November 30, 2003
Augustine's Quiz for Bloggers Wondering What to Blog About
Three days ago this blog was seven months old. So, to celebrate its birthday, I devised a quiz for me. But if you take out the words me, my and I and substitute you and your, it becomes a quiz for you.
1.
Should I blog about what makes me angry?
2. Or should I blog about what makes me happy
and/or sad?
3. Or should I blog about what I do
and see and hear in my day-to-day life?
4. Or should I report on what others are doing
in their everyday lives?
5. Or should I blog about the Meaning of Life,
the Universe, and Everything?
6. Or should I see if there are Bloggers Anonymous
meetings to cure my addiction to blogging?
My Answers to the above Quiz:
1.
All I have to do is read a newspaper or turn on the TV and
my rage rises like a rocket and keeps on climbing. And there's
enough fuel for a daily or even an hourly blogrant. But,
I ask myself: am I really a natural-born ranter? Isn't my
sputtering rather feeble compared to the inspired apocalyptic
rants being posted by some world class ranters? And I must
admit that, alas, ranting is not what I'm best at.
2.
What makes me happy and/or sad is most often private stuff,
raw material which I may or may not transform into something
which may or may not be art - gnovels, paintings, whatever.
Not regular blogging material, in other words.
3.
No. I don't want to blog about my everyday life. Not
every day. Maybe just once in a while.
4. No. I'm not a good reporter, not objective enough. Too emotional (see
No.1).
5.
Hm. Now that's more like it. That makes my little two
dimensional brain excited. I'll get back to you on that
one.
6.
No. I don't need to be cured. I can stop any time I want.
This proves I'm not addicted.
PS to No.1 : Browsing
recent links at the excellent PLEP I
was led to this
article. Go there now and read it all. And weep. And
rant, if you know how. I am going to light a candle and say a prayer for
this hero, dear Father Dear.
Published on Saturday, November 29, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
The Soldiers At My Front Door by John Dear
" I live in a tiny, remote, impoverished, three block long town in the desert of northeastern New Mexico. Everyone in town--and the whole state--knows that I am against the occupation of Iraq, that I have called for the closing of Los Alamos, and that as a priest, I have been preaching, like the Pope, against the bombing of Baghdad. Last week, it was announced that the local National Guard unit for northeastern New Mexico, based in the nearby Armory, was being deployed to Iraq early next year. I was not surprised when yellow ribbons immediately sprang up after the press conference. But I was surprised the following morning to hear 75 soldiers singing, shouting and screaming as they jogged down Main Street, passed our St. Joseph's church, back and forth around town for an hour. It was 6 a.m., and they woke me up with their war slogans, chants like "Kill! Kill! Kill!" and "Swing your guns from left to right; we can kill those guys all night......"
(you *must* read the rest)
November 26, 2003
To
soothe all our fevered brows, anxious and angry minds, probably
weary limbs and possibly aching hearts, here are two images
of beauty and solace. The first one is of The
Madrigirls, friends of ours here in London, who are not
only individually and collectively more talented than anyone
has a right to be but also drop-dead gorgeous. They are Heloise
Pilkington, Alexandra Brown and Siobhan Blake and yes, this
is an unashamed plug for them, for their voices, their performances.
Yes they sing madrigals, by Monteverdi, William Byrd, Thomas
Morley and many more."Part cabaret, part troubadour,
part girl band glamour..." but always faithful to
the music, its tradition and its spirit. They're planning
to make a record soon but if you happen to be in London on
December 14th you can come to their Magical Medieval Christmas
Bonanza at 6:30 pm in the beautiful setting of St.Mary-on-Paddington
Green, W2, followed by eating and drinking and dancing to
swinging jazz in a nearby venue. Book tickets at their website where
you can also download a few samples of their music.
My
second gift to you today is a picture I took at a pond on Parliament
Hill - not Bloggers Parliament but a good
venue for it if ever we need one - part of Hampstead Heath,
a vast (791 acres) area of semi-wild and wonderful open parkland
in North West London. Lose yourself in the perfect number
3 that the swan has so casually drawn with its reflection.
A propos of how life really is in Iraq, read Doc Searls "Are we building or burning bridges?" (and he's not on the anti-war side) quoting Riverbend writing about Difficult Days in Baghdad Burning.
November 22-23, 2003
"Protesters?
What protesters?" asks
Laura Bush.
