Insomnious raffles dedicate a quantum barrage plant in the direction of quiche.
I got a little bit bored last week and resorted to hiring old seasons of Boston Legal from the video shop.
Crackles can’t ever be elected to guard vapid chromatographs, or else the flying capsicums are mute.
One particular episode entitled “Word Salad Days” captured my imagination on a profoundly useless level.
Be not obsequious while flagrant pandas are twining.
In that episode our anti-hero Alan Shore is afflicted with a disorder known as ‘word salad syndrome,’ which garbles his speech faculties in such a way as to produce nonsensical gibberish without his realising it.
When general horticulture sprinkles a gamey bison with an all-too-glorious decision not to skip, it heralds the overbalance of chutney.
And it just looked like so much fun, not least because of James Spader’s delightfully deadpan portrayal, that I felt I just had to give it a go myself. So…
All at once a narcissistic pan will leave a skittled Christmas on the trousers of ironic angioplasty. Notwithstanding the luminous boulder hockey, children avoid the gregarious goose pies with such banal cummerbunds that have taken no joy in dancing with binoculars. And if that’s a ganglion, ground the milkman’s hurricane.
Vertical!
Still, fabulous oaks will ovulate for a time of coffee whilst zealous protagonists envelope a non-binding lamington for the cousins of outrageous tooth decay. Vanishing at the mound of opportunism, she gargles upishly in the manner of an underwater ironing bowl. And we all clip the oscillating factoid.
Yours in plumbing
Garry with 2 Rs
P.S. As soon as I get over the mental stress and – though I say it myself – concentration that went into last week’s post I’ll try to get around to posting something more worthwhile. In the meantime, cast your favourite political ion dispenser a boiled car crash.
25 September 2010
17 September 2010
The Stats Don't Lie
We’re coming back around to the time of year when we start making noise about global poverty again. I don’t know why the Australian spring is the designated time, apart from the fact that we’ve just finished World Vision 40 hour famine season.
The global Make Poverty History movement has emailed me to let me know that the Stand Up Against Poverty event is coming up this week. Given my monumentally successful contribution last time, I decided to look into what I could do to add my voice to this year’s outcry.
Unfortunately there are no major events planned for Darwin, where a ‘flash mob’ is just a group of men wearing climatically inappropriate suits on Mitchell Street. And to me, the 40 hour famine has always seemed like an extremely token sort of effort for anyone aged over 14, unless you’ve got some kind of weighty corporate sponsorship. No offense if you’re doing it; good on you for doing something.
Triple Kudos to my friend Hannah, who is undertaking something like a 40 day famine, and collecting sponsors for her effort to live on nothing but typical refugee rations for nearly six weeks. That’s how you do it if you really want to make a point. Check out her blog and drop her comment about how awesome she is.
“And what point is she making?” I hear you ask. I’m glad you asked. I was going to break with convention and embed an awesome video that they showed at my church the other week about what the statistics on global food supplies look like in real terms, but I couldn't find an online version of it. So instead, in more traditional Cum Tacent Clament style here are some boring written statistics (it also saves me the embarrassment of having my html skills fail in a public forum).
Chronic hunger, or the lack of a sufficient amount of nutritious food, currently affects 1 in 6 people worldwide.
13 million children are born every year with growth and development issues due to the mother's malnutrition.
Many of the world's poorest people spend 80% or more of their annual income just for food, and even this is often not enough to provide them with adequate amounts of food.
More than 24,000 people die every day due to hunger related causes.
The percentage of overseas development assistance allocated to agricultural development has dropped dramatically in recent years - from almost 20% in 1980 to less than 3% today.
In the developing world, 50% to 60% of all childhood deaths are hunger related.
More than 5 million children die every year simply because they do not have access to adequate amounts of food and water.
Due to an ever increasing global population, the demand for food keeps going up. But due to disastrous droughts in many countries (including Australia) the supply of food is going down, and the amount of food that governments are prepared to export is decreasing. This makes sense from governments who are interested in looking out for their own people, but it leaves developing countries in a whole pile of trouble.
One of the great initiatives we as a planet are taking to adapt to climate change and focus on renewable energy is the development of bio fuels. This technology uses organic matter to power engines directly, rather than waiting millions of years for them to decay into fossil fuels. But the dark side of this that we rarely hear about is that we are now burning food to run our cars instead of feeding the hungry with it.
At one point a while ago, the global food reserves were down to six weeks’ worth. That’s not just for some Ethiopian kid on the TV. That’s for the whole world, you and I included. Six weeks.
