Note to black market: get your act together
It used to be that athletes who wanted to cheat would do so by injecting anabolic steroids, which would bulk you up like Schwarzenegger and give you strength and speed that was quite literally superhuman. In the days before every competing athlete was required to piss in a cup on his way back to the change rooms, that worked fine, and the East German economy benefited from a generous influx of Olympic gold medals as a result. Those substances show up pretty easily in a beakerful of urine, though, so these days athletes get a bit sneakier, preferring to fortify their constitutions with various chemicals which occur naturally in the body, one of which is the male hormone testosterone. You can’t ban someone for having testosterone in the system, otherwise you’d have to ban everyone. Not only that, but (as any bald-headed bloke can tell you), people differ in the levels of testosterone they carry around with them, so you can’t even set an allowable threshold. It’s a fair bet to say that anyone who falls into the category “natural athlete” - those who find it easy to put on muscle - is probably churning out natural testosterone by the bucketful anyway, so it’s difficult to pick when an athlete has helped himself to a few extra thimbles full.
Drug testing laboratories have clever people in them, though. It turns out that the body, as well as containing its own testosterone factory, also manufactures another chemical called epitestosterone, which is like testosterone in lots of ways, but it’s steroid instead of being a hormone. Don’t ask me why - maybe there was some evolutionary Betamax vs VHS battle some time in the distant past, but both formats managed to hang on. Whatever the case, your body is producing both, and what’s more, it tends to produce them both in similar amounts. Most of us have a ratio of epitestosterone to testosterone that sits around 1:1. It can vary from person to person, but it’s considered unusual for the ratio to be any less than 1:6. For the purposes of drug testing in sport, it’s an offence for anyone to be less than 1:4. Floyd Landis, who recently won (?) the Tour de France, turned in a urine sample which boasted the impressive ratio of 1:11, and he’s fast trying to explain why. There’s some suggestion that it might be down to a medical condition (hypothyroidism - which begs the question, will the TdF field one day consist entirely of hypothyroidals, in the same was as NBA basketball is dominated by biological freaks?).
I don’t have an opinion on whether or not Landis is a drug cheat. Unfortunately, professional cycling is one of those sports where the returns to chemical enhancement are so massive that there’s always going to be someone trying it on. Like it or not, even someone like Lance Armstrong, who has never returned a positive sample, is always going to be under suspicion, just because it’s almost taken for granted that someone’s going to be cheating, and it’s obvious to point the finger at the guy who happens to exhibit gravity-defying bursts of speed up the Alpe d’Huez.
It makes me wonder, though, about the resourcefulness of the drug manufacturers. I mean, surely if the enforcement boffins are having to measure the ratio between these two substances in order to prove any wrongdoing, then backyard factories should be churning out testosterone and epitestosterone in a double-barrelled syringe like five minute Araldite?
At Yarra’s Edge
Out for a Sunday morning bike ride, I’ve landed at the Promenade Cafe at Yarra’s Edge in the Docklands, one of the few north-facing cafes on offer. There are about a dozen other people here, and I have the sunny deck area, overlooking Victoria Harbour and sheltered from the brisk north-easterly by a glass barrier, to myself. It’s pleasantly warm and idyllic and - well - quiet. I cycled through New Quay and Waterfront City and past the NAB building on my way here, and there was scarcely a sign of life anywhere. That seems strange to me - I know that a sunny Sunday morning in Brunswick would mean struggling to get a seat at any of my regular cafe haunts, but most of the places around here haven’t even bothered opening, despite having legions of well-to-do apartment-dwellers just a lift ride away. I don’t get it. Are they all up there admiring the views instead, unable to tear themselves away from their stainless steel appliances for a morning espresso? (The coffee here, by the way, is not bad).
The Age has begun a campaign to rescue the Central Pier from another commercial bars-and-cafes development. On the evidence of this morning, not a bad idea. I doubt that increasing the existing surplus of spiritless Italian brasseries is going to be the key to making the Docklands work. Although at least one side of it has a northerly aspect.
