(Above: loon pond is always given to shameless pandering to the gentleman reader, and as a reference to Raquel Welch appears in these pages, why not a shot of her looking out for dangerous dinosaurs?)
The thing is, there's no way I can visit a Neil Perry restaurant.
When someone lends his name, his aura to an outfit like Qantas, there should be some kickback. Sure he only designs menus for first and business, but the airline likes to pretend he's infected every area of its activities with a gourmet-laden capacity for quality. How then the explain the penne that landed on the in-tray, a perfect storm of vileness, a monstrosity of mashed up limp noodles, with vegetables so steamed that they had the texture and taste of very thin cardboard?
Better to eat the cheese and crackers, and sit sullen like cattle on the way to slaughter. And brood about the way the airline isn't what it once pretended to be ...
But enough of that. Over in Greece laid low by its decadence, Paul Sheehan is busy explaining how Greece's current situation is all the fault of trade unionists and anarchists and leftists, and people who hate banks.
This would be all very well if it only explained exactly how and why the markets are so nervous about Spain and Portugal and of course perfidious Albion.
Sheehan commendably managed to get through his entire column without once mentioning the rich, the political, the managerial and the mercantile, or indeed the role of the banks, foreign and domestic. Poor old George Papandreou has only recently got into the business of bank bashing, as in Greek leader considers actions against US banks, but it would be completely unrefined for a columnist of Sheehan's stature to look at the actual financial system in Greece, and how the relatively poor and resource deprived economy managed to rack up such an impressive bundle of debt.
Not when he can head kick public servants and unionists. Unless of course you count a passing reference to excessive speculative lending by banks as an incisive piece of economic analysis.
Meanwhile, as is the way of things, while the pond was in wintery Melbourne mode, we missed a beauty from Miranda the Devine, busy as always rogering the gerbil of history.
Seizing on the remarks of Raquel Welch - famous for her exemplary contribution to good taste and high standards in the cinema through her roles in Myra Breckinridge and One Million Years B.C. - the Devine manages to go much further than Welch managed in her epic It's sex o'clock in America.
The world is like Greece, it seems, which is to say totally fucked, with rampant sex and fewer babies and a perfect storm leading to a demographic winter, and it's all the fault of the pill, and perhaps Raquel Welch, at least until she came over to the good side, and began to understand that sex is only meaningful when it produces babies.
There's a bright side to all this. New Zealanders have forsaken sheep for the path of Catholic righteousness and fornication with purpose:
In the Anglosphere, New Zealand has the highest birth rate, at 2.10, and a tradition of cherishing babies in hundreds of tiny ways - from restaurants with high chairs to nosy questions of newlyweds to official street signs pointing to baby health clinics. By contrast, in Australia, children are regarded as nuisances, with complaints about monster prams and bitter competition for space in Sydney parks. Attitudes may make a difference.
Feder attributes the Demographic Winter, at least in the West, to the "me generation" selfishness of the '60s sexual revolution, and 43 billion abortions worldwide each year.
Oh yes, it's the hippies from the sixties still copping the blame. The me generation. But hang on, the Devine is always banging on about the me generation in a perfect display of splenetic subjective intolerance and rampant personal prejudice, replete with selfish stereotypes. isn't she the perfect exemplar of the intolerant, selfish me generation?
No, no, no. Let's do some considered rational history, remembering that computers and television and the current screen culture are likely to bring about the end of civilisation by the end of the year, if not sooner:
Oh golly gosh. Will I ever get it right. Now the computer age is a source of wonder, fuelled by a population explosion. I wonder how the Chinese managed to invent gunpowder and pasta so long ago, only to have the idea ruined by Qantas? Must have been a population explosion. As to that idea of democracy in ancient Greece? Population explosion? Modern rioting in the streets? Population explosion, with peasants demanding too much cake.
Alternative explanation: ever wondered what it's like to be a parrot, incapable of resolving internal contradictions in logic while parroting from the latest newfound, hot from the presses text?
Look no further than Miranda the Devine, as she plunders from the scribbles of US conservative writer Don Feder.