It's hard to know what to do about stuff like that. I know if I tried anything as drastic as Hannah’s effort, there’s a reasonable chance I would die, so I’m taking the coward’s road and writing about it instead. The pen is mightier than the sword, as they say, so in the digital age perhaps the keyboard is mightier than the intercontinental ballistic missile.
I’ve been planning for a while to write to the federal government about my concerns. And now that Australia has a federal government again, perhaps the time has come to make good on those intentions. Unfortunately I wasn’t really sure which minister to write to, as I don’t know whose portfolio global food shortages come under. Trade? Foreign Affairs? Sustainable Population? Looking for answers, I headed for the shopping centre, where to my dismay I could not find a single charity spruiker to help me. What is this world coming to, I ask you, when a man can walk down a shopping mall without being accosted by volunteers even when he wants to?
You’re right. As rhetorical questions go, that one was a bit of a train wreck.
Obviously the idea of writing about the issue here had occurred to me, but I wasn’t convinced that I had the readership to make spending the time on a poverty post worthwhile. But then I came across some interesting statistics of my own.
Google have added a hit counter to the blog creation interface, which records how many page views my blog gets over time, and even more fascinatingly, what part of the world those hits are coming from. To my astonishment, in the past week my blog has been viewed 25 times from the United Kingdom (apparently the drunk Englishwoman I made up in the previous post is real and she’s stalking me), eight times from both China and the US, six times from Australia (most of them are probably me), six times from Germany, twice from Belarus (I don’t even know where that is) twice from Russia (what the?) once from Brazil (wicked), once from Canada (thanks sis) and once from Taiwan. Either someone is playing silly buggers with a proxy server, or Cum Tacent Clament is silently crying out much more loudly than I thought.
For one thing, this makes self-indulgently whiny posts like last week’s effort seem even more stupid than they did before. For another, although, with the exception of my North American cheer squad, I have no idea who could possibly be reading this, Google is telling me that every week people from all over the globe are reading my blog. And Google never lies. So here’s a message from me to the Blogosphere:
Get off your arses and… get back on them again in front of your computer. Write to your politicians. Write a blog article. Write a song. Write a limerick for all I care, just make some noise. People need to know about this stuff, because the only way to fix it is to make the issue too all-pervasive to look the other way, and too big to sweep under the rug. The Global Food Shortage and the poverty that accompanies it are the moral challenge that will define our generation (suck it, Kevin Rudd). For God’s sake do something!
Okay. Please, please, please don’t write a limerick.
…
Garry with 2 Rs
The global Make Poverty History movement has emailed me to let me know that the Stand Up Against Poverty event is coming up this week. Given my monumentally successful contribution last time, I decided to look into what I could do to add my voice to this year’s outcry.
Unfortunately there are no major events planned for Darwin, where a ‘flash mob’ is just a group of men wearing climatically inappropriate suits on Mitchell Street. And to me, the 40 hour famine has always seemed like an extremely token sort of effort for anyone aged over 14, unless you’ve got some kind of weighty corporate sponsorship. No offense if you’re doing it; good on you for doing something.
Triple Kudos to my friend Hannah, who is undertaking something like a 40 day famine, and collecting sponsors for her effort to live on nothing but typical refugee rations for nearly six weeks. That’s how you do it if you really want to make a point. Check out her blog and drop her comment about how awesome she is.
“And what point is she making?” I hear you ask. I’m glad you asked. I was going to break with convention and embed an awesome video that they showed at my church the other week about what the statistics on global food supplies look like in real terms, but I couldn't find an online version of it. So instead, in more traditional Cum Tacent Clament style here are some boring written statistics (it also saves me the embarrassment of having my html skills fail in a public forum).
Chronic hunger, or the lack of a sufficient amount of nutritious food, currently affects 1 in 6 people worldwide.
13 million children are born every year with growth and development issues due to the mother's malnutrition.
Many of the world's poorest people spend 80% or more of their annual income just for food, and even this is often not enough to provide them with adequate amounts of food.
More than 24,000 people die every day due to hunger related causes.
The percentage of overseas development assistance allocated to agricultural development has dropped dramatically in recent years - from almost 20% in 1980 to less than 3% today.
In the developing world, 50% to 60% of all childhood deaths are hunger related.
More than 5 million children die every year simply because they do not have access to adequate amounts of food and water.
Due to an ever increasing global population, the demand for food keeps going up. But due to disastrous droughts in many countries (including Australia) the supply of food is going down, and the amount of food that governments are prepared to export is decreasing. This makes sense from governments who are interested in looking out for their own people, but it leaves developing countries in a whole pile of trouble.