At the Waterfront City plaza, a giant TV screen eerily pumps out cable news to an audience of no-one but me, vainly trying to create that cosy pokie-hall ambience but defeated by the lack of a crowd who like their waterfront views supplemented by scrolling stock reports. It makes me wonder whether some of these developers really understand this place. What moronic executive sat in what Sydney office tower and dreamed that a scene like that was what Melbourne really needed? I’m not someone who dislikes commercialism per se. There’s just something crass and cynical in some of what’s gone on here, something that seems to be embodied in that great bloody TV screen. I don’t object to television per se, either, it’s just that this one intrudes so crudely onto what could otherwise have been a beautiful public space. There’s a place for everything, and the place for big TV’s is in people’s loungerooms, where they can turn them on and off at will. The Federation Square screen is a bit different, in that it displays stuff that is integral to the public nature of the space. It will broadcast sports events and so on, things that people will actually gather together to watch, but the rest of the time it shows images from exhibitions that are on in the square, or promotions for ACMI or whatever. It doesn’t just drone on with some generic newscast as if the thriving centre of our city was trying to emulate an airport departure lounge.
Meanwhile, the Promenade continues to do a whimpering trade. The wind seems to be tending more easterly - good news for my ride home, but making things a bit chilly here on the deck as the draught finds its way up the entrance steps. The sun sparkles on the water and cyclists enjoy the rumble of wooden decking under their wheels. The towers above me are dizzying against an almost clear blue sky. I watch distant trucks crawl their way up the southbound incline of the Bolte Bridge. A smattering of dully ostentatious pleasure cruisers in uniform off-white populate the small marina in front of me - there are as many empty berths as full ones.
What if we embarked on this grand plan to turn Melbourne into another harbour city, and no-one came?
Truth, Lies and Walletgate
There’s some dispute going on at the moment between Kim and Tim about truth in politics in the aftermath of walletgate.
I’ll have a go at summarising the arguments.
Tim: Here is one more clear example of John Howard’s dishonesty. It is wrong for us to write this sort of behaviour off as politicians being politicians, because truth is a fundamental part of the relationship between us and our representatives. Howard loses credibility as each lie emerges, and surely the electorate must eventually say “enough is enough”.
Kim: It’s a waste of time trying to hold politicians to this standard. People are not overly concerned with the personal morality of individual politicians, only with the results that they achieve. Those of us who oppose John Howard should spend our energies targeting his real political weaknesses rather than prattling on about truth.
The evidence of the last election or two would suggest that Kim is right about at least one thing: it’s unlikely that Howard’s lies are going to prove too much of an electoral liability.
I have a lot of sympathy for Tim’s position though - even if truth in fact doesn’t matter, that doesn’t alter the fact that it should matter. Kim’s post seems to basically say “Get over it and focus on the next election”, but it seems to me that there’s a moral point to be made and there’s no harm in making it. Blog posts are not a finite resource - you can attack Howard for dishonest and still have time and space to attack him for IR and all the other areas where he might actually be vulnerable.
If Tim’s right that we should care about politicians lying, and if Kim’s right that we in fact don’t, then that leaves open the question: why don’t we? Surely most people would, given the choice, prefer an honest representative to a dishonest one. So why do questions of honesty seem to be such a political lame duck? I think the answer, like a lot of other answers to similar paradoxes in Australian politics (for example, the almost unanimous view that our politicians are all bastards, which sits awkwardly with our demonstrated tendency to keep electing them), lies in general apathy and disconnection. When the conjurers on stage are playing to an audience which is both distant and distracted, they can get away with incredibly crude sleights of hand. Political communication is filtered through so many layers of cynicism before it reaches the voters that concepts like truth and honesty seem quaint and novel.
Of course, a dozen seats’ worth of electoral punishment could change all that, but Australians traditionally don’t punish their governments for anything other than economic crises. The day when Australia demands truth of its politicians will probably be the day that Australians decide, for one reason or another, that politics matters. I think the average Australian’s attitude to politics, beneath all the cynicism, could be summarised as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Things here have always ticked along okay without the voters needing to take that much of an interest, so let’s just leave things as they are, put a taboo on political discussions at social occasions, and hopefully we’ll be happy and prosperous for ever. If politicians tell the odd fib, then whatever, as long as we can keep living the Great Australian Lifestyle and congratulating ourselves on how lucky we are.
