What's On Your Mind Atm??

Started by PearlThompsonsBloodflower, January 03, 2018, 22:52:40

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SueC

I listen to a fair bit of ABC Radio National and heard this fantastic story I want to share.  They were interviewing a professional classical viola player who was talking about trying to make ends meet during the pandemic, and having dark thoughts about her choice of career.  A good friend of hers is a nurse and she was thinking, "My friend is actually doing something helpful with her job choice during this pandemic.  It's really a bit self-indulgent of me just to be playing viola."

She mentioned this to her friend the nurse, who then said to her, "But you don't understand!  The only reason I can cope with my job when it gets really bad, like at the moment, is because I can go home and listen to this piece I love by Mozart.  It saves my sanity.  Your job is really important too!"  ♥
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MeltingMan

Quote from: Susann K.Bye, that's it - from the everyday life of a piano teacher

(...) No appreciation, no thanks
Who am I? What role do I play? What is the role of the son? Why is this family sending their child to my class? What should he do there? Learn an instrument or be entertained? And what am I doing in the parents' eyes? Seriously teaching? Leisure fun? Afternoon care?

The thoughts and questions race at top speed through my head and through my whole body:

Is it actually normal that an almost nine-year-old child is not able to pack his grades himself?
Is it actually normal that the questions I ask an almost nine-year-old child are still answered by the parents standing next to him?
Is it actually normal to constantly ask me and my colleagues to do things that they basically don't understand?

Do these people actually know what a music school is?
Do these people actually know what studying music is?
Do you know that teaching music is anything but a hobby?

Did these parents actually say "thank you" to me? I can not remember. Maybe my anger is so great that I just hide the "thank you".
No, I didn't hear a "thank you". I have a good memory.(...)

My piano lessons were a long time ago. When, following an internal prelude, a few years had passed, a change of teachers was imminent, my father took me from school. The chemistry between the "new" one and me didn't work at all. The change was fluid. Since I came to a Protestant cantor, the topic of music school was ticked off relatively quickly for me. There was no goodbye and for 34 years I had no contact with my former teacher. Two years after I left, she quit the job and found a job that fulfills her more.  :neutral-face
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

SueC

QuoteIt's International Women's Day. A day to celebrate women's achievements. A day which male politicians will inevitably make about themselves.

This year's theme is "Choose to Challenge": choose to challenge gender bias, gender inequality and men saying dumb things. Australian women have done spectacularly well at calling out the crap in recent months.

Here at Crikey, women have stood up to the leaders of our country, demanding a better response to sexual violence — or in the case of Madonna King, rewriting what the response should have been. Tory Shepard has highlighted how our prime minister is paying us nothing but lip service, while Karen O'Connell questioned whether we're in a new era of dealing with sexual harassment.

It's not been an easy start to the year, but let's not forget 2020 was enormous too, from women taking on the brunt of essential work in the pandemic and being left out of the budget, to fighting for reform around sexual violence both at home and in the workplace. Read our coverage of all these issues in our special International Women's Day edition, below.

As Australian of the Year Grace Tame said in her Press Club address last week: "Let's keep making noise, Australia."

Crikey summing things up this morning.  In case you've missed it, the Australian Attorney-General is an abundantly documented misogynist who now stands accused of anally raping a 16-year-old; but this doesn't make him so different from many of his parliamentary (and judiciary) colleagues - sexual harassment and rape are de rigeur in Canberra's parliamentary buildings - and we have the shittiest federal government in decades, truly vomit-inducing people who tread all over the general public and whose hypocrisy appears boundless.
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MeltingMan

😬🤔

Quote from: SchneeweißchenHow can I cancel weddings in general?

Difficult thing, I would definitely make it dependent on the level of the relationship. With friends, acquaintances or relatives who are further away, I would refuse for no reason - there will certainly hardly be any questions. With my closest friends, I would honestly say that weddings are not my thing and then just give them something nice. Of course, you have to consistently follow this through with everyone

I absolutely understand that the cost of an event that you don't feel like going on is enormous. I've also been to weddings that weren't really my cup of tea and where we invested unbelievable amounts of money in hotels, trips, gifts, clothes, etc. It's one of the disadvantages of everything getting bigger and better and further away ... In the past, people in their village got married, the guests wore their Sunday clothes and slept at home. Today, attending a wedding costs as much as a week's vacation. And if you don't like it, "Do it for the bride and groom" only helps to a limited extent, I see that very soberly.

Long story short: decide on a case-by-case basis how to get it across. And with the very best of friends, I might still overcome myself in your place and link the matter to something else - attach a short vacation to your liking and evaporate from the party when it's dull.
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

SueC

Are you in a quandary, @MeltingMan?  Got an invitation you'd rather not accept?

A lot of weddings are horribly dull and have expensive but bad food... not to mention that you might have to listen to dreadful music... I once had to listen to Achy Breaky Heart at a wedding... the marriage only lasted 7 years (see? Do Not Play Bad Music At A Wedding)...
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MeltingMan

Quote from: SueC on March 09, 2021, 14:32:23Are you in a quandary, @MeltingMan?  Got an invitation you'd rather not accept?

