Pica Pica

The one in Sydney. Hard to find on Google, though it has a short Wikipedia page. It does have a website though, named not after itself but after its address at 165 Macquarie Street. The front page says no more than the address, offering no public options – you can log in if you are a member, but otherwise you can go away.

One might be forgiven for thinking that one had stumbled on a very, very exclusive brothel. Not, apparently, so. Behind the 60′s exterior* we find what is modelled on the gentlemen’s clubs of London and New York. Our meeting of old members was to take place in a library on the third floor. Women were allowed to attend, though they cannot join this club.

I must explain that I am an old member of the House. Marpa House? No. Well, I am a life member there, but I refer in this post to my academic alma mater, Christ Church, Oxford. I was, clearly, very lucky to be given the education I was. One of the best of those of England’s schools (or see Wikipedia) that are open to the real public led on to one of the best colleges of one of the world’s best universities.

So where did it all go wrong?

First of all, of course, I must ask – did it really go wrong? I did get my first degree – just. The experience was hugely enjoyable. The perspective it gave on life, the stimulus of other undergraduates, even just spending that formative time immersed in the immense history and tradition of the place – wonderful. One of the best experiences I could have had. Altogether it was resoundingly half-successful.

Two factors, however, combined to pull my academic performance so low: me and them. The “me” part is that I didn’t work, and the “them” part is that my tutors didn’t give a toss. After I first left the university I spent some years blaming myself. It was, after all, me, myself, I, that did not work. Later, after I myself had trained and worked in education, as a schoolteacher and FE lecturer at Sandwell College, I came to see another factor, namely that the standard of tutoring I had received was appalling. Yes, I don’t doubt the academic abilities of those concerned, but in terms of education, their performance was, by the standards to which I had been trained, the standards expected, for instance, of a BTEC lecturer, nothing short of laughable. In more recent years I have rather got over blaming the College. It was a partnership, and both sides failed. We can therefore be friends. Which brings us back to the Australian Club.

Marek Kwiatkowski, picture from Christ Church website

Marek Kwiatkowski from the Development and Alumni Office at Christ Church was here in Sydney to meet old members. The ultimate motivation for the exercise is probably raising money, but that was not the focus of the meeting, most of which was given over to socializing over wine and nibbles, during which Marek praised the tutorial system. He described it as the “Oxford brand”, one of the keys to the university’s greatness, and asked us what we thought. I answered. I do in fact accept that, when it works well, the tutorial system can be extraordinarily helpful. It’s expensive, but it provides an opportunity for an engagement in the intellectual endeavour far, far beyond that achieved through lectures and term papers. But it is very private. There were, for instance, I am sure, no weekly staff meetings to discuss students’ progress, no inspections as far as I know of the tutors’ records of their tutorials. Were such records even made, let alone perused by anyone higher up the responisbility tree? I doubt it. So when the system is allowed to drift rudderless, as it did in my case, it can go a very long way off its intended route without anyone being at all aware. In essence, my three year technique was as follows.

1. Don’t really work
2. Spend half an hour shortly before any given tutorial spotting some question to do with the topic.
3. Take this fig-leaf to the tutorial and ask it within the first few minutes.
   (So far I am to blame. But…)
4. Watch the tutor sieze this question with relief – now he can ramble on about this for most of the next hour without engaging with questions such as whether the student has worked, whether he has learnt anything, whether he has understood anything, whether he is coming to terms with his studies in general or with university life, or even whether he has worked through the week’s assigned problems properly. Heaven forfend that matters such as whether the student is motivated or happy should be the subject of whispers!

There is an argument that I may have been fairly clever when on the hunt for a fig-leaf. Possibly. But was I the first clever undergraduate to have a wobbly motivation? Hardly. Did the tutor not have at least some responsibility for monitoring our progress? Assuredly. But that task was left entirely neglected.

These criticisms have little importance now, of course, as the water long ago passed under the bridge and down to the briny pool. It was nice, nevertheless, to be able to express these criticisms in an open way and to feel that they were understood by someone representing “the House”.

(PS Masculine gender pronouns above are true to the period.)

* The scale from 0 to 10 of 60′s architecture extends, of course, from the merely boring (10) down to the hideous (0). I’d give this place a score of 8 or so.

The paper was outraged! Hugh Jackman tweeted: “Having lunch on the harbor across from the Opera Center. Loving life!”

Why outraged? Because of two things: first the American spelling of “harbor”, when Hughie is supposed to be so very, very Ozzie; and secondly the reference to the “Opera Center”, but this time not because of the American spelling but because there ain’t no such thing – it’s the Opera House. Well we can be fairly sure he used a ghost tweeter, probably from the American film company, so that explains it.

And why is that curious? Because they did not complain about the sickly, posey, shallow, up-your-nosey, stick-in-your-gulletey, empty-headed, look-at-me-I’m-greatey, terrible-tasty tail of the tweet: “Loving life!” Shudder.

Well, smallish, if you count television as part of the world.
Scene:
Our living room in Sydney, yesterday evening. TV is on – a lightweight musical quiz is showing. Each week the quizmaster and two team leaders remain the same, each of the teams has two guests who vary. One of this week’s guests speaks with a lilting Irish accent.

Conversation:
Sarah: We don’t hear enough of that kind of accent, do we?
Me: No, it’s nice isn’t it?
Sarah: Who is it, anyway, do you know?
Me: No idea. But he does remind me a lot of Andy Moore.