A major threat to that lifestyle might shake things up a bit, and it’s no coincidence that the new IR laws have caught the public’s attention in a way that Iraq (demonstrations notwithstanding) never did. Ironically, if Kim is right and it is the IR disgrace that is going to wake the sleeping dog, then that in itself might end up making Tim right, too. When Australians begin to realise that Governments can, with sufficiently ideological nutjobs at the helm, actually strip away important elements of our shared prosperity and good fortune, that might become a tipping point - a time when politics finally makes some space alongside sport to become a part of the national consciousness. If and when that happens, perhaps politicians might find that they can no longer expect the voters to be content with a diet of bullshit.
At the third stroke
It’s often worried me that atomic clocks are only accurate to one second in 70 million years. Who’s going to be around to hold the button down for a second to get it back on track? Should we actually adjust it by a second after 35 million years so that it gradually works its way back into time over the next 35 million?
But there’s good news! Atomic clocks based on the vibration of the caesium atom are, it turns out, so 2005. The new clock on the block uses mercury, last seen in a sphygmomanometer near you (although hopefully not vibrating quite so fast). It’ll now be 400 million years before we need to slide a fingernail under the atomic stem winder and push it back in a second later.
It’s reassuring that we’re able to keep time with the sort of accuracy that makes the graceful rotation of the Earth look like a wobbly torpedo punt. Astronomers are dead keen, of course, and various other scientific types. GPS navigation seems to get mentioned a lot, although when drivers are quite happy to follow their Navman’s directions off the edge of a cliff, it’s hard to believe that the atomic clocks’ tour of the periodic table will make a hell of a lot of difference.
Howard v Costello
I don’t really know or care much about the Liberal party leadership, but I thought it was worth putting down a statement that I heard recently from a very believable source. To wit:
Peter Costello will never be Prime Minister of Australia.
Even if Howard retires, this theory goes, the Libs’ backers in the business community would never tolerate Costello as leader. Among Business Council-types, apparently, there’s a consensus that the working relationship with John Howard ranks about 8.5/10. The relationship with Peter Costello ranks about 2/10. The main complaints seemed to revolve around Costello’s less-than-towering intellect, his arrogance, and his general unpreparedness to listen and understand.
I’m only repeating this story second-hand, and I stand to be corrected by anyone with more detailed knowledge of how business regards Costello, but it struck me as an interesting take on the subject. Sometimes key centres of power are in places that the media and the blogosphere forget to look.
In Belgrave
I’m sitting, slightly uncomfortably, in the Green Bean Cafe in Belgrave. There’s a line of tables here cut from whole logs, much in the arts-and-crafty style of the town (over which a miasma of incense and pot-pourri hangs). The tree from which these particular tables were hewn can’t have been very stout - they are perilously narrow. Fortunately, the cafe doesn’t serve its food on massive plates, or there would be no room for crockery. The table is also mounted rather too low for the seat, such that eating (especially for a long-bodied individual like me) is something of a slouch and one’s knees are inclined to rub the unpolished trunk half underneath. A social worker (or parole officer, I can’t work out which), is seated at the next table with a teenager and a couple of adult guardians, discussing action plans and behaviour contracts. I thought at first that it might be the youth’s induction into a Big Brother/Big Sister programme or something, but the tone sounds rather too earnest for that.
I’ve been reading Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express, his story of a train trip from his home in Boston to the tip of South America. I find him a bit of a pompous prat - a grumpy university professor who claims higher status than a tourist (”traveller” being his preferred term) despite quite clearly being one. His claim seems mostly founded on his ability to sneer at and feel superior to other travellers that he meets, and to name-drop about the other places that he has been and people that he has met. He prefers to travel alone, he states at one point, because he doesn’t like having his imagination polluted by the impressions of others. That would be a bit easier to take if his own observations were a bit more imaginative, and had less of the quality of dismissal. Chugging past on rattling trains, he glimpses various tableaux from his window and uses them to make all sorts of sweeping statements about the country that he is travelling through. If he sees groups of people standing around doing not much, he concludes that this bit of the countryside is full of lazy unemployed people. If his train companions are not very talkative, he extrapolates experience out to a grand theory encompassing not only his travelling mates, but also all their countrymen.
