miracle cure

So for no apparent reason today I was completely pain free and like an animal or something I didn't even remember that I had had pain I just did my daily tasks. Eventually unlike an animal I remembered that I had been burdened with this nonsense for most of last week. Well, I don't get it but I live to fight another day I guess. Of course I will probably somehow contrive to contract the problem again soon enough. Then I'll have to get some St Jacobs Oil I suppose and cautiously stroke my leg with both hands for relief like this oddity.

more important back pain information from me

I wonder what went into De Witt's Pills, which I gather were liver pills. There was a letter from a doctor in the Sydney Morning Herald last year saying that it made people piss blue and another saying one ingredient was podophyllum. If they were like Carter's Little Liver Pills then they were actually just ('just') a laxative. Anyway, I just wanted to tally and tabulate my renewed back pain problem which is muscular. As I explained a few posts back, I know this because of the way it manifests in sitting and standing problems. This morning when I woke up I could barely move but once I am up and walking I am fine and indeed by the end of yesterday, a day in which I walked 15 thousand steps, I was absolutely fine to the degree I figured I'd licked the problem (again). I'm sure it'll be over in the next day or two and I just need to learn how not to aggravate it while I also learn how to counteract it, and while I can't really guess at what revived it a few days ago, I suppose I will just not do anything that might possibly revive it. 

Yesterday was a productive fieldwork day in the western suburbs with a colleague, going around the nascent 'fringe' real estate developments of late capitalism. Some of them I have to say were actually really appealing, some of them not at all, not that I am tempted to buy into a 'future community', except in the sense that (like most people) when invited by the moment to peer into a possibility I do so for a second. That's not temptation, just empathy or something. By the end of the day - a lot of driving, a lot of walking - I was both starving and overstimulated. 

Meanwhile on the page of the Women's Weekly which precedes the above advertisement, there is a really terrible example of how to keep someone you value in your life. 

A wise man, Sting, or was it Elton John, once sang if you love someone don't shoot them. It seems counterintuitive but I suppose all opinions are valid. 

comprehension and memory

 

This picture was taken by Darren Howe and I stole it.

I have spent a little time lately reworking the X wikipedia page, from pretty shitty to slightly less shitty. All the usual wikipedia rubbish had to be snipped away (these usually involve things like referring to men by their last names and women by their first names; curious interjections of seemingly irrelevant information that skew the overall; half-remembered semi-true facts that have to be reordered and clarified). Best example of the last issue that I can think of is a previous writer falsely claimed that Lobby Loyde had been a member of Rose Tattoo with Ian Rilen. But no, Loyde had been in RT some years after Rilen left. In a sense with (they both belong to the category of 'decent and talented men who have unfortunately been involved with Rose Tattoo') but not actually with. It's surely someone's memory playing tricks on them, and although it doesn't really matter, it also messes with the chronology of X to imply that Rilen was in RT in the early 80s which he wasn't. 

But it's amazing how hard it can be to defeat a memory with facts. I was writing a walking tour of Sydney Road last week and had to battle with my own firmly-held memory that Franco Cozzo had shops only in North Melbourne and Footscray in the early 80s. I know that is true, that his catch phrase was 'Norda Melbourne i Footiscray'. Knowing it in your soul isn't enough - I found newspaper articles from the source which show that Franco Cozzo has had a store in Brunswick since 1979. I just have to accept and reassemble the reality.

I also have to accept that it's really hard for me to, um, accept new facts. Maybe it always was hard. It's also hard for me to read critically. Rewriting that X entry in wikipedia I passed over so many bits and pieces, focusing first on weird turns of phrase (someone had written that Ian Krahe played guitar without a pick and therefore had 'blood on his hands'; I thought, no, we have to put that another way) while ignoring other much more important actual errors. I do suspect that I still have too much respect for the written word, and it takes me some time to reassess things written by others which I've seen not exactly in print but in, you know, typing. That might be an outcome of being old, I don't know. 

* updates, always updates: I finally got around to looking in Ian McFarlane's Encyclopaedia of Australian Rock and Pop and found there were quite a few earlier members, inc. Geoff Holmes who I'd put into the wiki entry as an early member then taken out because I couldn't find evidence anywhere else. So I guess I will have to go back sometime and fix the fixin's.

an item from an age editorial from 100 years ago today

(21 Feb 1921, p. 4) The Age in 1921 was a really dull and mean little paper and people must not have had the internet or something, if this thing could actually sustain interest. I mean it didn't even have a Green Guide. Anyway, this editorial reads to me like there was nothing to editorialise about and someone ordered someone to have a negative opinion about something that actually wasn't a terrible idea, just to fill up column inches. The railways should pick up on things like this today, except there aren't enough places railways go anymore. Baldwin Spencer was a man of his time by which I mean he studied Aboriginal people and considered them an inferior species. That has nothing to do with this article but it's still true. 

a hundred years ago today, le prince received les lettres du foreign pays

 As if! The Prince of Wales a multimillionaire! Instead of what he is! Sacre bleu! 

a review i wrote, apparently, for some reason, possibly to be published somewhere, fifteen years ago

Neville Staple

The Rude Boy Returns

(Reign Records)

Neville Staple was once a member of The Specials.

This record features Rat Scabies and Mick Jones as guests

It sounds like it was recorded at a midi studio one afternoon.

The songs are grotesquely awful, pastiches of the good work Staple was once involved in.

I resent it sorely for the time I wasted listening to it.

2021 observation: apparently this was issued in a kind of Rude Boy Returns, Returns situation on vinyl last year. Christ! Some things deserve to be thoroughly forgotten forever. 

mars rover

Carlisle Sentinel 17 August 1985 p. 22 thanks Trisha used without permission. 

I know I have grizzled about this before but I have to say the news of a new Mars landing really gets my goat not least because, once again, it is framed in the press as a search for life on other planets. Why does this bug me so much? Partly because I suppose if this is what the search is for, then I think that shows an extraordinary lack of imagination or intelligence amongst... amongst everyone who thinks this is a good idea (although I also feel that, if life-on-other-planets was found on the absolute closest planet to Earth, then it would be pretty funny - what are the odds! If the odds are that low, then I guess life on this planet can't be all that special, really). Hey, I'm fully interested in the history of people being interested in life on other planets, don't get me wrong, I don't think it's such a boring topic in a manner of speaking because how people envisage life on other planets (I always think of a Kurt Vonnegut idea in one of his early novels which I probably didn't finish reading, about a silicon life-form that reminds me somewhat of a slinky, that just reproduces a replica of itself in a procession of replicas, whenever resources are available, for no apparent reason and certainly with no conscious principle) says a lot about how people think about their own lives and/or life in general, particularly but not exclusively human life. But for all that, I think the search for life on other planets is futile even if they find it, because it tells us precisely fuck all about how to solve our problems on this planet, or how to bring, you know, peace to the middle east or whatever cliche you want to dredge up. If humanity can't fix what ostensibly seems to be the simplest of problems in its own nominal backyard (or front yard, no geographical relativity here), then what is knowing how life came about in another part of the universe going to tell us? I'm not naively assuming that the sum of human progress should be all about figuring out how to make people (or enable them to) get along, but I am naively assuming that while we can't understand our own behaviour and motivations (yeah, it might be that friction and fear of the other eg racism* is essential - but do we have consensus on that?!) we are not going to get anywhere. 

This is why all resources that might accidentally or purposefully lead to the discovery of life on other planets should be diverted to the study of history, until humanity's own shizzle is comprehensively understood and resolved. 

* This is a hypothetical nonsense, i.e. the idea that everything that happens happens for a reason.