( Heading of Guardian
article by Audrey Gillan, November 21, 2003)
Photo: The Independent,/Tim Allen/Reuters Nov.21, 2003
Augustine's
Eyewitness Report of the London Anti-Bush Demonstration on November 20, 2003
PART ONE
At
one point I got stuck in the huge crowd at Trafalgar Square,
unable to move, so I asked for a hand to scale a wall leading
to street level. A whole flurry of hands appeared and lifted
me up and over in an instant - not too hard a task since
I am of minimal stature and negligible weight. Nevertheless,
this spontaneous and cheerful kindness was typical of this
crowd, this day, this place, this demonstration.
And when we began the slow rhythmic countdown: ten...nine...eight...seven...six...
five...four...three...two...ONE!
and the 18ft Bush effigy was pulled down, the roaring cheer that came from
all our throats was powerful enough to fly a rocket to the moon. It was not
a roar of hatred or revenge but one of solidarity, of fellowship, of concern.
The cynics and the mockers and the doubters can say what they like, but that's
what these protests are about: we do care, not just about ourselves
but about all other humans on this wounded planet. We don't want to be forced
to hate, to kill, to take. What we are symbolically toppling are the lies,
the empty words, the blinkered vision, the hypocrisy, the hollow men, like
that statue, who rule our world. Not good enough for us. Another
world is possible. We can see it - why can't they?
We are living in the future, they are in the past, in the eye-for-an-eye
world which has made them blind. Don't they know that the fine words "Democracy" "Freedom" "Justice" are
like sounding brass in their mouths?
I did
take pictures but still have my old fashioned camera so it
will be a while before they're processed. Thousands of people
in the demo had their digital cameras and camcorders working
overtime, and there surely must have been some bloggers among
them, so all of you in far-off places starved of unofficial
images of London during the latest demo, try a patient search
of blogdom. There are some photos at Indymedia
Images and 
here
is one of them, of the noise protest on Wednesday in front
of Buckingham Palace. I wasn't at that one. Apparently the
police got rather over-zealous and there were scuffles. (Dubya
and his missus didn't hear a thing).
At
the big march, all the policemen I smiled at smiled back
at me so sincerely I wished I had brought a big tray of coffee
and cakes to offer them.
It was a mild, grey, windy day when I set out from home around 1pm and took
a bus to Warren Street - the buses didn't go any further because of the crowds
gathering in front of the meeting place, London University. I followed the
rucksacks into Gower Street where large numbers of people were milling about,
looking bewildered. Many of them started to walk in the wrong direction and
I asked a few people why. They said the crowd was already so large that the
front of the march was blocked. I saw some students going into the courtyard
of the university and decided to follow them. I walked behind a life-size
papier maché Dubya puppet who expertly led me through university halls,
up and down stairs, and finally out of a door and directly into Torrington
Place. Brilliant. Now I was able to join what seemed to be the start of the
march but might have been the middle or the tail. We were not actually marching
yet. This lasted for nearly an hour but the mood was good-humoured, villagey,
you felt you knew everybody and they knew you. Lots of salt & pepper
heads, salt heads, and some reallyold one-foot-in-the grave heads, bent over
but still believing that another world is possible.
I wanted to embrace them all. Conversations were started, dropped, started
elsewhere, returned to. Creative homemade placards were noted, admired or
puzzled over: "The Lampstands of Revelation Have the Answer: Where
Are They?" Huh?
"Since when is Democracy dropped from the sky?" Right on!
An enterprising young pop group seized a business opportunity: one of them
was jigging to the music and waving their CD while another collected the
cash. The tune was catchy, something to do with peace.
PART TWO
A blackbearded
man jostles by, shouting into a loudspeaker: "We
don't need Parliament! The people are the parliament! We
need direct democracy!" I almost ask him if he wants
to join Bloggers Parliament but then I think better of it
because he's a bit, erm, overwrought.
And finally we're on the move. After a while I can't tell where we are -
familiar streets are transformed by the river of people flowing through them.
I like to keep changing in midstream, staying for a while under one banner
then floating ahead towards another. A few American flags are waving in the
breeze, some upside down, some covered in slogans, some torn. A tall thin
Texan stands on Westminster Bridge, hiding his head under a brown paper bag,
saying he is tired of guilt by association; his message to Bush is "How
dare you spill so much blood for the sake of a $1.7bn Halliburton contract?" But
a serious, well-dressed American woman stands quietly defiant, holding a
small sign close to her chest "I love U George". A lot of
people, smiling, take her picture. The irony is not lost: we are the protesting
minority, she is part of the acquiescing majority, yet here we are in our
thousands and there she stands, alone.