Yes I am. That's why I translated the text from German because it partly describes my situation. In the meantime I have formally canceled the invitation, which was not easy for me. By the way, happy 35th birthday, dear Fio.
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

SueC

Really well-written article on art and the imposition of boundaries here:

https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/03/25/dark-mofo-indigenous-blood-exhibit/

Quote from: undefinedCulture: Making Dark Mofo 'safe' is a step towards artistic mediocrity. In fact, it ain't art

Dark Mofo's energy has been declining for some time, its transgression replaced by a theme park of a concluded artistic modernity.

Given that David Walsh, founder of MONA and Dark Mofo, made his fortune off gambling, it might have been worth taking a bet on when his festival of transgression would eventually really land itself in it. The "we want your blood" controversy currently engulfing Dark Mofo would appear to be it.

The festival — which takes over Hobart for a couple of weeks, usually in the winter — advertised with a raw red poster and alert for Indigenous people to donate their blood so that it could be soaked into a Union Jack.



Artist Santiago Sierra described it as a comment on colonialism, presumably the horrors thereof. Indigenous and other artists disagreed, to put it mildly, and more than a hundred participants signed a petition demanding not only the artwork's cancellation, but that Walsh's MONA complex thoroughly reform its curatorial practices, have all staff and management undergo cultural awareness training, and various other reparations.

Dark Mofo director Leigh Carmichael looked like he might tough it out for a while before he caved, as did Walsh, cancelling the work and adopting the language of anti-colonialism and trauma deployed by the protestors who had demanded that Dark Mofo be a "safe" space for artists.

And, well, that's pretty much the end of Dark Mofo ain't it? I mean, as a festival of transgression and edge. Perhaps that was only a matter of time.

There was always something bizarre about the festival's wild success in the Apple Isle, whose public morality is split between Christianity and green-secularism.

As representatives of both clenched their teeth, Dark Mofo and MONA became major tourist drawcards and part of Tasmania's global branding. Yet that drew the festival into a paradox.

Its identity and energy were drawn from a European avant-garde tradition of transgressing morality, at the same time as the progressive class and the cultural-producer elites have built new collective identities around the enforcement of ever more specific moral rules.

The confrontation was never going to come around Dark Mofo's usually jejune attacks on western religion. Now they went and did something a little more interesting and it has all come apart.

You can see the point being made by the protestors about the in-your-faceness of Sierra's work. It's not a single event in a gallery you choose to go to, but widely disseminated by a festival; sort of Satan's Moomba, now an arm of the state. It's by a non-Indigenous artist, it's kinda tiresome in its staginess, etc. But on the other hand, protesting artists — I mean, it's all a little grimly funny. What is it that first alerted you to the "unsafe" qualities of a festival called "Dark Motherfucker"?

Was it the neon Satanic inverted crucifixes around town? The guy using the fresh remains of a slaughtered bull? Heh... The protest over "We want your blood" shows that the transgression of events like Dark Mofo has always been a packaged one, held within limits, which conformed to the secular-humanist values of the knowledge class.

The rest is well worth reading.  What do you all think?
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SueC

An excellent article:

QuoteThe United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political crises that we face – and it must be dealt with.

The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires have enormous wealth and power while working families have been struggling in a way we have not seen since the Great Depression. This situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents'. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence.

Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs and incomes during the pandemic, over the past year 650 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3tn.

The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new.

Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America.

In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation's wealth. In 2019, the latest year of data available, they own nearly 20%.
from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/29/rich-poor-gap-wealth-inequality-bernie-sanders

This one's also good:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/14/joe-biden-coronavirus-covid-stimulus-trump-tax-cuts-welfare-reagan-clinton
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SueC

I've never seen anything like this before:  TWO cyclones approaching the northwest-Australian coast.

And on Sunday/Monday, we're forecast to get a lot of rain on the South Coast because of it!


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Ulrich

The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Yeah...a bit of a problem because it's crossing far further south than usual:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/10/western-australia-cyclones-evacuations-ordered-as-odette-and-seroja-loom

Most recent Bureau of Meteorology update:

QuoteHeadline:

Tropical Cyclone Seroja is moving towards the southeast. Dangerous weather expected to develop on the west coast from Sunday afternoon.

Areas Affected:

Warning Zone

Minilya Roadhouse to Lancelin along the coast, extending to inland areas including Mount Magnet, Dalwallinu and Paynes Find.

Watch Zone

Inland areas including Merredin and Southern Cross.

Details of Tropical Cyclone Seroja at 2:00 am AWST:

Intensity: Category 2, sustained winds near the centre of 110 kilometres per hour with wind gusts to 155 kilometres per hour.

Location: within 55 kilometres of 22.4 degrees South 109.6 degrees East, estimated to be 500 kilometres west northwest of Carnarvon and 750 kilometres northwest of Kalbarri.

Movement: southeast at 24 kilometres per hour.