Yep, at a time when the world's population has already reached 6.7 billion, or so the Devine says, and we're heading to a total population of nine billion by 2050 (here), the Devine, courtesy of Feder, lathers herself into crisis mode about a baby shortage and a nuclear demographic family winter.
I think what they mean is that the "right sort of babies" aren't being born, while other areas of the world with the "wrong sort of babies" aren't being born. Still it looks like grim times ahead:
Was it only a few weeks ago that the pundits were all terribly excited and agog and alarmed about a big Australia, with a population of 36 million?
Yes it was, but don't be alarmed, we have a baby-loving conservative Catholic saviour on the way who'll ensure Australia can crank itself up to 50 million licketty split:
It's a warning for Australia. If the shadow cabinet this week did put the kybosh on Tony Abbott's suggestion of a $10,000 baby bonus for stay-at-home mothers, it was a shortsighted victory for fiscal rectitude.
Indeed. Time to take us back to the nineteen fifties, and forget that selfish "me" sixties generation ever existed:
Abbott's proposal for a parental leave scheme guaranteeing working women wages so they can spend time with their newborns was similarly scorned earlier this year. But as we saw with the baby boomlet associated with the 2004 baby bonus, governments can influence family choice.
Abbott seems to be rare among his colleagues as a politician who understands the dangers of the Demographic Winter.
Ah yes, the perfect storm of the demographic winter. With caps to make sure you're suitably alarmed. Demographic Winter! There, that sounds better. Now how will the Demographic Winter play out in Australia as we rush towards that thirty six million people, many of whom might miss out on the chance to become baby-loving Catholics?
For that we must turn to the Devine, as she explains the parlous micro-level problems for Sydney in It's time for the old grey mayor:
To fulfil Kevin Rudd's ''big Australia" promise of 60 per cent population growth by 2050, Sydney will bear the brunt of the expansion, almost doubling in size to 7 million people. We must "embrace" this inevitability, a forum of planners, bureaucrats and business types agreed this week.
Since all those new people have to live somewhere and the state government won't release more land in greenfields areas, prepare yourself for more backyard infills and congestion, according to the Committee for Sydney forum at the Park Hyatt.
And yesterday, Infrastructure Australia confirmed as much, with a report showing Sydney is the most congested city in the country.
Those of us who live here don't need a report to tell us Sydney's once envied livability status is heading downhill, with worldwide indexes recording the slippage. Even Melbourne beats us now.
Eek, we're doomed. The Demographic Winter has turned into a Hot House Livability Crisis as We Pack Like Rats Into The High Rise Suburbs.
Not enough babies - I blame anarchists and public servants - and way too many babies - I blame public servants and anarchists - and as a result Sydney's once envied livability status is heading downhill, and Melbourne is beating us, even if Melbourne's population is projected to exceed Sydney's in the not too distant future, meaning they know how to shelter babies better than Sydney in a livable way ... so for gawd's sake, bring back Paul Keating and turn him into Boris Johnson.
The gibbering of parrots, and with all the al dente strength and logical consistency of a penne in economy class in Qantas. So it goes as we head towards another Sydney winter, Paul Sheehan and Miranda the Devine our company as we camp in over-crowded parks with only newspapers to keep out the cold ...
Talk about nightmares. Where's a gerbil in need of a good rogering?
(Below: Raquel Welch contributing to good taste, quality cinema and Myra Breckinridge. Traders, switch off this image before appearing on a television network's financial news report! It's the decadence of the me generation right before your very eyes).
As always loon pond hits the spot, those darned Greeks living beyond their means, so unlike the steady and sober lifestyles of the banking world.
ReplyDeleteThere was a Devine statistic that had me scratching my head - 43 billion abortions a year. That did seem rather a lot in a world population of only 6 billionish. In today's SMH letters Ian Dunlop did the sums on the back of napkin ......
Go figure
I was surprised to read in Miranda Devine's article (''Copulate to Populate'', May 15-16) that 43 billion abortions are occurring worldwide each year. My calculations, on the back of a napkin, while sipping my latte, showed that with the stated population of 6.7 billion, with about half female, this gives us 13.03 terminations per woman per year. Given that the maximum possible number of menstrual cycles per year is 13 and that many women are pre- or post-menopausal, I feel for those women suffering multiple terminations each month.