One of the great initiatives we as a planet are taking to adapt to climate change and focus on renewable energy is the development of bio fuels. This technology uses organic matter to power engines directly, rather than waiting millions of years for them to decay into fossil fuels. But the dark side of this that we rarely hear about is that we are now burning food to run our cars instead of feeding the hungry with it.
At one point a while ago, the global food reserves were down to six weeks’ worth. That’s not just for some Ethiopian kid on the TV. That’s for the whole world, you and I included. Six weeks.
It's hard to know what to do about stuff like that. I know if I tried anything as drastic as Hannah’s effort, there’s a reasonable chance I would die, so I’m taking the coward’s road and writing about it instead. The pen is mightier than the sword, as they say, so in the digital age perhaps the keyboard is mightier than the intercontinental ballistic missile.
I’ve been planning for a while to write to the federal government about my concerns. And now that Australia has a federal government again, perhaps the time has come to make good on those intentions. Unfortunately I wasn’t really sure which minister to write to, as I don’t know whose portfolio global food shortages come under. Trade? Foreign Affairs? Sustainable Population? Looking for answers, I headed for the shopping centre, where to my dismay I could not find a single charity spruiker to help me. What is this world coming to, I ask you, when a man can walk down a shopping mall without being accosted by volunteers even when he wants to?
You’re right. As rhetorical questions go, that one was a bit of a train wreck.
Obviously the idea of writing about the issue here had occurred to me, but I wasn’t convinced that I had the readership to make spending the time on a poverty post worthwhile. But then I came across some interesting statistics of my own.
Google have added a hit counter to the blog creation interface, which records how many page views my blog gets over time, and even more fascinatingly, what part of the world those hits are coming from. To my astonishment, in the past week my blog has been viewed 25 times from the United Kingdom (apparently the drunk Englishwoman I made up in the previous post is real and she’s stalking me), eight times from both China and the US, six times from Australia (most of them are probably me), six times from Germany, twice from Belarus (I don’t even know where that is) twice from Russia (what the?) once from Brazil (wicked), once from Canada (thanks sis) and once from Taiwan. Either someone is playing silly buggers with a proxy server, or Cum Tacent Clament is silently crying out much more loudly than I thought.
For one thing, this makes self-indulgently whiny posts like last week’s effort seem even more stupid than they did before. For another, although, with the exception of my North American cheer squad, I have no idea who could possibly be reading this, Google is telling me that every week people from all over the globe are reading my blog. And Google never lies. So here’s a message from me to the Blogosphere:
Get off your arses and… get back on them again in front of your computer. Write to your politicians. Write a blog article. Write a song. Write a limerick for all I care, just make some noise. People need to know about this stuff, because the only way to fix it is to make the issue too all-pervasive to look the other way, and too big to sweep under the rug. The Global Food Shortage and the poverty that accompanies it are the moral challenge that will define our generation (suck it, Kevin Rudd). For God’s sake do something!
Okay. Please, please, please don’t write a limerick.
…
Garry with 2 Rs
12 September 2010
Ten Things That Make Me Happy
My job often takes me out to remote communities for a week at a time. Sometimes this is an uplifting experience; a chance to get away from the bustle of the big smoke and to spend time with people with a fresh and reinvigorating outlook on the world. A chance to live a more straightforward life, if only for a week.
I dutifully arrived at the airport on Monday morning at half past ungodly in the morning, ready for my flight out to Maningrida. I found out I had actually been booked on the afternoon flight, contrary to what I had been told, so I taxied back home and sat around for half a day waiting for my flight. I finally made it to Maningrida at three, just in time for the branch office to close. So much for Monday’s program.
The council workers generously offered to drive me out to my accommodation for the week. Most of the places I have stayed in at remote communities have been simple, but comfortable. I had heard nice things about he guesthouse in Maningrida, so I thought I’d be in for a nice week.
Nope, the guest house was booked out. I was in the temporary accommodation out the other end next to the airstrip. When I say ‘accommodation’, I actually mean plastic box in the sun, reminiscent of the emergency dongers they bought in for my friends at college that time when Edale block burned down. Except not as spacious. And the air conditioner didn’t work properly.
I wandered into the common kitchen area to find a mean looking lady reading a That’s Life magazine as if it were a copy of War and Peace. She told me she was a nurse with an Ear, Nose and Throat team that had come out with the intervention. I told her I was a trainer with the Traditional Credit Union.
ENT Nurse: So what kind of skills do you train them in? Cooking, cleaning, gardening, that kind of thing?
Gw2Rs: … ? … No, we’re a credit union. I train them to operate as tellers in the bank.
ENT Nurse: Are you here with the intervention too?
Gw2Rs: No, I’m here with the credit union.