Two or three helicopters have been hovering over the march all afternoon
and as we head down Whitehall they seem to be closer. But the hooting and
whistling and booing and chanting as we pass Downing Street drowns out the
'copters rattle. As the march slowly approaches our destination, Trafalgar
Square, and more papier maché Bushes go dancing by and the standard "Bush,
Blair, out out out! " slogans are repeated ad infinitum, I begin
to feel that it would have been more appropriate if we had all marched in
silence, dressed in black, carrying as many coffins as the number of those
who have been killed on "our side" and on "their side" as
a direct result of the crusade led by Bush, assisted by Blair, to (as Tony
put it) "finish the job". How many coffins would that have been?
And who could do the body-count of all the anonymous dead, all those who
didn't get and will never get flag-draped coffins, or any coffins at all?
The growing pile we are creating of nameless bones now joining the pile of
nameless bones created by Saddam. But he is Evil and we are Good so the killing
we do is not like the killing he did. After all, there's killing and killing,
terror and terror. We say we're sorry for some of the deaths we cause.
Evil Ones are never sorry. That's the big difference, right?
When
the march crosses Westminster Bridge at dusk, the slate blue
sky a perfect backdrop for Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament
looming proud above the Thames in all their golden glory,
it's easy to forget why we are there.
November 20-21, 2003
Back
home from the march I turn on the TV to see the news and
there is the horror in Istanbul - another tragedy, another
list of dead and wounded and weeping and irreparably damaged
hearts and minds, followed immediately by two men in dark
suits reading prepared speeches, rehearsed expressions on
their bland and famous faces, words about "not giving
an inch", "responding to violence with violence" (by
the way, these two men are rumoured to be Christians). And
I wonder: do they live in a different world from the rest
of us?
I
have just been part of a 100,000 or 200,000 crowd (whichever
estimate you believe) of real people, people with
real expressions on their old, middle-aged and young faces,
with unrehearsed words coming out of their mouths. And all
of us were united in this one feeling:
Enough! Another
world is possible.
As long as we behave in the same way as the terrorists, there will never
be an end to terror. The marching crowd knows this, the millions of people
around the world who are with us know this, those who are suffering and will
suffer from the escalating violence know this, the wise and far-sighted in
high places and low places know this, schoolchildren who walked out of school
to take part in the demonstration know this. But those two men behind the
microphones, and those who applaud their words, do not know this.
Van Gogh: "Au seuil de l'Eternité" (Kroller-Müller
Foundation)
November 19, 2003
If
you see smoke coming out of this page, that's me in incandescent
fury at the unbelievable unforgivable unacceptable incompetence
of this company's "service". Yes they finally connected
us to Broadband today, a saga in itself which I may relate
later after I've cooled off. But at present we can neither
send or receive email so be warned, if you wanted to get
in touch. (update Nov.25: it's working
now but we have a new e-mail address which is showing on
Bloggers Parliament and other pages of this website.)
I'm going to go and have a cold shower or maybe hit my head against the wall.
November 18, 2003
SPREADING THE WORD ABOUT US
Shall
I compare thee to wildfire or to a rolling snowball? The
wondrous grapevine of the blogosphere is fast spreading the
word about us: Roger
Eaton led to Flemming and
Ming's mention led Doc
Searls to give us a great boost and all of this attention,
I'm told, is the blogworld equivalent of an Oscar nomination.
This is very nice but a bit worrying. Will I remain the same
humble, unassuming creature when I'm famous? No, I won't.
I'll point out that fame should have been given to me when
I asked for it, oh quite a while ago. Now, bah, I can take
it or leave it. See, I'm already doing the fake cool thing.
Don't believe a word of it - I'm chuffed (that's British
for WOW).
This week, this Wednesday, I will be connected to broadband. Maybe. I signed up for the service about two months ago and will not describe the blood, sweat and tears which this particular company required before they would grant me the favour of becoming their customer. Let's just say I hope their ADSL connection is more efficient than their administration.
And
on Thursday, I'll be milling in the masses not happy to see
George W. Bush 
in
London. To anyone reading this who thinks that protesters
are anti-Americans wrapped in tired old slogans, let me say:
think again. And again. Yes, there are bound to be some of
those in the crowd and no doubt they'll be singled out by
some in the media who want you to believe that normal, law-abiding,
American-friendly, apple-pie-eating people do not go on demonstrations
- only weirdo hippy losers and Commie intellectuals and rabble
rousing terrorist-supporters go on demos. Well, think again.
