mnemonix.

Apples

The apple is to fruit as a martini is to cocktails, the most fruity fruit, like an oriole is the most birdful bird. It is an archetype, an object from childhood memory. It tastes good too. It is inside apple pies, and things measured in bushels are cool.

But "apple" and "evil" are close in Latin, malum, and malus, and Eve tempted Adam with one having fallen first for the subtile guiles of the serpent and having been condemned as a result to agonising childbearing (and the fall of man):

2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. 2:18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. 2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 2:22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 2:23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. 2:25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

3:1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? 3:2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: 3:3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 3:4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. 3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. 3:7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. 3:8 And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. 3:9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? 3:10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. 3:11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? 3:12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. 3:13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. 3:14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: 3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. 3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Well, that's the King James version, anyway. To find out what it actually means, see this horrible sounding but comprehensible version. But hang on, where's the mention of the apple? There is none. The things you learn when you start a new blog entitled "Appeals to Me" and choose apples as your starting point. Now, this is interesting: Noah's great grandpop actually says that the tree of knowledge was:

like a species of the tamarind tree, bearing fruit which resembled grapes extremely fine; and its fragrance extended to a considerable distance.

That's like, my next post: tamarind. Mmm tamarind, secret ingredient of Worcestershire sauce. Mind you logicians have suggested that Eve might have plucked the fruit and the fig leaf from the same tree, and rastafarians will tell you that the tree of knowledge was a great big Mary Jane. There always was something very original sin about the "Just Say No" campaign (always a difficult push in this age of Nike), but -- hey -- did Snow White in fact choke on a lump of hash? They'd hardly admit it if she had, and coming out of her drug induced stupour is a plausible explanation for her dramatic return to life from the coffin.

Thanks to Eric Rodebeck for the photo. He's my age, from San Fransisco, a designer, a good one.