terrific honorifics

The conservative Australian government
has asked Her Majesty if they can restore
 the bestowal of her Sovereign Honours,
selected from lists submitted to her office
and usually awarded to mark her birthday
or the new year.
One year The Beatles were OBE's but John Lennon sent his back.

Instantly the/my Australian Twitter milieu has been
elevated and that is just so Australian. Also funny that
these honorifics feature in a week when
  HIS EMINENCE Cardinal Smell hightailed it back to
the luxury of the vatican apartments after
two poor shows - one at the royal commission and the
other at his farewell cathedral mass.
Some of the Twitterers know as little about it as the very politicians waffling so seriously, and have been elevated to The Peerage of Lords, Earls and a Marquis. This hardly matters when one thinks of all the Peers and Knights with legal convictions. 
All explained in the essential reference Yes Minister:
Bernard: “Of course, in the service, CMG stands for Call Me God. And  KCMG for Kindly Call Me God.” 
Hacker: “What about GCMG?”  
Bernard: " oh that stands for God Calls Me God".

Bless us all, as there is nothin' like a Dame Annie ODyne.

capTURING an innocent person

Today I was pleased to read that other people are aggravated by those silly twisted CAPTCHA words.
I don't have Word Verification on any of my blogs.  It's already hard to get comments.
The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, abbreviated as CAPTCHA (instead of CAPTTTCAHA )
My favourite acronym is FFS.  (I actually think I pioneered it, but that's another post for another day)
That the developers have dragged poor Alan Turing into this blurred vision also aggravates me. Poor innocent man had enough trouble in his life without this.
That is all.

Karma Kami Matteoli on

Who would have thought, that even before 2DayFM got into the London inquest for suicide Jacintha Saldanha, that the dramatic arc would be repeated? (rhetorical, answer – nobody).
The entire (well-fed) world came down like a ton of bricks onto Mel Greig and her colleague after they did something they had done without drama more than once before, when they did it to a person who unknown to them of course,  just happened to be chronically depressed.
When the FBI asked for members of the public to come forward if they recognised the men who might be the Boston Marathon terrorists, Kami Mattioli thought one resembled Sunil from her school class of 13 years ago. The sometimes UNsociable Network Of The Usual Suspects gave this an instant virtual explosion almost as harmful as the actual one.

                                                       "and then hit Reddit"



Now only her 6000 Followers can post comments to her Twitter and she is no doubt bracing herself for the virtual/ethernet lynch mob, after she tried to do the right thing.  Unfortunately, as with 2DayFM and Nurse Saldanha, this involved a chronically depressed person.

He has now been found dead, but was aware before this, that he had been mistakenly suspected, and had emailed various friends to set them straight. I would risk serious money betting that Ms Mattioli has never heard of the 2DayFM phone prank, or of Nurse Saldanha.
The student, Sunil Tripathi was a Brown University philosophy major nearing graduation and ‘was last seen on March 16 on a surveillance camera after leaving his apartment at 1:33 a.m., and his family has been frantically searching for him for a month. There is no evidence tying Tripathi to the bombings.’ ‘6 feet 2 inches tall. Tripathi left his apartment without his wallet and cell phone. ABC News reported that he was "possibly depressed and left home without any of his belongings."’ A Facebook page dedicated to finding Tripathi was taken down by his family late Thursday night after suspicions about his involvement in the Boston bombing were posted on Reddit. The Facebook page was flooded with comments that were quickly deleted before the page was taken down.'