Tropical Cyclone Seroja is moving towards the southeast and approaching the west coast of WA.

Seroja is expected to intensify a little during Sunday, possibly reaching Severe Category 3 intensity as it accelerates southeastwards towards the coast. It is then forecast to weaken back to Category 2 before it crosses the coast.

The cyclone should weaken as it moves inland on Monday but is still likely to be causing gusty winds east and north of the track, and heavy rain close to the track, as it crosses over the south of the state.

Hazards:

GALES with gusts to 100 kilometres per hour are likely to develop in an area between Minilya Roadhouse and Kalbarri during Sunday afternoon, then extend further south towards Lancelin and inland into the southern Gascoyne and the Central Wheatbelt during Sunday evening and early on Monday morning.

DESTRUCTIVE WINDS with gusts to 150 kilometres per hour are forecast to occur close to the centre of Seroja as it moves across the coast and into adjacent inland parts. The most likely area to experience destructive wind gusts is on the coast between Geraldton and Denham. People near Denham may see gales as early as midday on Sunday, tending to as early as dusk further south near Geraldton. The most likely time for onset of gales winds is mid to late Sunday afternoon near Denham, and during Sunday evening or overnight near Kalbarri and Geraldton.

Seroja will be moving fast, so weather conditions will deteriorate rapidly as it approaches.

HEAVY TO INTENSE RAINFALL and FLASH FLOODING are likely close to the track of Seroja during Sunday and Monday.

ABNORMALLY HIGH TIDES could cause minor inundation at the coast between Coral Bay and Lancelin, increasing to SERIOUS FLOODING in the Denham and Shark Bay region and near Kalbarri. Dangerous surf and beach erosion is expected between Denham and Geraldton.

We're not likely to get cyclonic winds down here, but gale-force is possible (like with our bad winter storms), and it's going to bring in a lot of water.  I put rugs on my older, more susceptible horses and donkeys last night - i.e. everyone but the two overweight donkeys, who the Donkey Society advised me shouldn't be rugged but have access to a shelter (which they do).  So they're all bundled up against the cold, stormy, very wet weather that's coming.  The cattle will shelter in the bushland.

They can never predict the paths of these things accurately.  In 1978, a cyclone went all the way around the coast instead of crossing the west coast, and Albany got 150km/h winds and structural damage to buildings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Alby

At this point Seroja isn't nearly as strong a cyclone as Alby was, but it's still concerning it's predicted to make landfall in areas where buildings are not built to withstand cyclones.  It's going to cause a lot of damage because of it, and there's masses of tourists in tents and caravans who need to evacuate to safety (Easter school holidays, peak tourist season)...
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Ulrich

The "like" is for the info you posted, not because I like the "cyclone"...
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

MeltingMan

Quote from: SueC(...)TWO cyclones approaching the northwest-Australian coast.

Why don't you post this under 'Weather extremes'?
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

SueC

Hello, @MeltingMan:)  Because I didn't see the category (but thanks for pointing it out!), and because it's also valid to post it here because it's on our minds!  I usually post miscellaneous on-my-mind things here...  Also we're unlikely to get extreme weather where we are - just a lot of rain and some storms if the tropical low passes through the inland track and to the east of us as predicted.

But I'll put a link into the topic you pointed out too!  :)

Here's a photo of our crew all rugged up this afternoon in the start of the wet weather:





Mary Lou and Don Quixote were deemed by the Donkey Society to be ineligible for rugging unless they lose more of their blubber (they came to me very obese in 2012 and it helps them slim down not to be kept warm artificially on top of their existing very good insulation - but my main secret is grazing muzzles in spring which restrict their food intake so they can't hoover but can snack, and mineral supplementation so they don't get bad cravings...) - and they have a shelter available that they do actually use during rainstorms.

Oh and see that portable yard and head-bail behind the donkeys?  A neighbour just came by this morning and dropped it off to me so I can take care of the horn issues with two of my steers - apparently he got up on a Sunday morning and decided to be a beneficient fairy, because I certainly wasn't expecting this.  He says if I like the system he'll give me the number of the person he's got this modular portable set from, and I can order my own (made in WA, support local industry etc).  We think we will, now we've got the house and outbuildings and then the bore and finally the driveway done, and have a little bit of spare cash.  That and some fencing modifications and our farm will be pretty much set up.  :cool



PS:  Live radar of TC Seroja crossing the coast at Geraldton at the moment (8pm our time):

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/national_radar_sat.loop.shtml

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SueC

In case anyone wants to know how it looked in the towns after the cyclone went through last night:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-12/cyclone-seroja-wreaks-havoc-wa-one-mile-jetty-destroyed/100062020

It went through too far east of us (400km) to even produce any strong winds here - it's actually very calm and was all night; but it has rained nonstop, all day today as well.

What is really sad is that, days before the cyclone hit our coast, in Indonesia and Timor it caused floods and landslides that killed over 200 people and made thousands homeless. There's no reports of casualties from Australia and if that happened, will only be a handful of people (e.g. accidents in homes or while out driving or boating when they should have been sheltering).
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