The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

At the beginning of the year I made a few attempts at New Year's Resolutions. I am not really into doing the NY resolution thing since I prefer to be a slow and steady plodder relying on habit rather than motivation to get stuff done. But I did think that a clean slate would be the perfect opportunity to develop some better bed time habits. So basically I set out to be curled up in the serpent sack by 11pm each evening. Now I have to cackle evilly. Be careful what you wish for. I did slowly and steadily drag myself away from the Big Mac, Twitter and an assortment of online distractions but before long I would not even have to try.

( The Slack Serpent )

What!
No BIRDIES!




So the lights are down in the HATE HOUSE

Meanwhile, Meidas have come up with their best advert yet


Sarah Kendzior has been a voice in the wilderness for the last 5 years.
For all that time, she has been posting a quote from a Fox 'news' interview from February 2014
(It's FUX so he can't claim it's FAKE)

“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a .... you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

It has been a crazy week with not just the real world burning but a bunch of some scary and some significant anniversaries (2016 USA election, Armistice Day, Reichskristallnacht, the fall of the Berlin Wall, even the Russian Revolution which no one wants to talk about these days)

Normally I would be getting all nostalgic and spending ages wandering down Memory Lane but Dursleyish DIVORCE dramas have rather got in the way of that.

In the meantime, David Rowe has excelled himself with his cutting cartoons. His is the one Twitter account that I would miss most of all were it to vanish into the black hole like it did a few weeks ago.

Usually his cartoons get around 20 to 30 comments on Twitter but this one is at 200 and still counting.
Long after Scomo is gone from the Lodge, this image will live on as his legacy.








The penny pinching goblins promoting coal and cutting the budget for fire prevention and emergency services will be in for a shock when it comes out that large parts of Australia will soon be uninsurable.
The actuaries are the real canaries in the coal mine. They were the first to notice a link between smoking and cancer, asbestos and other lung diseases and they were on the case of climate change before nearly everyone else because if they screw up their risk assessments then their companies go broke

Once a property becomes uninsurable then no bank will lend against it, house prices will start crashing and where is a whole pile of government revenue going to come from then?

And all that aside from the awful suffering and stress to people and animals due to the heat waves and fiery infernos.

Even without taking into account the dramatically increased fire risks, the increasing number of days over 40C will just sizzle all green and growing things. Even the old trees are now keeling over from heat stress and thirst.

It has been an unusually mild summer. Not one single solitary day over 40c when we normally get 4 or 5 of them
In fact I do not remember such mild weather ever since coming to Oz back in 1993
And then there was the Fringe Festival. 30 decadent days of freak shows and weirdos.
Got to see 18 shows this year. Had saved up a war chest for the occasion but kept on fringe bingeing even when it was empty. The old plastic fantastic to the rescue
But unlike previous years, barely a squeak about them because in spite of all these wonderful things, the best way to describe the last few months would be
“But apart from that Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”

( The Elephant in the Room )

When last month's squiggling frenzy ended, got to thinking that December marks not just the end of Nanowrimo but the beginning of a month with a lot of awful anniversaries. One of them long before my time was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. That got a big look in this year due to the 75th anniversary. It turns out to share the date with the murder of John Lennon way back in 1980.


Of course all of that is ancient history but recently is also a festival of misery. There was the Sandy Hook school massacre back in December 2012. It is frightening to think that even the senseless deaths of so many school children did not trigger a change of heart in the government and public of the USA and certainly not the NRA. Australia had it's own creepy crawly gun man who took hostages at the Lindt cafe in Sydney back in 2014 and hitched his egotistical power trips to the ISIS bandwagon.
Then yet another pair of ISIS wannabees mowed down a bunch of people at a Christmas party last year in San Bernadino California.

And now there is barely time to remember the dead when a whole bunch of new atrocities fill the airwaves and the television screens.
Even when not having a television, it is almost impossible to escape them.

Putin must have studied his Master Stalin well. For he was reputed to have said that one death is a tragedy but a millions deaths are merely statistics.

The scale of the destruction in Syria and Allepo in particular is just too enormous for the normal person to comprehend. But watching a man giving a speech at an art gallery who is shot in the back in cold blood while his killer does a victory dance that would not be out of place in Saturday Night Fever - it was just plain creepy. Even if Andrei Karlov was a minion of Putin and personally responsible for bombing Alleppo back to the stone age which he most likely wasn't, it is still a ghastly way to die.

But the creepiest so far - it sort of reminded me of what the Americans call 9/11. Now that the jihadists find it so much harder to hijack planes they are getting desperate and resorting to hijacking trucks to use as weapons.

The attack was uncannily similar to the one in Nice which has now of course forever tainted Bastille Day for the French.