She sniffed at me and went back to her magazine. I went back to beating the microwave with a saucepan until it turned on.
We had a new starter at Maningrida, so the next morning I took her over to the West Arnhem Shire Council office to get her a letter from the council identifying her, so we could order a copy of her birth certificate, so the police could run a police check, so we could sign her up officially. A lot of people in remote communities don’t have passports or driving licences, so they get ID from the shire councillors.
Gw2Rs: Could we please get a letter of identification for Anita (not her real name)?
WASC lady: Does she have any ID?
Gw2Rs: No, that’s why we’re here. She needs a letter to get some ID.
WASC lady: I’ll need to see some ID before I can issue a letter.
Gw2Rs: …
WASC lady: Otherwise how am I supposed to know who she is?
Eventually we convinced the extremely helpful shire receptionist to issue the letter by producing Anita’s medicare card. For our American friends who might be new to this concept (That’s another thing. My blog has four public followers and, with the emigration of my sister and K.Kim, they’re all women in North America. How did that happen?), a medicare card has neither the owner’s photo, nor address; simply a government issued number. Apparently that did the trick.
Finally that afternoon we sat down to complete the training program. Of course, the computer crashed. I negotiated with our extremely friendly IT staff back in Darwin (370km away) to fix it. So much for Tuesday’s program.
On Wednesday we finally got some work done. My trainee was pretty good at the computer stuff once we finally got the damned thing working and managed to balance up at the end of the day without any trouble. Things were finally looking up.
On Wednesday night I was attacked by a pack of wild dogs.
Yep. For the sake of dramatic emphasis I decided that sentence deserved its own paragraph. Furthermore it’s true. Whilst walking around the block after enjoying a meal of dim sims and chicken … somethings from the delightful local takeaway I was accosted by an unfriendly band of local canines, possibly due to being an unfamiliar person on their territory, or possibly to the lingering aroma of inadequately processed meat. I felt more alive than I have for months as I stared down my aggressors with cold composure reminiscent of Mick Dundee and Charlie the buffalo and then, with all the dignity and masculinity I could muster, turned tail and ran for my life, with the noisy assailants in hot pursuit.
And there’s another thing. What kind of backwards looking takeaway shuts at four in the afternoon? And furthermore, if you’re going to shut at four in the afternoon, and if I come looking for a punnet of fried rice at a quarter to four only to find the front door locked, then … Blegh! That’s right, I said blegh! So much for… pathos.
So by Friday afternoon you can imagine I was more than ready to board my plane, leave this backwards town of nasty dogs and stupid West Arnhem Shire Councils and make my way back to civilisation. And when by ‘civilisation’ I’m referring to Darwin, you might begin to suspect there’s a problem.
Our plane broke down.
The air hostess (Is she still an air hostess if she’s standing on the ground looking disgruntled?) informed us that the plane had a flat battery. And apparently that’s not the sort of thing you can fix with jumper cables. They had to fly a replacement out for us from Darwin.
The Centrelink contingent in town, who were keen to return for the weekend, rang up their bosses in Darwin who magnanimously arranged to fly out a charter just for them. We gave them all a clap as they climbed aboard a private plane and took off to beat us home by about an hour. That was the fastest I’ve ever seen Centrelink arrange anything, and I suppose they felt there was a really good reason they couldn’t hire a bigger one to pick up the rest of us. We all got on the regular replacement plane and I finally got home at around ten o’clock that evening to find my housemate had once again fallen asleep in front of the television, which was still at full volume.
And somehow, in my absence, the freaking Labor party got back into government. Like my week wasn’t palm-to-the-face inducing enough as it was.
Oh yes, it’s been a while since I had a really good whinge. It’s somehow depressingly theraputic, whether that makes sense or not. Either way I feel better for it. All I need now is to run into a drunk Englishwoman. Or a communist.
I really don’t look good in watermelon pink business shirts.
...
Garry with 2 Rs
I dutifully arrived at the airport on Monday morning at half past ungodly in the morning, ready for my flight out to Maningrida. I found out I had actually been booked on the afternoon flight, contrary to what I had been told, so I taxied back home and sat around for half a day waiting for my flight. I finally made it to Maningrida at three, just in time for the branch office to close. So much for Monday’s program.
The council workers generously offered to drive me out to my accommodation for the week. Most of the places I have stayed in at remote communities have been simple, but comfortable. I had heard nice things about he guesthouse in Maningrida, so I thought I’d be in for a nice week.