For all the pomposity, though, reading this book has given me a hankering for some train travel. That’s what brings me to Belgrave today - sitting on a train half-reading a book (in this case, a book about a man travelling on trains and half-reading books), glancing up as we pass through stations, reaching a destination which, while it trails Theroux’s for exotica, is at least a change of scenery. I’m able to take a Tuesday and spend it schlepping about on trains, because for the first time perhaps ever, I’m feeling unemployed. I’m sure that I’ve been through times in my life when I have been doing less, working less, earning less. But this year’s winter gig lull seems to be hitting particularly hard, for a variety of reasons. One is that I’m not studying this year, so I can’t slip identities and become a student again whenever the music work gets a bit thin. Also, I’m single for the first winter in five years, which has left me with more time and space to ponder the amount of time and space that I have. And I’ve also had an unsuccessful period of job hunting, my five hopeful applications to the state education bureaucracy roundly rejected, with a six-month wait ahead of me before I can plunge into another frustrating encounter with the online recruiting system (never have so many hesitant ticks been put in so many ambiguous boxes).
So my trip today is more than just a whimsical attempt to immerse myself in travel fantasies - it’s also an attempt to shake off the black dog that has been snapping at my heels ever more rapaciously for the last month or so. I’ve been looking for the swift scissor-kick that might allow me to draw breath amidst the wave of turbulence (hoping all the time that, when the kick eventually gains purchase, I’m facing in the right direction). Like Lucky Guus working his substitutions, I’m prepared to try anything (even blogging about it) that might throw some unexpected light on the problem.
The food was good – a veggie burger sandwich with the untoasted rye bread not quite containing a small surplus of chutney. The coffee was in a style which this place shares with the Sugardough Bakery in Lygon Street – a large, hearty-looking mug which looks warming and inviting, but which leaves the flavour diluted to an almost Starbucks-like weakness, barely able to penetrate the rye bread let alone the chutney.
I’m continuing this now with a pen in a paper notebook, my PDA battery having died. In fact, what you’re reading has been through two-level filtering process – from my mind onto the paper via my chaotic script, which I’m heavily re-interpreting as I type it later in the evening. My handwriting is so slow that I speed it up by leaving out any words that don’t seem necessary at the time, so I can’t just transcribe it. I’d like to learn shorthand, because it would be much cooler to be able to sit and scribble on a page rather than set up the geeky-looking apparatus that I do when I want to write in public, but for some reason the motor skills which serve me well when I’m typing or playing an instrument desert me altogether when I pick up a pen. I don’t know much about shorthand, but there’s a good chance that mine would be even less intelligible than my normal script. Besides, the PDA and its little keyboard (when the battery retains some charge) does attract its share of glances, albeit mostly from blokes.
Over the road is the Telstra exchange, the ugliest building in town by a large margin. My favourite view of this place is actually from the train platform looking up at the rear of this row of shops. The street is built into the side of the railway cutting, so there’s a whole maze of stilts and improvised-looking scaffolds holding up the commercial strip. It looks kind of shanty-like and interesting. From the street level, the architecture is mostly unremarkable. Down the street there remain a few old character houses, cosy-looking old wooden places with firelight glows in their bay windows. Otherwise, though, Belgrave hasn’t managed (like Daylesford has) to resist the stylistic incursion of suburbia. The town was probably more attractive 50 years ago, when it was still genuinely out in the sticks. I’m not sure of the history of the train line – was it instrumental in bringing suburbia to Belgrave, or did the urban sprawl do the trick unprompted? Puffing Billy is the attraction here – a steam train which these days just chugs up the track and back – I’m not sure if it’s the remnant of an old city service, or whether it filled a function of its own in the Dandenongs in times past. Next time I play on board (my only other trip to Belgrave was for such a job) I’ll check it out.
