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Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. After Amanda and Dogpossum and hearing Adam Spencer play the awesome How Can I Let a Good Man Down? a few weeks ago I’m hooked. Now I don’t dance (as in can’t and won’t) but Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings make strange sensations in my feet and hips.

Watch, listen and enjoy.
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One thing I like about having new blogging digs is that if you wait long enough, you can recycle your posts. Which is rather depressing when it relates to the greatest Prime Minister who wasn’t because he didn’t have the balls to stand up and be counted.

On Australia Day, Peter Costello gave an address to Catch the Fire ministries. For those with a keen eye in regards to the mingling of stupid politicians and stupid Christians, the leader of Catch the Fire, Danny Nalliah, “prepared” Costello to be Prime Minister before the Federal Election in November 2007. Check out a prophetical pathetic post in regards to the 2007 Federal election.

It’sobvious who God voted ended up voting for. That must have really hurt.

In Costello’s message, he states that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of Australian society and laws. Utter rot. But instead of having to rehash this issue, over the fold I’ll just repost something I wrote in 2005 with a few edits. The argument from then is very much relevant to the now.

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Quite simple. Play unaccompanied Hawaiian lap steel guitar.

Earlier today I was learning a few bars from Aloha Oe Blues, a 1927 song by David Naphihi Burrows. I was digging the slides, hula picks when The Beloved had enough. She gave me an air cooler to ease the heat and closed my door.

Now it could be a critique of my playing then again, The Beloved has no problems me working up  Leo Kottke’s version of Jesu. That is regular finger picking.
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Today (January 26th) is Australia Day. All across the nation, the traditional segregarion of the sexes based on barbecue duties will occur. Oh, and there will be plenty of beer.

There is nothing wrong with a few burnt snags (or lamb of course) and beers to celebrate this fine nation. And thankfully the jingoistic nature of Australia Day that emerged during the Howard years will subside. Australia Day as it currently falls is rightly viewed as “Invasion Day” by our indigenous community. With that in mind, Australian of the Year, idingenous leader Mick Dobson calling on Australia to reconsider moving Australia Day to a date that is inclusive of all Australians.

Dobson’s call will get the predictably get the perpetually outraged right wingers all upset.  And then there is the younger generation who that sport “Aussie Pride” stickers or tattoos and wear the flag as a cloak of patriotism. They  equate pride in your nation as being xenophobic and using violence as an acceptable means of articulating their paranoia. They are an example of what Australia Day shouldn’t be. A relaxed and comfortable indulgence with no view to the past and a narrow, fearful vision of the future.

For if Australia Day is the one day where we can’t discuss what it means to the Australia, warts and all, then when can we do it? It is not un-Australian to question what it is to be Australian. Those that do offer a far better service to our nation that those that blindly try and suppress dissent with the absolute directive of “love it or leave it” and remain dismissive of any concerns of how this nation was made.

A critical examination of the nation does no harm. In fact, it will make us a better country.

A pulsating codpiece. A flashing brassiere. Fire in the disco, fire in the gates of hell. Disco metal that is perversely entertaining.  I give you Electric Six and Danger! High Voltage from 2003.

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Now, I’m not sure how Dave will take this but I sorta liked Dana Perino, the final press secretary of the Bush administration.

It is a strange feeling as it is quite easy to dislike a Bush press secretary. Ari Fleischer, Scott McClellan and Tony Snow were all great at their jobs and hence despised. McClellan more so as he only found his conscience after he left the White House.

But Perino, mainly because of a few appearances on The Daily Show, came across as a likeable person. That is not to say she wasn’t an expert and dissembling the White House line and believing in the improbable. Oh no, a Daily Kos dairy has some of her greatest spins.

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Say hello to Samir Abu Hamza, a Muslim cleric in Australia who reckons that it is ok for husbands to beat their wives and force them have sex. In the grand tradition of someone being caught spouting ignorant nonsense, he claims that the was misquoted. He also throws in the metaphor defense as well.

Rightly, the Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has slammed the comments of Mr Hamza.  Meanwhile, good Christians are feeling a deserved sense of superiority in regarding their views of women.

But then I came across a post at Echidne of the Snakes about some guy called Dennis Prager who thinks that if a husband wants sex, the wife should submit whether she wants to or not.

Now Prager is not saying the husband has the right to force his wife into having sex. But it is a matter of degrees. If someone thinks that his wife should be ready for sex no matter her mood, the non-consensual sex is not far away.

The comments of Hamza are vile indeed. But that doesn’t mean misogyny is solely an Islamic problem. Prager may be milder in his thoughts but at the heart of both comments beats a shared expression of misogynstic religious values.

Scientist Anne Fausto-Sterling has written a lot about science from feminist perspective. What she has done is shown that a feminist perspective offers are far different view of human behaviour than the macho men/gold-digger scenarios that always get a run in the press (see this article from today).

Beyond Difference is an excellent article that Fausto-Sterling wrote for Alas Poor Darwin, a collection of critiques of evolutionary psychology.

She does a great job of puncturing some of the simplistic arguments that follow evolutionary expectations in regards to women. But she also reminds us that the same simplistic scenarios also condemn men to inflexible caricatures of behaviour as well.

The irrationality of the grosser evolutionary psychology arguments condemn us all.

Well worth the read.

If there was one festival this summer in Sydney that I would have wanted to go to, All Tomorrow’s Parties would have been it. It would have been mainly for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (who I saw in 2005) but The Saints (more curiosity as I was never really into them) and The Laughing Clowns (as I’m a late convert to appreciation of Ed Keupper post Saints).

From the festival some pics have been posted and there is this dynamic shot of Nick Cave posted from the SMH website.

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…are getting a little better. Methane has been discovered on Mars which suggest the presence of microbial life.

Methane can be produced by geological processes (volcanoes for example) but in the case of Mars, methane seems to be replenished at a constant rate. So it appears that it could be farting microbes. Or, if like Earth, Martian cows.

Seriously, if indeed Martian microbes are found then that would be one of the most amazing scientific finds. Life on another planet. But we should be cautious. What happens if the Martian life is something else, far more sinister and no one would have believed in the first decade of the 21st century that

this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

I always hear Richard Burton when I read the above followed by those famous crashing chords.