Nope, the guest house was booked out. I was in the temporary accommodation out the other end next to the airstrip. When I say ‘accommodation’, I actually mean plastic box in the sun, reminiscent of the emergency dongers they bought in for my friends at college that time when Edale block burned down. Except not as spacious. And the air conditioner didn’t work properly.
I wandered into the common kitchen area to find a mean looking lady reading a That’s Life magazine as if it were a copy of War and Peace. She told me she was a nurse with an Ear, Nose and Throat team that had come out with the intervention. I told her I was a trainer with the Traditional Credit Union.
ENT Nurse: So what kind of skills do you train them in? Cooking, cleaning, gardening, that kind of thing?
Gw2Rs: … ? … No, we’re a credit union. I train them to operate as tellers in the bank.
ENT Nurse: Are you here with the intervention too?
Gw2Rs: No, I’m here with the credit union.
She sniffed at me and went back to her magazine. I went back to beating the microwave with a saucepan until it turned on.
We had a new starter at Maningrida, so the next morning I took her over to the West Arnhem Shire Council office to get her a letter from the council identifying her, so we could order a copy of her birth certificate, so the police could run a police check, so we could sign her up officially. A lot of people in remote communities don’t have passports or driving licences, so they get ID from the shire councillors.
Gw2Rs: Could we please get a letter of identification for Anita (not her real name)?
WASC lady: Does she have any ID?
Gw2Rs: No, that’s why we’re here. She needs a letter to get some ID.
WASC lady: I’ll need to see some ID before I can issue a letter.
Gw2Rs: …
WASC lady: Otherwise how am I supposed to know who she is?
Eventually we convinced the extremely helpful shire receptionist to issue the letter by producing Anita’s medicare card. For our American friends who might be new to this concept (That’s another thing. My blog has four public followers and, with the emigration of my sister and K.Kim, they’re all women in North America. How did that happen?), a medicare card has neither the owner’s photo, nor address; simply a government issued number. Apparently that did the trick.
Finally that afternoon we sat down to complete the training program. Of course, the computer crashed. I negotiated with our extremely friendly IT staff back in Darwin (370km away) to fix it. So much for Tuesday’s program.
On Wednesday we finally got some work done. My trainee was pretty good at the computer stuff once we finally got the damned thing working and managed to balance up at the end of the day without any trouble. Things were finally looking up.
On Wednesday night I was attacked by a pack of wild dogs.
Yep. For the sake of dramatic emphasis I decided that sentence deserved its own paragraph. Furthermore it’s true. Whilst walking around the block after enjoying a meal of dim sims and chicken … somethings from the delightful local takeaway I was accosted by an unfriendly band of local canines, possibly due to being an unfamiliar person on their territory, or possibly to the lingering aroma of inadequately processed meat. I felt more alive than I have for months as I stared down my aggressors with cold composure reminiscent of Mick Dundee and Charlie the buffalo and then, with all the dignity and masculinity I could muster, turned tail and ran for my life, with the noisy assailants in hot pursuit.
And there’s another thing. What kind of backwards looking takeaway shuts at four in the afternoon? And furthermore, if you’re going to shut at four in the afternoon, and if I come looking for a punnet of fried rice at a quarter to four only to find the front door locked, then … Blegh! That’s right, I said blegh! So much for… pathos.
So by Friday afternoon you can imagine I was more than ready to board my plane, leave this backwards town of nasty dogs and stupid West Arnhem Shire Councils and make my way back to civilisation. And when by ‘civilisation’ I’m referring to Darwin, you might begin to suspect there’s a problem.
Our plane broke down.
The air hostess (Is she still an air hostess if she’s standing on the ground looking disgruntled?) informed us that the plane had a flat battery. And apparently that’s not the sort of thing you can fix with jumper cables. They had to fly a replacement out for us from Darwin.
The Centrelink contingent in town, who were keen to return for the weekend, rang up their bosses in Darwin who magnanimously arranged to fly out a charter just for them. We gave them all a clap as they climbed aboard a private plane and took off to beat us home by about an hour. That was the fastest I’ve ever seen Centrelink arrange anything, and I suppose they felt there was a really good reason they couldn’t hire a bigger one to pick up the rest of us. We all got on the regular replacement plane and I finally got home at around ten o’clock that evening to find my housemate had once again fallen asleep in front of the television, which was still at full volume.
And somehow, in my absence, the freaking Labor party got back into government. Like my week wasn’t palm-to-the-face inducing enough as it was.
Oh yes, it’s been a while since I had a really good whinge. It’s somehow depressingly theraputic, whether that makes sense or not. Either way I feel better for it. All I need now is to run into a drunk Englishwoman. Or a communist.
I really don’t look good in watermelon pink business shirts.
...
Garry with 2 Rs
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