The background music in the café is well-judged – sort of acid jazz/groove, some electronic stuff with some saxophone loops and light doofing. Those tunes with actual bass lines are let down by a subwoofer which shows singular fondness for one particular note (the supertonic in the tune playing at the moment) and complete indifference to all the others. Still, when there are supposedly trendy cafes on Sydney Road which still persist in playing commercial radio, I think this place has done well: the music is pleasant and unobtrusive.
When I read books, I kid myself that I can tell whether the author has drafted them with a pen, a typewriter or a word processor. I recently read Journal of a Novel the collected letters that John Steinbeck wrote to his publisher as he compiled the first draft of East of Eden. Steinbeck used these letters to clear his head each morning before he started to write. Some of the text is a discussion of the plot as it unfolds, some talks about his general state of mind or things that are going on with his family at the time, and the remainder is a discussion of his pencils. He would buy these pencils in bulk, sharpening a dozen at a time before he started work each day (on an electric pencil sharpener, another focus of his narrative), and they were clearly a subject of some obsession. He is very repetitive about them – by the time you get to the end of the book you want him to shut up about his bloody pencils – but I found it quite endearing, this immersion in the working details of his creative process. It was nice to think that as he wrote his novels, he was as preoccupied by his writers’ callous as anyone else (this, too, he describes to his publisher in detail). As I mentioned, I think that the writer’s tools do come across in his writing, somehow. Perhaps it’s a conceit on my part, but when I read Steinbeck I can imagine the pencil dragging across the page, or a fountain pen in the case of Orwell. David Foster Wallace scribbles in an exercise book with a ballpoint, while Jonathan Franzen is all word processor. Maybe it’s my unconscious projection, but Orwell’s sentences seem to have a commitment about them, a sense that he compiled them carefully and wrote them down once. Franzen’s seem to be shaped and crafted and retouched to within an inch of their lives, a level of detailed and invisible editing that’s only possible with digital technology. Paul McCartney, it’s said, wrote most of his songs by sitting down with his guitar in front of a tape recorder. The tape would run from beginning to end, recording all the time. Would they have sounded different if he used the sort of system that I use, with all the benefits of editing and multitracking and (importantly) instant deletion? The orthodox idea of the drafting process seems to be that one should write and write in a mammoth, uncritical splurge of ideas. Write and keep writing, they say, and make your critical judgments later. If that is actually a good way to create, then maybe it’s better to improvise your ideas using a more concrete medium. Maybe it’s easier just to produce and not to judge when the delete key is not forever under your pinky. I saw a nice Brother electric typewriter in an op-shop the other day, and I thought to myself that it might be a fun discipline to bang out a couple of pages each day without the benefit of being able to correct anything. Mind you, that’s more-or-less what I do on this blog – I can’t say that anything here is very carefully crafted, as you can probably tell if you’re still reading. Then if things don’t work out, you can screw up the paper, or destroy the tape, and maybe that act of actual destruction might spur the process of creation in a way that MS Windows’ recycle bin sound effects never will.
The attraction of schoolteaching was that a school seemed, on the face of it, a good place for someone like me – a generalist without the patience to become an obsessive. I’m good at accumulating knowledge about stuff, and it would be nice if that process had a purpose of some kind, and even better if I could be paid for it. Of course, there are no guarantees (even assuming that I get a job one of these days) that it will turn out that way – I might be forced into becoming a different kind of obsessive, obsessed with the mechanisms for survival and crowd control, with all of those ideas about learning and knowledge just languishing in the background. There’s only one way to find out, though (and at the moment, not even that).
I’m joined now (well, not actually joined – they’re sitting on bar stools by the window while I spill over the edges of this little table) by a couple of attractive young women speaking French, engaging the waitress in a confusing dialogue about the meaning of chai tea. I am feeling, not for the first time in my life, impotently monolingual. Are they backpackers? Have they come from the other side of the world in order to ride on Puffing Billy? I can’t understand enough to figure it out. They opt for latte and hot chocolate, not surprisingly given that the sales pitch for the chai tea wasn’t very convincing.
