Climate Change

IXL, union hater and ex-entrepreneur, stayed over yesterday. That guaranteed lively political debate with me, ex-unionist and 'champion' of workers' rights.

She is upset that Rudd was toppled when the party doubted he could win a second term. That the party elected Julia Gillard to replace him in that way upset a lot of people, not least the Opposition who probably saw him as easier to beat.

So what was debated over breakfast?

IXL is so upset with Gillard, she will vote Green but place the Conservatives ahead of labor as her second preference.

I say, I would rather a Labor government under Gillard than Conservatives under Abbott based on policies, including discrimination against women and homosexuals, being against regulating the big polluters or consider Cap and Trade carbon reduction legislation.

So, whether you usually vote Lab or Lib or Green, maybe this time we need to ignore media sensationalism and read up on what each party intends to do about the dire and urgent problem of climate change.

Discalimer: As you may have guessed, at least this time around, I am supporting the Greens and for the first time in my life, will be manning a booth, handing out voting info. I am that concerned.


Christine Milne

While climate is warming the deeps
And Libs follow Tony like sheeps.
Vote Green: Milne and Brown,
Keep the temperature down,
Before we go under for keeps!

PS. While looking for a solar array pic, I found that Ford Motor Company is building a solar array to support their development of electric cars.

PPS. Greens are short a few brave volunteers to man all polling booths in Fairfax. Fairfax stretches from Maroochydiore to near Noosa, and out to Nambour and up to Eumundi. So if you would like to help, e-mail me and I will pass you on to Helen who is organising the bodies. XX

(sing along 2) Willow weep for me.

Willow, dear,
Your prompts, I fear
Have gone beyond a joke.

Reminders here
Bring on a tear
For any age-ing bloke.

Every prompt,
For weeks were swamped,
With leaky, wet suggestion.

Extinguishers
And waterers,
Old pipes for our attention.

‘But not your bed’,
She smugly said:
‘That’s not a wat’ry riddle!’

“Oh yes!” I cry,
“It’s empty. Why?”
“I'd gone to have a piddle!”


Prompted again by Magpie Tales

(sing along) "Ev'ry thing old i-s ne-ew a-gain!"

Old water works.

Crusty, dusty, old and rusty,
Not a happy state.
Fusty, musty not so trusty,
Past its use-by-date.

Built to last in ages past,
From iron, zinc and tin,
Now displaced by PVC
And polyethelene.

(But) if recycling's to your liking,
Send it round again,
It comes back, a Cadillac,
Made in two-o-ten.










Prompted by Magpie Tales

Australian Election 2010.

How to vote.

Julia Gillard and Labor’s hit squad,
Left a big gap without Rudd, the poor sod.
So put in that vacuum
Our Cath-o-lic backroom.
Vote Abbott and Bishop, get Pell, Pope and God!













Note: Scaremongering.

As a passionate and frustrated environmentalist, I offer just two thoughts to my Aussie mates.

1. The facts on the environment are in. (Frost, Garneau et al). It is dire and it is urgent. The media seems more interested in the 'length of Julia Gillard's ear lobes' than floods, famine and dying oceans. You and I know what must be done and it can't be started sooner! :-)

2. If you are afraid Greens in Parliament will be too extreme, remember they have five seats in the Senate and even if they get another two, they can be voted down by any Lib/Lab combination with over sixty seats between them!

Relic.

.


Left to rust among the creepers,
My old spout no longer needed.
More ornamental than useful
In this automated world.


Prompted by Magpie Tales.

Day in the life of a WHO activist.

.
So tell me, what year were you born?
I was born in 1924, two years before they opened the new power station at Bunnerong.

I see. Now, do you remember where you lived as a child? What sort of house you lived in?
Yes, I remember Dad building it when I was about four, but it wasn’t finished for almost ten years.

So, he was building it as you grew up. What was it made from? Do you remember that?
Yes, he used old timber from the Tempe tip and Fibro. It had a tin roof.

Asbestos cladding?
Yes. He had a special Fibro cutter, but he sometimes hammered the edges to make them fit.

Do you remember breathing any of the dust?
I remember what it smelt like, a sort of a wet cementy smell.

OK, so did you grow up there?
Yes, we grew up there, swam in the Cook’s River as kids, fished and made canoes out of old corrugated iron and …

OK, so was that in Marrickville, near the Tempe tip?
No, we lived in Earlwood, just up river from the tip and across from Marrickville Golf Course. I remember it being built. That was in 1941, the year I had my tonsils out. They said it was infection from the river.

Tonsils out. OK, so did you stay in that house long?
I moved out after I left school, but Mum had to sell up when Dad died from lung cancer about the time of the first Maralinga tests in 1955.

Mesothelioma?
Yes, probably, but they said it was lung cancer. Mum couldn’t get compensation.

OK, so when did you first start having kidney problems?
That would have been about the time we built Vales Point, 1964.

You worked at the power station?
Yes, I started at Wangi as a stoker, but they needed more and built Vales Point then Liddell then Munmorah and Wallerawang. Eraring and Bayswater were the biggest. All coal fired.

