Collendina

When mother was a girl before the family went bust the family property was Collendina,up on the Murray. It reappears again today in the context of a fraudulent land scheme - "a proposed retirement village scheme at Collendina, near Ocean Grove." There may even be a family connection, Ocean Grove being near Barwon Heads, where the family moved after the bust, grandfather being the golf club secretary and everybody living at Portrush, the house I love.

Hancock

Saw Hancock last night. A mess, as reported; possibly not as bad as I expected: unrealistic not because it postulated the existence of superheroes but because it copped out [even before the happy ending copout] - the superheroes re basically nice people (that is, people whose interests are the same as ours) in a basically nice society (where the only real problems are used by holdup-levelcriminals). We shall have to wait for Watchmen to get the real lowdown.

And how do you get to qualify as a criminal mastermind if you make an attack on a superhero that could only possibly work if a completely unpredictable mysterious loss of powers comes upon him?

And sexist; the male hero must save lives, the female hero has apparently no obligations beyond being a good wife.

These Names Make News

A crapshop up at North Melbourne has a stack of old Time mags, raising the question of why one would ever buy a new Time when the old ones are available as competitors. Take yesterday's purchase - a cover story on Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott, review of the new Camus, a story on the new Israeli occupation of Gaza:

Now that the Israelis (who controlled Gaza in the days of King David) have driven the Egyptians out, as their ancestors once expelled the marauding Phoenicians circa 1000 B.C. The Israelis are determined to stay - first to make sure that Nasser's suicide raiders shall never return to resume their over-the-border raiding from Gaza against Israel's desert settlers, but also because they think the place belongs historically and economically with Israel. They have decided that they cannot now annex the strip, if only because that would mean absorbing the refugees and so increasing their Arab minority to an unacceptable 30%. Their long-term plan: keep administrative control under U.N. supervision, press the U.N. to resettle the refugees, and meanwhile, run the strip so progressively that both the Arabs of the area and the world will some day see that Israel should keep the place permanently.

Well, that worked out.

More to the point, the wisdom of hindsight being what it is, it sounds self-contradictory from the off; make it so nice that the Arabs will like it, while at the same time getting rid of the Arabs. Never workable, never rational.

Onward and upward

For some reason I have trouble checking in to this blog frequently: and believing that there's no problem so big or so small that it can't be run away from, I started a second blog, unimaginatively called A Second Live Toad every Morning, or http://livetoads.blogspot.com/. Any completeness freak should look at both.

Indiana Politica

Having seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull thought it very poor stuff, interesting only as an obvious commercial for John McCain - the grumpy older man, the hero getting on a bit who can still show the younger folk who think they know it all a thing or two, confronted by a castrating communist bitch. Obama is I suppose the La Beef boy, at the end trying to put on the hat but reminded that no, this is not your time, perhaps next election.

Trying to get into the spirit of it all I bought a a party supplies shop what I registered as an Indy hat;

only some while later did a more accurate perception kick in and I realised it was in fact a Freddy Krueger hat, a switch in semiotics across the entire width of the spectrum.

Iron Man

Toys for the boys movie, yes. But the only interest for non-boys is its take on the US military.
Stark is of course the most government-friendly Marvel hero (next to Nick Fury), and the film does credit the army for assistance.
After going to Afghanistan and seeing his weapons being used against American soldiers (and civilians) he comes home and says he's getting out of the weapons business.
At the end we know that the Afghan baddies had Stark Inc weaponry because they'd been given it by bigbad Stane - presumably, though this was left a little hazy, as a bribe for killing Tony Stark, since the actual income capacity of Taliban types is presumably rather limited.
Anyway, the point is that he's not shocked by the use of US weapons by the US army, which is the actually frightening thing about US weapons tech.

Anne said "Militarism posing as pacifism" and gave it a 4 out of 10 (but she's not a boy).

Mashup

Just so I don't forget, here's an idea that came to me in a nightmare this week. A film project. A combination of marple-cozy-murder mystery and slasher flick. All the suspects dying off one by one, as usual, only with their heads sawn off. Perhaps zombies could come in somewhere.