Sun 28 Jan 2007
It’s Australia Day again, and time to glorify this great nation with various backhanded compliments and outright insults. We talk about the good and the bad of the wide brown land, then review some good and bad Australian movies: Head On; One Perfect Day; and Candy.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:24 am
O.K. Flemming was a bit of a tosser, but at least he did have the sense to publish a scientific paper on the effect he noticed, which was what Florey and Chain picked up on a decade later.
All this about Florey, but no mention of Florey’s German collaborator, Chain. Whatever. You are right, Florey (and Chain) did the hard work. One thing you didn’t mention was that Chain wanted to patent penicillin, but Florey refused on humanitarian grounds. Florey was honourable to the bone.
Tax the very wealthy? We tried that in the UK in the 1970s, with 98% tax rate on the super-rich; they all just buggered off to other countries.
An Australian film I enjoyed very much was ‘Razorback’, a story of a malevolent wild pig. Whether it had a shred of Oz outback reality in it I don’t know, but it was certainly gripping.
Considering Britain as a bolt-hole when global warming really bites could be a good idea. The papers are forecasting us a 2050 climate like the South of France is now, with the North Sea becoming our Riviera. We already have some citrus and olive groves planted in the south and at last British wine is becoming drinkable (yes, really). Plus, the UK government has just permissioned development of the biggest off-shore wind farm in the world, so global warming won’t be all our fault. You’ll all be most welcome!
January 30th, 2007 at 9:38 am
According to the documentary we saw (I’m not claiming to be an expert), Florey’s two collaborators were Chain and another, English, guy whose name I can’t remember. It suggested that the English collaborator, who didn’t have a doctorate but devised the system which made mass production of penicillin possible, was the one who was hard done by, missing out on a Nobel Prize as he did. He was later awarded an honorary doctorate (I think at Oxford but I may be wrong).
Razorback wasn’t realistic in that there aren’t giant boar terrorising rural Australia (there are wild pigs, but not giant ones, as far as I know), but it is an Australian B-Grade classic. Russell Mulcahy, the director of Razorback, went on to make the Duran Duran Wild Boys music video and another B Grade classic, Highlander, which was a favourite from my teens.
January 30th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
At around 36:30, I noticed Zan almost misspoke. He was trying to think of the name of the Australian scientist who might’ve invented DNA. I’m sorry, Zan, but I think we all know that GOD invented DNA, not some scientist. What were you thinking?
Also, on how safe Australia is, I wonder what the gun laws are like there? I think of Australia as very much like the U.S. in a lot of ways, maybe more than any other country. But I wonder if the gun laws are similar, and it’s just our fault that you’re 100 times more likely to get shot in America. I just watched a Penn & Teller Bullshit episode on gun control where they vehemently opposed gun laws (guns don’t kill people, people kill people) because it’s a basic freedom to own a gun, but I find myself still agreeing with Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine documentary which basically said that other countries are much more strict, sometimes outlawing guns all together. And those countries have (and this is a made-up statistic) 97% fewer gun deaths. I think ours is a paranoid society who can’t be trusted with guns.
And now Jana’s talking about how paranoid Australia is. Well, there you go. Don’t even get me started on the whole child molester scare. They’re the new boogeyman. People are utterly and unreasonably scared of them. A woman I work with says she’s scared when her 14 year old gets home from school before she gets home from work. As if the girl’s going to immediately be raped in the po-dunk nowhere town they live in. We’ve restricted the civil rights of so many sex offenders because it would be political suicide not to. What lawmaker’s going to shoot down the bill that keep sex offenders 1,000 feet away from schools at all times? The state of Georgia has gone so far that there’s hardly anywhere they can live since they can’t be near schools, parks, or bus stops. And our governor in New York started putting sex offenders into mental health facilities once they completed their prison sentence as a way to keep them off the streets in 2005. It’s enough to make you want to write a list of things you hate about your country.
On the films, every time someone said “Head On,” I thought, “Apply directly to the forehead.” American listeners will know what I’m talking about. And I loved hearing about how awful One Perfect Day was. An Australian film I couldn’t make heads or tails of was Sweetie by Jane Campion. It was plain old-fashioned weird. Is that one known at all well in Australia?
January 31st, 2007 at 4:31 am
Ryan said: “other countries are much more strict, sometimes outlawing guns all together. And those countries have (and this is a made-up statistic) 97% fewer gun deaths.”
The UK has ‘the most repressive gun laws in the world’ according to the papers. Basically, ordinary citizens can’t legally have one.
That’s a brilliant guess, as I calculate from this link the figure is actually 96.4%!
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita
But at the other end of the scale, the US is still 96.2% safer than South Africa.
This next document also makes interesting reading on the subject:
http://www.iansa.org/campaigns_events/documents/2006/Statistics-2.pdf
January 31st, 2007 at 10:32 am
Australia has pretty strict gun laws. I don’t know all the ins and outs of them, but basically, you have to show some particular reason you need a gun; ie, something to do with your occupation, like if you are a farmer or something who needs to be able to shoot rabbits and foxes etc. Also, you can own a gun if you are a sports shooter and associated with a club of some kind, but the type of gun you can own is very strictly controlled.
In 1996 we had Australia’s worst mass murder - The Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. More than 40 people were killed by Arthur Bryant at a popular tourist destination. After that, the government banned the sale and ownership of semi-automatic weapons, and there was a huge buy-back scheme, where people were required to hand in their guns.
Obviously, gun lobbyists kicked up a stink, but they are not nearly as numerous or politically influential here as in the US. Mainstream society tends to think of them as fringe-dwelling lunatics, not noble defenders of the right to bear arms. Since the ban, there has not been one incidence of gun-related mass murder in this country, although there were three or four in the five years preceding the ban.
The changes to the gun laws have been one of the few things I approve of Little Johnny Howard doing during his Prime Ministership. Of course, if there was the same kind of resistance here as in the US, never would have happened.
February 1st, 2007 at 4:27 am
“Considering Britain as a bolt-hole when global warming really bites could be a good idea.”
Britain may come out on top, but I think the real winner will be Canada.
“But at the other end of the scale, the US is still 96.2% safer than South Africa.”
When I visited South Africa, I saw that at one of the large casinos near Sun City, there was actually a window (like at the movies where they sell tickets) with a big sign above it saying to line up there to turn in your gun, as firearms were not allowed inside.
February 1st, 2007 at 8:53 am
At Dell in Austin, Texas, according to an article I read a couple of years ago they had a big sign as you enter the production line saying “No guns allowed beyond this point.” This was restated below on the sign in Braille.
The thought of blind gunmen roaming around alternately terrifies and amuses…
February 1st, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Ooops, the Port Arthur gunman was actually Martin Bryant, not Arthur.
February 1st, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Now Arthur Bryant can sue you for defamation of character.
February 2nd, 2007 at 2:22 am
I do believe I remember the shooting spree when it happened and put a blurb in my newspaper about it.
I likely made a comment out loud that it was simply another case of American culture being copycatted overseas. “How unoriginal!” I thought in my jaded manner.
—
For Australia Day, I threw another koala on the barbie and basted it in Fosters. The eucalyptus accents always keeps my guests guessing what spices I used.
March 16th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Hi, this is Arthur Bryant. Was someone looking for me?
Just kidding, this is really Vibeeen. Hey, what’s all this about me fluffing of at work, reading news sites? Not so, I’m an unemployed cancer researcher & software engineer.
-V