And now the miserable puritanical Islamic fundamentalists have trashed the wonderful Weihnachtsmarkt. No one does Christmas quite like the Germans. I still get nostalgic for the four years I spent Christmas there even while now being a card carrying member of the Grinch Club. Maybe that is why I signed up. The Oz attempts at doing Christmas are just so sad and pathetic in comparison and pretending that it is winter in the middle of summer just emphasizes the awfulness.

It must have been awful for the Polish truck driver Lukasz Urban who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and for his boss who was following the progress of the truck almost in real time and his wife who was getting no replies to her phone calls.

Now Germany will have to copy France and Belgium with extra security measures.

Then there's 21st December which as well as being the solstice is also the anniversary of the Lockerbie terrorist bombing. That seems like centuries ago except of course for the relatives for whom it will always be like yesterday.

Past or present. All paths lead to doom and gloom in December. Here's hoping that the future will not get tainted too. But since fumble fingered potty mouthed petty and vindictive Tyrant Trump and his Schnurrbart minions will soon get his paws on the nuclear codes, the odds are not exactly in our favour.

(sorry for the lack of alt text - every time I add it the HTML nazis get nasty and nitpicky. It did read "Lady Liberty got laid and now she's got a terminal case of the pox")

I was glued to the radio all day on Wednesday and listened as a certain some one took the podium and made his acceptance speech.
All humility, graciousness, bridge building and bucket loads of lofty idealism.
Izzie was not convinced.

It was so amusing, actually sickening to hear a man who has spent most of his life and certainly the last 18 months striking matches and pouring petrol everywhere - the human Molotov Cocktail and now he's donning the fireman's hat and is going to save the planet. As some previous commentators said - Trump isn't running for President, he's running to be Batman.

I wonder how long it will take before the Real fear mongering rage filled hissing snarling Donald Trump will return to true form.


Such a lowlife shameless charlatan bully is now being richly rewarded for his appalling behaviour. I suspect that even he is astonished to have gotten so far. What is so worrying is that his ego is just far too enormous to ever allow him to seek out and take advice from people who are smarter than him and who might actually compensate for his total lack of competence.
To find so much rage, malice and incompetence together in some one on the cusp of so much power is truly frightening.

( One Wicked Wednesday )

And now in this time of darkness, the prophet of Doom has departed this mortal coil. We will have to walk the valley of shadows alone.

Once again another musical legend bites the dust.
When Trump's Tower of Babble has long crumbled to dust, the Tower of Song will live on.

It’s been all gloom and doom over the last week or so.


It started with the sad saga of the slimy Stanford Squid which was the tale of the day not just in Cyberia but even in the local news and views circuit.
Back in the 1950s a 14 year old boy could get killed for wolf whistling or chatting up a woman. In these more enlightened and progressive times, a student can rape an unconscious woman (and likely spike her drink beforehand) and be handed down the draconian penalty of 6 months in jail reduced to 3 for good behaviour and have his family and friends all testify about what a nice decent upstanding citizen he is. And of course the clincher - he is good at swimming.

But the worst of it was how this perpetrator is presented as some poor innocent victim more to be pitied than punished.
Since such cases are not just confined to the USA but happen in Australia too, then it cannot be seen as just another example of irrational American logic. I guess male logic better fits the bill.

There seems to be an epidemic of pity parties these days. Miserable Muslim morons who get so offended by cartoons that they feel the need to murder the artists and still see themselves as more sinned against than sinning. Any normal human being would either get over it or hit back with an even better cartoon. A crazy couple in California who crash a Christmas party with guns and consider killing infidels to be a more worthy and higher calling than caring for their own kid and now of course the icing on the cake this week with the murder of all those people at a night club in Florida.

Once again some useless loser dickhead with an inflated sense of his own importance has hitched his wagon to the latest freak show in town as a way of justifying his meaningless existence.
I could only think that the constant repetition of the mantra “The worst mass shooting in recent USA history” is almost like throwing the gauntlet to the next nut job like this is some giant game and that 50 is the score to beat on the giant leaderboard in the sky and one wonders how bad things were in not so recent history when even this horrifically high number was surpassed.

The more I hear about this creep, the more he appears to have in common with the other one in Norway and the one we had here in Australia who took hostages in the Lindt cafe in Sydney back in December 2014. He spent his life proclaiming that everyone was out to get him. His wife was not so lucky as the Afghan lady because she did not survive his murderous rage. He was constantly before the courts prosecuting vexatious claims and sending nasty letters to the families of dead soldiers of the sort that would make him worthy to be a card carrying member of the Westboro Baptist Church. In spite of a litany of such dodgy behaviour he was still free to slink about the streets of Sydney and to inflict his peculiar brand of misery on its citizens. Being Iranian, he was far more likely to be from the Shia side of the fence but was smart enough to know that the mere mention of affiliation with Islamic State would get him all the attention he craved.
But gun laws are not so lax here so he could not inflict as much damage as quickly.