Andy is an estate agent in Cork city. He is also a Buddhist and a very witty guy. I got to know him a bit in 2000 when I went with a dozen or more other people from Ireland to a week of teachings from HH Dalai Lama in the south of France, organized by Lerab Ling. A fun trip, that was, really! Here is Andy, from his website:

Interestingly enough, he is also the brother of Christy Moore, who is so famous in Ireland that Irish readers might even be surprised that I have to explain that. In the rest of the world he is known only to a minority, though I for one remember seeing him in the 1960s in the folk club in Oxford (Heritage, it was called) when he was just a poor boy with a suitcase in his hand travelling from gig to gig. But in Ireland, he is an icon.

So, programme rolls on, the Irish guy sings (really well, I thought), and eventually we get to the credits: it’s Luka Bloom! No wonder he reminded me of Andy – they are brothers! Luka Bloom is the stage name of Barry Moore, brother to Andy and Christy.

Well that wasn’t very exciting was it, but it was amusing at the time. I swear it.

It’s the late summer and the successful female orb-spinners have grown fat. The strings of discarded prey advertise their success and demonstrate the majestic scale of their palaces. So when you walk down the path between the bushes, those who don’t like spiders should not look up.

Like most pictures on this blog, you can click for a closer view, but again those who do not like spiders should not enlarge the picture below – the detailed view has more resolution than I usually use. The bodies of the big ones can easily be bigger than my thumbnail!

Here is a picture of part of our street this morning. This is nothing unusual.

I’ve mailed the distributor with the suggestion that they might apologize. I’ll let you know if they do!

Well if not a prize, an honorable mention at least.

There is a well known saying attributed to Lord Acton in the late 19th century along the lines of “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. I am looking for an equally pithy phrase to express the fact that secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid.

I’m not sure how many non-Australian readers will remember the Haneef case that I mentioned in 2007 in this old message. Actually that’s a collection of old bits and pieces, so if you go there you will have to search down for “Haneef” – alternatively you can just Google the name. The point is that the way the case was handled turned the Australian Federal Police into a laughing stock, and did the same for the Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews. All the authorities tried to hide their puerile bad judgement behind official secrecy. It would probably be fair to say that the atrocious handling of Dr Haneef was one of many things that led the public to perceive the Howard Government as out-of-touch, and more interested in their own status and power than in doing things properly. I daresay it even contributed to Howard’s party’s trouncing at the election, so perhaps there really is a small silver lining for every cloud, eh?

Now we have a new example in the mandatory Internet filtering proposed by the government. It is acknowledged by almost everyone that the proposed scheme could cripple the Internet here (which is not the hottest service anyway), and that it would not in fact make any significant dent in the circulation of child pornography, since seriously illegal material is passed around by methods other than the web. Every right-thinking person is of course offended by child pornography, and this is the cloak being used to push the scheme. But we know governments, don’t we? After child pornography it will be ordinary pornography, then anything about euthanasia, then things that the government finds highly sensitive and embarassing… and on it goes.

The funny thing though is that the existing secret blacklist of sites that are being used for the “trials” by a small and shrinking number of ISPs (Australia’s third largest internet provider, iiNet, has just withdrawn from the trials, saying it could not “reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility”) has recently been made public, and can be obtained from well-known sites such as Wikileaks. Somebody at the paper has taken the trouble to look at the sites on this list, and it turns out to contain “a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.” In other words, if an office junior with basic internet skills had been told to go off and browse for a week to find a few sites to ban, they would not have earnt much credit for coming up with this list! Some of the porn sites may be in what many of us may find in bad taste, but isn’t it up to us to make our own minds up there?

The Communications Minister responsible for this display of childish idiocy, Stephen Conroy, is, would you believe, not just a Catholic but a member of Opus Dei! Look him up in Wikipedia.

So an honorable mention will be awarded to whoever can come up with a really pithy version of “secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid”.

Much of the information here is thanks to the SMH.

Revisiting March 10:

Loud chanting of battle cries, lots of cameras – when people have suffered, it’s hardly surprising that younger demonstrators can get carried away by the urge to somehow, anyhow do something!

Woke up before the 4:00 a.m. alarm to catch the bus down to Central Station for 5:00. The Sydney contingent was two full coaches plus a minibus. Dozing on the 4-hour trip to Canberra was slightly successful. Arrived late.

There were speeches outside Parliament House, a march to the Chinese Embassy, a touch of rabble-rousing chant, just enough to get some young ones to try to rush the police line, which makes for more dramatic footage. Chants like “Shame, Shame – China Shame”, “Stop Killing – In Tibet”, “Stop Torture – In Tibet”, some silence, some songs.

And that was it really. What’s the point? I think just being there to be counted usually has a point, though it’s obviously very indirect.

Thanks to a series of coincidences we got invited to a free lunch on the Arcadia. (I suppose P&O are still trying to improve their image after the sorry Dianne Brimble story). A tour of the ship followed. I was a barnacle in tow with Sarah who was there as the daughter of her father, Les, who had very fond memories of a trip many years ago with some of the other friends at our table.

The name of the ship was historically important to Australia – I think quite a number of the Ten Pound Poms, for instance, came on an earlier bearer of the name. To be sure there are a lot of people with better reasons to have been there, but that was the luck of the draw. Note the cameras and media presence in the slide show!

Facit: food not at all bad, service excellent. What would those Victorian gentlemen who amused themselves dreaming up plurals call a large assembly of waiters? A canteen?

There is nothing I can add. It’s very sad.