Coming back through Flinders Street Station during rush hour, the Upfield train had been delayed. The platform was overflowing and angry. I decided to wander down to the 55 tram instead, forcing my way through masses on Flinders Street bunching around train replacement buses, hapless Connex employees trying to reason with them as the buses filled without making a visible dent in the irritated crowd. Whatever I end up doing, I’d prefer not to be a rush hour commuter, if that can be avoided, much as I like trains.
More BB
There’s a suggestion that Ashley and John might make an appearance on tonight’s nominations show, so I’m on the case just in case.
Hmm, nothing in Gretel’s intro to suggest that that’s going to be happening. Seems as if BB is doing its best to get back to business as usual. So I might as well just respond to some of the stuff that’s happened since I posted on Saturday.
The newspapers picked up on the story (in a more substantive way) on Sunday, although they still weren’t discussing details of what had happened. Politicians of all stripes piled on and called for the show to be axed. Andrew Bartlett wasn’t impressed:
[T]o attempt to force a television show – however tasteless it is - off the air because of an incident that wasn’t even screened on television is simply beyond the pale and represents an excessive intrusion into the lives of Australians by moralising, preaching politicians who want to control how people live their lives.
Well, apart from Steve Fielding (who was out for BB well before this happened), I’m not aware that any of the pollies have called for the show to be “forced off the air”. Coonan has asked for an investigation into any code breaches. Presumably there weren’t any, since the incident wasn’t even broadcast except online. Howard and Beazley have both suggested that Channel 10 take this opportunity to axe the show, but I’m not aware of them suggesting government intervention to make that happen. There’s certainly been moralising and grandstanding, unsurprisingly, but as I pointed out before, there are issues here that go beyond standards of decency on television, and Andrew seems to pay those issues minimal attention.
There seems to have been fairly universal condemnation of Gretel Killeen’s “they were terrific blokes and it’s a shame that they had to be kicked out based on one foolish incident” speech, not to mention the stuff about how you’d hear all sorts of exaggerated stories. What’s to exaggerate, you might ask? Did she get held down or not? Did she get slapped with a penis or not? The facts seem to be pretty uncontroversial which is not surprising considering the video footage. Differences of opinion arise over the interpretation of the incident - a good-natured prank for some people, a serious sexual assault for others. As you’ve probably gathered, I’m one of the ones who takes this very seriously.
In a comment on my last post, Bianca alludes to the fact that the video footage seems significantly less harrowing than one might expect from the description of events (or even from the still photos). Unlike Bianca, though, I didn’t see anything on the video (which was available on YouTube - sees to have disappeared now) to suggest that this was anything other than a serious assault. I don’t think that anyone really knows how Camilla felt about it, but there was certainly no indication that she consented - that’s the only relevant issue.
The Queensland Police, it would seem, see things differently. From the brief newspaper reports, it seems that they have viewed the footage and interviewed Camilla, but decided not to proceed with prosecution on the basis that Camilla didn’t want to make a complaint. That raises the question as to whether anyone else could make a complaint and have the matter brought to court - I wouldn’t have thought that there’d be any lack of Queenslanders happy to get the process moving. I don’t know enough about legal process, particularly in Queensland, to know whether or not the decision of the police not to proceed was reasonable enough in the circumstances, nor not.
For a good list of links to other posts, see Mark Bahnisch’s post at LP.
UPDATE: Looks like I had my wires crossed - the two guys are apparently appearing on the up late edition tonight. Which means I watched the nomination show for nothing except the spectacle of Claire being badgered by BB to be specific about her reasons for nominating Krystal, and Claire doing her best to point out that she couldn’t because it was related to the Ashley/John issue which they’d obviously been instructed not to mention. Gretel Killeen, meanwhile, was doing a splendid job of pretending that nothing had happened.
Le Tour 2006
Wow, hasn’t the Tour de France dovetailed nicely with the FIFA World Cup? Why don’t we just synchronise our clocks to Central European Summer Time and be done with it?