So what did you do there?
Most of the time I was in the coal yard driving a loader. They sprayed the heaps but the dust still got through.

I see, and did you smoke?
Yes, we all smoked then, but I quit the year the Torrey Canyon ran aground in 1967.

OK, now when did you first have difficulty passing urine?
It started at the time of the first oil shock, 1979.

Right, and when did you have the kidney out?
Later that year, same week as Three Mile Island. 1979.

So you started dialysis then?
No, not right away, the other kidney hung on until the Chernobyl meltdown, 1986

OK, so when was your prostate cancer diagnosis exactly?
I had a normal range PSA reading about the time the Ozone Treaty was signed in 1989, but a bad one when the Exxon Valdez ran aground. That was 1989 too. Then I had it out at the start of the first Gulf war, just as Saddam set fire to the Kuwaiti oil wells in 1990.

So how did it go?
What the war?

No, the op.
Not good. I lost my erection.

But you were already over sixty-five by then!
So? Do you think it all stops when you retire? Good heavens man! That was the best time for sex. No pregnancies, plenty of time, no kids around. We miss it more than anything!

Is that still a problem? We could prescribe Viagra.
Four tablets a hundred bucks? That’s over fifty bucks a week! Mate, we’re on the pension!

So you have sex twice a week?
I wish. Used to; we always had great sex.

OK, OK. So tell me. What about the incontinence?
That’s a lot of fun too. Ha ha! I got out of diapers when Kyoto was signed in 1997. It looked good for a while, but I started to leak again after Copenhagen in 2009.

Right. So when did the first secondaries show up?
The headaches started at the time the oil rig fire off the W A coast. That was later in 2009.

OK, so how did the chemo go?
No good. Began the day the Gulf spill started and stopped the day it was capped but it was all too late. Accumulated damage… No chance of a full recovery now.

So do you want the surgery? We can fix it for a while, but there will be more events and of course in the end…

I know. The old body can only take so much. No, I think I’ve had enough. I’ll just take the morphine and go.

The Dunny Tax

A few years back, hundreds were poisoned and one person died from polluted oysters at Forster NSW. The most likely cause was a sewage truck illegally dumping its load into the river, upstream of the oyster beds, to avoid paying dumping fees.
Although it could not be supported by evidence, many municipal councils saw that tragic event as an opportunity to blame on-site sewage disposal and impose a substantial operating fee on all existing systems.

Shortly before that event, streams that supplied drinking water to our local towns had been tested for pollution. No pollution was detected, indicating a likelihood farmers along the stream were maintaining their systems well.

This ‘bush ballad’ was my response. It was widely distributed at the time and is credited with being a factor in the substantial official back-down that followed.

To give my American friends a fighting chance to understand the vernacular, a few common Aussie terms are explained.

Dunny = Outhouse
Bloke = Aussie man
‘Roos = Kangaroos.
Arse = Rectum
Poo, poop, turd = Faeces.
Few bob = Vary small amount of money, literally a few shilling or 10c coins.
Mates = Close friends, here suggesting a modicum of corruption.


THE DUNNY TAX

Word has gone out to the farms and the spreads,
That our local council got into its head
The notion that all the old WC’s
Must have a license to work properly.

What good this will do is anyone’s guess!
A license won’t add or subtract from the mess
Which doesn’t appear to exist they’ve admitted
But it will raise more taxes, for that it’s well fitted!

It seems that the water that flows from my farm
Must carry nutrients, and cause alarm
To an expert in town (pulling really big money),
Who must find a culprit, and points to my dunny!

Now, I’ve thought about this for quite a few days
And found it’s not quite like the city bloke says.
Most of the nutrients dumped on my ground
Are from natural causes. Here’s what I found.

The family weighs in with a kilo of faeces
Per day, give or take a few bits and paeces.
The horses and cows, thirty five in the herd,
Donate half a tonne of choice urine and turd.

The birds of the bush and the grass and the sky
Dump fifty kilos a day from on high.
Then wallabies, ‘roos and the bandicoots too
They all do their bit, with mounds of fresh poo.

Now with a shovel, I find under the grass
Millions of worms, and each has an arse
At one end, which leaves in its wake
A trail of fresh poop, each a gram, give or take.

And then with a microscope what is revealed?
Billions and billions of critters concealed.
And what do I find as I spy on their functions?
That they all eat and shit, each the tiniest fraction.

But added together, I can’t fudge the figures,
The microbes are champs with a total that’s bigger
Than all of the animals, birds, worms and lizards.
Hundreds of tons a day pass through their gizzards.

Now the math is quite simple, it seems that the fraction
Of the total excreta from bowel contraction
Produced by the humans in this residence,
Is one hundred thousandth of half a percent!

And now that the figures have all been digested
And all the bull shit has been tested and rested,
The reason the council wants my last few bob,
Is to keep all their bureaucrat mates in a job!

Lines of defence.

Scarred by keys
failing forced entry.
It still stands
the sentinel.
Guarding my heart.