By now every second rate nobody has worked out that proclaiming allegiance to Islamic State is guaranteed to get lots of attention and free publicity. It’s almost like a franchise willing to sign up every crackpot and nut job with a sick and twisted sense of their (usually HIS) own importance. No loon is too loopy to be accepted into the fold. In fact they will then go and claim after the fact that these creepy crawlies were indeed their minions and that their tentacles are everywhere.

Almost at the same time as the massacre in America, a kid in France is now an orphan thanks to one of these wannabee minions murdering both of his parents. Not only did he kill them in cold blood but to add insult to injury made a 'snuff movie' of the atrocity.

You know the world has gone mad when the only people who claim responsibility for their actions are terrorists and their wannabe associates even when it has nothing to do with them at all.

Of course the Norwegian nut job had a deeply rooted hatred of Islamic extremists but certainly shared their belief that anyone unlike him has no right to exist. But like the Sydney slime ball - it was “All about me”. He apparently held up his hand after all that shooting to complain that the effort had exhausted his poor pretty fingers.

PS I refuse to name these creeps because most of them seem to be after their fifteen minutes of fame. For their names to be recalled while those of their victims sink into oblivion is to give them precisely the attention that they crave.

But there is another one of these miserable male megalomaniacal monsters who does not resort to bullets. His weapons are words and dollar bills. No matter what the situation he can always twist it into an “It’s all about me” scenario.
Maybe he will ride the wave and fan the flames of fear and hate all the way to the White House in November. Maybe then the Mad Mullahs of Islamic State will look like a bunch of 10 year olds at a Ramadan picnic.

Tomorrow evening I will be going to a talk given by Zunar -a Malaysian cartoonist. Here's hoping than none of these sad sooks will gate crash the party.

The serpent has been absent of late. Strange that in the days of having no internet and not even a computer, I was posting far more frequently.
There are just so many distractions these days the worst of which are the dreaded Dementors who paid a very unexpected visit.
March is usually a month that begins with a bang. It is a time of hope and promise as the worst of the sizzling stinking summer is over. There are weeds and seeds to be planted and numerous opportunities to indulge the inner emerald serpent.

Izzie was all chirpy and happy and got lots of stuff done and had all sorts of grand plans. But that all ended in the middle of the month when the weather gods promised and delivered a string of days with a 40 in them with the bonus of some sickly steaming humidity.
February had more than its fair share of 40s but nearly all of them were the dry kind of heat that just makes you thirsty and tired but not totally troppo and grotty. Even Astrofest on Saturday 12th was insufficient to distract this cranky scratchy serpent.
It was a trivial thing but in the midst of the mugginess my wristwatch decided to die. That should be no big deal as there’s always the phone for finding the time. But unlike the young things of today I do not have this infernal object permanently attached to my hand and would constantly need to be looking in my bag to find it. That’s where pockets would come in handy but I don’t have any of those.

So I was running around like a mad March hare constantly worried about being late all the time. Back in 2009 I had a watch die at 6pm on Christmas Eve so it would be another 4 days before there was even a hope of getting a replacement. By then I was so desperate that I went to the first watch shop in the city that I could find and forked out $100 for a new one. I had no time at all for the usual ritual of shopping around and visiting 10 different stores in order to compare prices.
Since then I learned that shops like Target have them in the accessories section and there’s no need to pay more than $25.
That’s just what I did on the Friday evening after work. I could have done so the day before the old grey cells were not even capable of such a simple and logical thought.
Even a couple of sunsets at the beach on the last days of the recent Sculpture by the Sea did not banish the creepy clammy cloaked creatures.
None of the usual weapons worked against them. Sunshine, star gazing and gardening did not banish them. Not even chocolate so the only alternative was to just wait and wait, be a small target and hope they would get bored and go elsewhere. Invariably they always do but by the same token they always return.

The clammy creatures finally departed on Easter Sunday. Which is just as well because a couple of days later the trusty mobile phone started crashing and finally died this evening. I’m pretty peeved at losing all my online Scrabble games but it’s not the complete catastrophe on steroids and end of the world it would have been if the beasties had still been lurking.

I could not help but think of the wise words of Anthony de Mello who claimed that one good way of measuring your spiritual/mental strength is to count the number of times in the course of the day that you become disturbed or upset.
Then there are the toasty glowing times when it feels like being surrounded by a teflon coated shield where an assortment of slings and arrows of outrageous fortune just bounce off and barely cause a scratch.

Maybe contrasting and comparing the two states and watching for the warning signs for each would be a useful exercise in observation and could provide some useful insights.