I’d love to be able to write a detailed and informative summary of this years TdF, but unfortunately I’m strictly a two-weeks-a-year road cycling fan, so I can’t tell you much except that this year’s Lance Armstrong-less tour will benefit from having, unlike the last few, more than one possible winner.
I do find the cycling interesting - tactically, it’s one of the more fascinating sports, I think. The need to collaborate with one’s adversaries, and to choose the correct moment to break those allegiances, recalls the intrigue (if not the destructive force) of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Perhaps what keeps me watching, though, is the scenery. Say what you like about the French, but the country just looks stunning. Le Tour takes a different route every year, and while I’m sure that they’re careful to thread it around any pockets of ugliness, there seems to be an abundance of prettiness to go around. How have they managed to keep all those little towns so attractive, so free from crass commercial development, so stylistically coherent, so evocative of the good life? How can you have all those thousands of kilometres and barely one depressing vista? You hardly seem to see a factory or a power station or a car yard or a McDonalds. It’s vineyards and olive groves one after another, punctuated by towns which are all cafes and bakeries, narrow streets hemmed by old two-storey residential buildings with immaculately-matched window boxes and bay windows. You almost expect to see the riders emerging from the town limits with armfuls of baguettes and slabs of brie.
I don’t know what it is, but the French, they’ve got something right.
The End for Big Brother?
Looks like things have started getting serious:
John and Ashley have been escorted from the Big Brother house.
The official site says…
Big Brother Housemates Ashley and John were escorted from the House on Saturday afternoon following a breach of the rules. The producers Endemol Southern Star and Network Ten deemed their actions were grounds for their removal from the show. The producers will not be commenting any further on this serious matter.
“What the hell happened?” you’re no doubt asking yourself.
According to the Behind Big Brother forums, at around 4am this morning John held Camilla down so Ashley could slap her in the face with his penis.
Last year they had a similar problem, although not quite as extreme as this. If it’s true, then I imagine there would be grounds for legal action (and unlike many similar cases, evidence will presumably be in abundance).
I wrote last year about the nasty strain of misogyny which seemed to be in evidence on BB. This year has had its share, but I until now I thought it was a tad milder than last year’s. It’s something that goes beyond common garden chauvinism and gets into real fear and hatred. It’s an attitude which seems to have been taken to an extreme in the Dianne Brimble case. I haven’t been exposed to these attitudes much in my day-to-day life, which might say more about my day-to-day life than it does about either BB or Australian society in general, but I do think it’s a matter of great concern if John-and-Ashley-like behaviour is seen by young men as an acceptable (or even funny) way to act toward women. I think it would be tremendous if the police were to prosecute these two guys.
For the record, I have no problem at all with sex or nudity or anything else that happens on BB, as long as it’s consensual and as long as any broadcast properly informs its viewers beforehand about what they’re going to see. I’m not any kind of wowser - my issue is with the degrading nature of what happened.
Also note that I’m assuming for the moment that the story on Jess’s site is correct - I haven’t seen any stories in other news sources, and the producers (I gather) are being tight-lipped about it for the moment. I stand to be corrected if the story is wrong, but at the moment I find it quite believable.
UPDATE: Been fishing around for more information. The BB forums are down, with this message:
In light of the events of the last 24 hours the Big Brother forums will be unavailable until further notice.
The justification being what, I wonder? Are the producers imagining that they can keep a lid on it? Are they hoping that images won’t get out? There are a couple of photographs on Ausculture, which are grainy nightvision, but clear enough to think that the full video would be pretty incriminating. I won’t copy them here unless I see any reason to.
UPDATE 2 10:55pm
Nothing on The Age website so far. The SMH is repeating the producers’ lines.
UPDATE 3 12:18am
Fwiw, here’s a rumour:
According to a source inside Network Ten, senior management have met with Southern Star Endemol producers tonight regarding the future of the program, Big Brother on the network.
Just under a fortnight ago, Ten management finally axed the show Big Brother Adults Only, citing continued government pressure in relation to censors.
While the controvesy of the weekends events involving Ashley and John, who were evicted earlier tonight, was certaintly the main reason for the talks, others suggest a sudden collapse of funding from the major sponsors also prompted the talks.