It makes me glad to be male.
Ian Dunlop Telopea
Maybe Devine like Barnaby just got her millions, billions and trillons a bit mixed up?
http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/jessica-much-more-than-just-an-ordinary-girl-20100516-v677.html
LOL. It being a MD free weekend - with the Sunday HUN only $1.80 - bolter value - by the time I caught up with her, the offending figure had magically changed from billions to millions.
ReplyDeleteBut are we being too hard on her? After all, what's the odd billion between chums? It's not like it's squillions.
Still it's always good to read an insouciant flippant indolent latte sipper (who no doubt turns to chardonnay swiller at five, like a pumpkin). Come on down Ian Dunlop, mathematician of the week ...
... and thanks to you for the catch up iView giggle at his letter. We must keep gerbiling these rogers ...
La Devina:
ReplyDelete"By contrast, in Australia, children are regarded as nuisances, with complaints about monster prams and bitter competition for space in Sydney parks."
This must be a different Miranda Devine from the one who penned this column in 2008. Shurely shome mishtake?
Oh you vicious pedants and contradiction seekers. Keep it up, next thing you know the entire world will blow up in an explosive massive contradiction:
ReplyDeleteThe principle of explosion is the law of classical logic and a few other systems (e.g., intuitionistic logic) according to which "anything follows from a contradiction"; that is, once a contradiction has been asserted, any proposition (or its negation) can be inferred from it.
An informal statement of the argument for explosion is this.
Consider two inconsistent statements, “Lemons are yellow” and "Lemons are not yellow", and suppose for the sake of argument that both are true. We can then prove anything, for instance that Santa Claus exists: Since the statement that "Lemons are yellow and lemons are not yellow" is true, we can infer that lemons are yellow. And from this we can infer that the statement “Either lemons are yellow or Santa Claus exists” is true (one or the other has to be true for this statement to be true, and we just showed that it is true that lemons are yellow, so this expanded statement is true). And since either lemons are yellow or Santa Claus exists, and since lemons are not yellow, (this was our first premise), it must be true that Santa Claus exists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
I insist. Miranda the Devine does exist!!
Oh wait, but I forgot to quote, for the record:
ReplyDeleteThe rise of the baby buggy behemoth rivals the four-wheel-drive phenomenon. Big, unwieldy, selfish four-wheel-drives have been hogging the road in increasing numbers for a decade. Now the equivalent in prams, costing as much as $5000 apiece, are hogging footpaths, shop aisles, cafes and buses. In certain circles, status attaches to the right Bugaboo, with leather seats, carbon-fibre frames, alloy wheels and disc brakes de rigueur. The pricier, bigger and more elaborate the pram the more cachet attaches to its pusher. The worst are the all-terrain "jogging" prams with their huge wheelbase and annoying tendency to make you trip over the front wheel in the local cafe. While there have been few sightings of mothers jogging with such a contraption, they do have the capacity to carry an enormous amount of shopping.
They are a scourge, used like a weapon to gain priority on the footpath, and manoeuvred kamikaze-style into traffic. Some mothers seem to think that because they are pushing a pram everyone else has to part the Red Sea for them.
A bit harsh, but that's the view from the front line, echoed in colourful language on the discussion board.
Such rancid social interactions are hardly the stuff of cohesive societies. But just as buying the biggest, most traffic-unfriendly 4WD is a recipe for road rage, so too is choosing the equivalent giant pram, provoking ripples of resentment and hostility in a feedback loop of payback discourtesy. Whether it's prams or 4WDs, coarse language in public, not standing up on public transport for pregnant women and the elderly, tailgating, queue-jumping, or burping loudly, the social norms of politeness are fraying.
And so on and on. Bonus wonders.
Too delicious. A must read. A wonderful contrarian find. Consider the gerbil rogered.
Hmmm, I wonder how many sprogs Miranda has popped out recently?
ReplyDelete