Make a Difference

Day: December 28, 2009

Aussies Triple Grog Intake Over Christmas/New Year

Wow! An alarming headline.

But not a very informative one, unless we are told what that intake is being tripled from and to.

Reading the small print we find that FebFast, another charity group no one has ever heard of, undertook a survey which found that:

… most respondents drink one day a week and that during the festive period that increases to three days a week. One-third of Australians consume more than 10 standard drinks a week during the festive season.

That doesn’t sound too alarming to me.

“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the summer and the season’s festivities, but we need to be aware of how much some Australians get carried away and take celebrations to excess,” FebFast chief executive Fiona Healy said in a statement.

Absolutely. An average of one a half drinks per day during the festive season. This outlandish festivity must be stopped.

I don’t fancy their chances in the Northern Territory, land of sweeping plains and swooning Kidmans, where no respondents to FebFast’s survey said they consumed too much alcohol.

Baz Lurhmann’s Australia

I finally got around to seeing Baz Lurhmann’s Australia. I cannot remember ever having seen a film so offensively bad.

It is three hours of unmitigated drivel.

My mother-in-law said about half way through ‘This thing just goes on and on. It must be six hours already!’

My brother-in-law Bruce, at whose insistence we were watching it, replied ‘It’s almost over, just another half hour.’

‘Half an hour!’ shouted Bonnie, ‘I can’t sit here another minute!

We stopped for twenty minutes to let everyone catch their breath. I grabbed a very large scotch, and kept the bottle.

The movie started again. OK. I was pretty confident I could get through the next half hour without slashing my wrists.

An hour and a half later it finally dribbled to an end.

By this time Bonnie was comatose, and even Kathy, who had wanted to see it, was looking less than gruntled.

Australia is an abject collection of every movie cliche imaginable.

The overall effect is like Flying High or Scary Movie – ‘Oh, that’s from How The West Was Won’ or ‘That’s from Sixth Sense.’

But because Australia takes itself so seriously – and that is a key difference from Lurhmann’s earlier films – it doesn’t offer even the minimal amusement afforded by those other rip-off movies.

Australia is also a collection of every offensive half truth about about Australia’s history, and every offensive libel about official attitudes and policies relating to Australia’s indigenous people.

Some of the scenery is interesting, but apart from that, it is difficult to think of anything good about the movie at all.

Nicole Kidman is a competent if not brilliant actress (to be fair, she was brilliant in The Hours, a substantially less depressing film than Australia), and Hugh Jackman makes a good Wolverine or Peter Allen.

But in Australia, the limit of their expressive power is Jackman stalking about looking manly, while Kidman struts about looking concerned.

The boy who plays Nullah (Brandon Walters) is a nice looking kid, but he has only three expressions: happy, sad, and confused.

He looked confused quite frequently. He wasn’t the only one.

I am sure I looked confused almost as often as I looked bored or annoyed, depending on whether what was on screen at the  time was another gaping hole in the plot, another cattle stampede to the edge of the cliff cliche, or another malicious misrepresentation of Australia’s history.

Baz Lurhmann has produced three entertaining and original movies. How did he go so far wrong with this?

Climategate – A Graphical History

Jo Nova has put together a massive wall chart of highlights (low lights?) from the FOI file of documents and emails from Hadley.

It details more than twenty years of data fudging, bullying of scientists with alternative views, pressuring scientific journals, hijacking the peer review process, and outright lying about the evidence for anthropogenic climate change by a small cabal of well-funded public servants.

The only disappointment is that Jo repeats the furphy about the medieval church silencing sceptics. Jo is usually a careful researcher and clear thinker, so this is a little surprising.

In reality, the medieval church was the friend of science, and consistently encouraged the asking of questions and the search for truth.
 
This is one of the reasons it is the West that has been the home of science, and Western thought which has provided so many of the answers to questions about the natural world.

But that hesitation aside, Jo’s wallchart is a product of a prodigious amount of work, displayed, as always, in a clear and interesting way.

Tiger and the Plastic Playmates

A few belated suggestions for Tiger and the plastic playmates.

Tiger:

Some women chase sports stars, or anyone who is rich and famous.

When women approach you and offer to have sex with you, this is not because they like you, care about you, or want to get to know you better.

Women want to have sex with you because you are a trophy. The purpose of a trophy is to be displayed. So don’t expect them to keep quiet about it.

You make most of your money from sponsorships – manufacturers and retailers paying you to endorse their products.

They pay you to endorse their products because the they think the public trust you, and will believe you when you say that a product is of good quality and worth buying.

But if you show that your word means nothing, even when given to the people you love, why should the public believe you when you tell them to buy a certain brand of sneakers, or car, or life insurance?

And if there is no reason for the public to believe what you say, there is no reason for sponsors to pay you to say it.

Playmates:

If you dress, walk, talk, and generally act as if you think the only important thing about you is your sexuality, don’t be surprised if some men agree with you.

This means that instead of relating to you as a person with ideas and values and perspectives worth considering, they will relate to you only with an interest in the pleasure they imagine they could get from your body, that is, as a kind of masturbation aid.

This demeans both you and them.

It also almost certainly means that while you will be appreciated as a party girl, someone to date, a good sport, you will not be a person most men would want to have a long-term relationship with, one in which you and your thoughts and feelings are valued.

And I don’t blame them.

© 2024 Qohel