At 9.30pm tonight, the Official Site shut down it’s forums, unable to keep up with removing posts regarding why John and Ashley were evicted, even after pleading with forum users to steer clear of talking about the subject.
The source has also claimed that just under an hour ago plans were being finalised from the meeting, and that the decision reached was to axe Big Brother immediately, with the remaining prizemoney split 8 ways between the contestants still in the house.
The source has also claimed that tomorrow’s eviction will no longer go ahead, instead being replaced by The Simpsons and a special Futurama documentary.
The consensus about the place seems to be that this is unlikely to be true, but we’ll see.
Dogs & Diets
Henry was losing weight. His little ribs and his backbone were feeling worryingly close to the surface. He was eating as voraciously as ever, practically inhaling half a can of Chum in about eight seconds (a motion, incidentally, which made his ribs stick out even more - as if he was trying to generate more suction). I kept upping his quantities, eventually feeding him twice a day, worried that his system wouldn’t cope with the sheer volume of congealed meat-like matter. The result was lots of putrid flatulence, but very little increased padding. He was wormed and wormed again (although it makes one shudder to imagine the tapeworm that would be capable of keeping up with his intake).
So we went to the vet. He weighed a kilogram less than he did when we bought him home from the RSPCA, when he was less than a year old. The vet didn’t seem too concerned - she took a blood test just in case, but the main thrust of her dignosis was that I’d been feeding him crap with no nutrients in it. Whereas in the past his food had been supplemented by lots of leftovers and table scraps, since I’ve been living on my own he has had to subsist solely on the contents of his dog bowl. Chum, it seems, like other tinned dog foods that you buy from the supermarket, doesn’t have much actual food in it. The vet described it as tinned water. That surprised me a bit - I’m not used to the idea that cheap, low-quality food would make you lose weight. Where human food is concerned, the less you pay for it, the more fattening it tends to be. The same, apparently, doesn’t apply to dog food.
So the Chum had to go, to be replaced by Science Diet, a dried food that you buy in bags the size of a corpse from the pet shop. Well, do you think that solved the problem? Less than a week into the change, I had an obesity crisis on my hands. I had to buy a measuring scoop to reduce the portions to the incredibly miserly-looking recommended dose. So the skinniness issue was resolved.
More surprising, though, are the other effects. Henry’s coat has never been softer or shinier, and I don’t think he’s farted in a week. And he’s started behaving like a puppy again. He’s been careering around the house playing with toys. He’s covered the kitchen in a coarse layer of pillow-stuffing, the result of a continuing altercation with his bedding. In the park, he runs down his tennis ball almost before it hits the ground, even the one shot in ten that finds the sweet spot on my tennis raquet.
I always assumed that dogs would be well enough adapted to a diet that consisted of whatever they could scavenge, and that their bodies would be able to deal successfully with whatever came along (snail pellets notwithstanding).
Actually, I’ve tended to think the same about people. I tend to think we should eat sensibly and not overdo it on cholestorol or calories, but I don’t believe that paying six bucks for a thimble-full of wheatgrass juice is going to turn you from a walking zombie into a bright-eyed pixie. A good diet is one that allows you to avoid adverse health effects (obesity, heart disease, diabetes etc) while allowing you to enjoy a good life. Your particular brand of breakfast cereal or salad dressing or vitamin supplement probably doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference to anything, other than a placebo effect if you can convince yourself that it’s useful.
Henry’s experience, though, maker me wonder. Admittedly, I’m not, as he was, living on a diet of food marketed for its “chumpiness” combined with occasional snacks of other animals’ faeces. But it would be fair to say that my diet, like his old one, comes mostly out of tins, and has nto been structured very thoughtfully to take account of nutritional needs. Might be that the odd fruit or vegetable could find a useful place in my calorie count. I’m in the habit of throwing down some conciliatory baby spinach with breakfast, as a kind of peace offering to my digestive health, but my vegetable crisper is tundra-like. Fortuitously, the 55 tram runs right past the Victoria Market, so perhaps it’s just a matter of figuring out when the dollar-a-bag specials start.