Today was a time for some serious nostalgia and a visit to the serpent's favourite old lunatic asylum which has been converted into an arts centre.

There's been a bit of a makeover in the garden with a new stage and some tidying up of the wormwood patch which seems to have included removing the wormwood. It sucks when yuppies take over serpent sacred sites.

Out there in the big bad world there's just been so much gloom and doom and creepy crawliness.
If it's not the state government and their mining company minions trashing areas containing significant ancient antiquities then it's that mob in the Middle East smashing old temples and murdering 82 year olds in their zeal to banish from the planet everything that does not reflect their ridiculous and most miserable interpretation of reality.

The idiots in government here then want to use such barbarity as an excuse to indulge in yet more of their own. Instead of bombing Syria back to the stone age maybe they would be of more use allowing some Syrian refugees to come here instead of expecting the European Union to do all the heavy lifting.
It was so weird hearing the news on the 76th anniversary of the start of the second world war that the huddled masses of the world (well the Middle East at least) view Germany as the land of freedom and a fair go. They are literally dying to get there when for so many years it was the place people wanted to escape from.
Just even thinking about those nasty people smugglers' trucks is seriously creepy let alone contemplating how truly desperate one must be to get in them.

Life is such a lottery. I was over in Europe in January this year and could move about freely on planes, trains and trams with no need to be crammed like a sardine and paying exorbitant prices for the privilege yet others who live much nearer to Europe are so unwelcome and go to such desperate measures to get there.

It's one of the most magical times of the year in this bit of Oz. All the wildflowers are presently putting on a most amazing show. Only the most jaded barbarian could fail to appreciate the gorgeousness. Along with the wonderful weeds come the birds with their joyful squawking and cackling. Australia is filled with the most amazing of critters.
Will be off looking at the pretty little critters tomorrow in Kings Park. Was there last Thursday and got to thinking that once a week is simply insufficient at this time of the year.

Even ancient serpents feel the sap rising in early September. Everything is blooming and blossoming and it is wonderful to be alive at this time of year. Magic is afoot.

I was living in Germany in the early 1990s. Around that time there was a spate of firebombings of houses and hostels where Turkish residents were living. One such attack resulted in 5 people being burned to death and the culprits turned out to be a bunch of young white males. Puffed up poppinjays with an inflated sense of entitlement and resentment and the usual line "These people are taking all our jobs and raping our women." They seemed to believe that women are some sort of property and it was no doubt all the fault of those evil Turkish infidels that no German girls were interested in them. More likely because most of them had no job and no prospects of one with such an entitlement mentality.

So when I heard the news of the church shooting in South Carolina, it was with a strange sense of deja vu.

Mass shootings in the United States happen so often that it's almost normal. But this one is different. Not just that yet another poor oppressed young white male guns down a bunch of people just going about their daily business. But he commits this crime in a church where he had been welcomed. He repays this hospitality with a hail of bullets while ranting about how it's all their fault for being BLACK!. "You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go"

That alone is bad enough but it is some of the responses to the massacre that are downright scary. So many people are claiming that this is not a hate crime and has nothing to do with race. It is a mere 'incident' according to one presidential candidate and the most outrageous of all that it is really the fault of the church leaders for not allowing their congregation to carry guns to church!

But it's always the same old pattern. When a young white male goes on a killing rampage, the talk is of 'lone wolves, misfits and mental illness. Other young white men are not expected to apologize or be held accountable in any way and they certainly do not need to fear walking the streets.

The killer in this case appears in nearly all the pictures looking seriously smug, self righteous and pleased with his 15 minutes of fame. He intended to sow the seeds of discord, chaos and mayhem and knew exactly what he was doing. That by any definition should count as an act of terror. If that is madness then there is certainly a method to it.

If he had been an Arab or a Muslim there would likely be absolute outrage at this barbaric act of terrorism, demand for government reprisals and most likely attacks on women wearing head scarves or men wearing turbans.



Jon Stewart summed it up perfectly
No Laughing Matter

Out of curiosity I began reading some of the comments and was absolutely flabbergasted at how quickly they degenerated into a troll fest and a pity party.
Nine members of a Black church have been mercilessly murdered and all some people can say in reply
" Imagine being a white guy during the slavery era, not able to have a house because of all the jobs that are being taken by slaves who get fed and housed."

And that ridiculous comment is positively civilized, mannerly and logical compared to some of the rantings and ravings especially from the NRA and KKK minions

As an outsider I will never understand just what it will take to end the United States love affair with guns. If the murder of 20 school kids and 6 teachers was not enough to change the gun culture then this one is hardly likely to melt the cold hardened hearts of the nasty NRA and their supporters.

And how long will it take before the next American mass shooting makes it to the local news?