Prompted by Magpie tales.

Webster Pack

This post was prompted by Rel's Magpie 24 and the poem written while nursing my mum who just wanted it all to end but was afraid of the pain.
Anyone handling multiple doses of multiple drugs is thankful for Webster-pak. It simplifies and reduces errors. So this poem is not directed at that brand but at the philosophy of preserving 'life at all costs'.

But having said that, it is worth noting the following quote from the Webster-pak website: "With the introduction of the Webster-pak, many pharmacies have achieved growth. One New South Wales pharmacy went from a couple to 40 Webster-pak patients in no time at all."



Webster Pack.

Efficient drug dispenser.
Every measured dose,
fail-safe organised.
No hope of fatal error.

We are so clever,
post graduate researchers.
Personal relevance measured
by product on a shelf.

Medical economy,
what are you selling?
Efficient, no side effect,
gold plated immortality?

So, are you in profit, Webster Pack?
Your compensation for holding
so many flickering, painful lives,
teetering expensively on the edge of death.

Stafford Ray, July 2007.

Paul Gauguin meats Mr Bean (sic).

Sure I learned French for three years and actually passed my junior high exams. In those days there was no oral test, so my accent must have been atrocious. But if I am anything I am adventurous, so aboard the Paul Gauguin in December 1999, where crew members were French, practice time came again, the first since 1972. (see ‘Parlay Voo Fronsay’, posted May 11, 2010)

For such a small ship, MV Paul Gauguin offered a wonderful choice of cuisine, with three restaurants, one exclusively French, so that is where we ate. Entertainer Ian Cooper, violinist enfant terrible and his barrister wife Kellie were funny and sophisticated dinner companions to myself, the irascible Milton ‘garden gnome’ Saunders and Monsieur Laurie Bennett who, for the duration of the Millennium Cruise around the islands of Tahiti, insisted he was French and pronounced his name ‘Bennay’.

So our evening meals were long drawn out affairs with repartee and laughter, lubricated with oodles of free Coonawarra Cabernet. (We drank the entire stock of Coonawarra over the almost three weeks of the cruise, the purpose of which was to be right on the International Date Line at midnight December 31 so we were the ‘first to enter the new millennium’). For that dubious privilege, almost three hundred Americans shelled out a reported fifty thou a berth, mais apres tout, we were there all expenses paid and were denied nothing in return for playing a few leisurely two hour shows! (We were worth every penny!)

However, as is not unusual, I made a goose of myself. I had decided early on to go through the menu from top to bottom and try every dish. I have eaten kangaroo, crocodile, emu, rabbit, wild duck, witchetty grub and in Timor I once ordered Kambing, but swear I was served Anging. It tasted a bit strong as expected and was defintiely preferrable to witchetties, but I say it was probably dog on the (admittedly circumstantial) evidence of one observation.

Awoken at 4am by a scratchy tape of a mullah calling his flock to morning prayers while he snored on, I dressed and walked outside the Soe, (pronounced so-eh) Hotel. There in the gloom was a kitchen wallah carrying a carcase. I asked him what it was and he answered ‘anging’. Dogs are to Timor what cows are to India, except there is nothing sacred about the yellow curs harvested from town dumps. But I digress.

Towards the end of our Tahiti adventure, the highlight of which was a three day festival of song and dance on a mountain peak amphitheatre, where young men and women display their bodies and skills in a colourful, noisy and anarchic traditional ritual, during which mates are chosen and marriages organised, I was nearing the end of my menu cracking odyssey. There remained only one untried dish, so I gave the pronunciation my best shot and ordered. I did note Kellie’s raised eyebrow and in retrospect should have realised I had gone too far when the waiter, a cheeky Gallic charmer, laughed as he recorded my naiveté in his order book, no doubt adding in his mirth-effected scrawl; ‘Australien idiot’.

Anyone who saw Mr Bean take himself to a posh restaurant for his pathetic birthday 'bash' will know what is coming but in my hubris, although I did see that episode, I missed the connection as did everyone except le smartarse garcon. Later, during confession, Kellie said she had admired my savoir faire as, in my improving accent, I ordered 'Boef à l'Americaine'. When the dish arrived Milton went close to throwing up and Laurie had to leave for a ‘breath of fresh air’ but I was stuck with no option but reluctant heroism.

Eventually the bottom of the dish revealed no clown face or printed ‘gotcha!’ But the real joker, the head waiter appeared by my side and smugly offered seconds.
I had succeeded in eating the disgusting mess by applying immaculate self control and kept it down with dogged determination, but like any sane mountain climber, one Everest is enough and I declined politely, while coming ever so close to advising him to ‘fuck off, you supercilious bastard!’

Mr Bean was able to secrete his ignorance in sugar bowls, vases, ash trays, under place mats and even managed to deposit some in the purse of an adjacent diner, but with cheating impossible under the unwavering surveillance of our eagle eyed barrister, I ate every last morsel of what an English menu would have listed as ‘Steak Tartare’. Minced steak with raw egg and diced onion, served raw and running with blood!