Alexis C Madrigal lays out the sequence of events on The Atlantic magazines website, but this was written pre-suicide and could disappear if the legalities that follow a death require it. Even this (pre-suicide) April 19th Buzzfeed report by Andrew Kaczynski might disappear, and it is good so please read it while you can.
It is ridiculous of me to even dwell on all this when elsewhere there is massive repression, starvation, corruption, and mass deaths of various kinds every day, but nobody would argue with my opinion of those things. There are many suspicious things to discuss with regard to The Saldanha Inquest, and the similarity of this situation required addressing.
Sunil had taken leave with permission from his philosophy course and had gone bush. His emotional state was apparently known to be fragile. If it had not been, he would have returned and probably been propelled with Kami into their 15 minutes of fame and laughed the whole thing off while raising money for the injured victims of the real bombers.
But he was fragile and now he is dead and it is not her fault, just as the death of Jacintha is not the fault of Mel Greig.
The Tripathi parents will probably not have the confluence of a Keith Vaz, MP, and a posh hospital to propel them into legal action and claims, as with Nurse Saldanha, but the tabloid public have been flung fresh sustenance in Ms Mattioli. Poor girl. What happens next will affect any future assistance the FBI might get from The Public.

hair! heir!

I would have said that Johnny Rotten was 'a child of Thatcherism'.
Wrong wrong wrong.
So my education by blogging continues today when dreary tubby old Johnny is in the news of two continents alongside the passing of Margaret Thatcher ex-PM of the UK.
I was there in 1976 for it all, so I should know better than thinking that the initial UK 'Punk' movement of fashion/music/behaviour came out of the society created by Thatcher governing.
In fact, poor Margaret had to preside (after 1979) over the punked society that actually fomented under Harold Wilson the 1974-76 PM.
Why it did is a mystery to me because he was very kind to the battlers (do read his Wikipedia entry - no really). For articulate comment on this week in London, please read That's So Pants (which never is).

post impression

When out and about, one sees other travellers. This one told me she hadn't stopped moving since her husband died. Her valise was a very visual start to a very visual day. Our train arrived -

and we travelled from the city whose flag is of The Southern Cross constellation, to the station named Southern Cross - from which one cannot actually see the sky at all.
Sky RADIANCE - the new exhibition of post-Impressionists curated by Dr Ted Gott at the NGV, was the reason to travel, and to meet another blogger and step through the entry with 750 other culturati in the first 30 minutes of viewing - and radiant they certainly were.
If you know nothing about art, and you are ever pressed for an assessment, it is always safe to say "well of course it's always about 'the light' isn't it?"
So many opulent golden frames ... and silver-haired women with geometric cuts (that would have thrilled Vidal Sassoon if he could have seen them. He actually shocked 'the world' 50 years ago with his creation so radical when compared with what went before; as these painting were in their time).

Usually, I can ignore any painting of a beach and a boat, but yesterday one was my favourite of the show. Georges Seurat painted Grave Lines on The 'English' Channel many times. the one in Melbourne is very small with an very very High-Relief frame that could not be a further contrast of the simple composition.

A picture of a painting is one thing, and getting close to one is another thing altogether. Seurat, bless his paint-stained fingers, can make a boat, and convey calm pleasure out of eight tiny tiny paintstrokes.
It truly is radiant and if you were stoned you could lose yourself in it for hours more than the prolonged contemplation this sober admirer (usually having the attention-span of a canary) was happy to give it.
I loved it enough to steal it for my own. My companion informs that the title role of Seurat was played by Mandy Patinkin in a film Sundays With George. It is probably just a lovely film, but Mandy creeps me out, even in Homeland. I think that's because I saw him in Yentl, where everything creeped me out.
Beaches and boats have the same effect on me, as a direct result of going to high school so close to the shore in a fishing town, that the 'art teacher' would always make us go down there for painting and drawing the many dinghies and moorings.
On one of these days a big slobby black dog came at the group full of enthusiasm and some of the prissy girls started shreiking which escalated the whole thing until the teacher ran across Point Nepean Road to the police station. Plod attended immediately and SHOT THE DOG.
When old people tell you youngsters how different life was before mini-skirts, you'd better believe them. The teacher was probably 22 and PC Plod probably the same.  If I could only go back in a Time Machine and knock their empty heads hard together ...