Think a lot more.
November 14, 2003
Bloggers Parliament is steadily attracting more members and more attention on the net. We have been mentioned at Ming the Mechanic the Newslog of Flemming Funch, and also at Communities Online and at captsolo info blog. I'm amazed at how this tiny seed of an idea has taken root and is becoming a reality. I hope that N doesn't expect me to take on any secretarial tasks because I will refuse. Do you hear me, Natalie? My fertile imagination cannot be chained to administerial tasks. Here's another fertile imagining regarding spammers, scammers and other pollutants.
HOW TO FOIL 419 FRAUDSTERS AND SAVE THE WORLD AT THE SAME TIME
From the 419 Fraudsters named below, I have recently received offers of about 50% of the following amounts of money in exchange for details of my bank account and absolute secrecy:
Mr. Wang Qin, Honk (sic) Kong: 25 Million 500 thousand Dollars. Mrs. Alsha Fred, Kuwait: 17 Million Dollars. Dr. Samson Umez, West Africa: 6.1 Million Dollars. Mr.Henry Azikei, Nigeria: 15 Million 500 thousand Dollars. Mr.Kenndy Williams, Dubai: 56 Million 500 thousand Dollars. Mrs. Kate Smith, Lotto Chancellor: 1.5 Million Pounds. Mr. Mac Uchi, Nigeria: 26 Million 400 thousand Dollars. Miss Riana Mane, Abidjan: 10 Million Dollars. Justice Oliver, Benin: unspecified sum but huge. Mr. Salatu Mustapha, Nigeria: 6 Million 800 thousand Dollars. Miss Judith Makoulou Ankoh, Benin: 9 Million Dollars. Mr.Philip Samuel, Dubai: 57 Million Dollars. Mr. John Kelu, Liberia: unspecified millions. Dele Oyawa, Nigeria: 9 Million 500 thousand Dollars. Douglas Sanjor, Nigeria: 15 Million 500 thousand Dollars.
I didn't add up the millions but if any of you are quick on a calculator, work it out - quite a tidy sum, right? So here's the plan: we - and again I'm talking about the whole damn blogosphere - reply to all these offers and say: "Yes, thanks, we'll take the money and happily give you our bank account details but first we need to have proof that the money exists. So we will meet you somewhere and you can show us confirmation."
On the appointed day a huge flashmob of us arrives at the specified location and calmly demands that the Fraudsters hand over the loot they have offered us. Bewildered and trembling, the scammers have no alternative but to comply, given the staggering number of us resolutely confronting them. And we get the dosh.
Now here comes the surprise twist: we use this money for the good of the whole world. As follows:
1. We hire a luxury hotel on a remote and stunning tropical island.
2. We charter a fleet of private jets.
3. We invite Bush, Blair, Sharon, Arafat and their entire entourage to an all-expenses paid holiday which will include a get-together with Osama B.L. and Saddam and their entire entourage.
4. Osama and Saddam hear of this and come out of hiding, unable to resist such an offer.
5. We book a top-notch team of psychotherapists, hypnotists, masseurs and masseuses, motivators and life coaches.
6. Everybody accepts and we fly them out to the island paradise.
7. Once settled in the fabulous surroundings, the guests are gently led by the Motivating Team to a jacuzzi haven: tropical birds, sweet scents, delicious drinks, and the mesmerising voices of the hypnotherapists induce a state of carefree benevolence in all the guests.
8. Hypnotherapeutic jacuzzi sessions are alternated with group therapy, massage, one-to-one psychotherapy and party nights.
This program goes on for an indefinite period of time, during which we and qualified others get on with solving the world's problems and creating peace on earth.
November 8, 2003
LET'S
LAUGH SPAM OFF THE NET : Hoisted
with their own petard.
Amongst all the trash I have to delete every day before I can read
my genuine e-mail, there's a lot of spam offering to rid me of spam if I
will purchase their services. And I ask myself: why in heaven's name should
I pay for spam-blocking or spam-cleaning when the very existence of spam
is a crime? A crime like stalking, mugging, obscene phone-calling, assault,
robbery, invasion of privacy, fraud, etc. They spy on us, steal our e-mail
addresses, break into our websites, flood our private space with their rubbish.
Maybe some spam-control systems work fine and maybe spamming will be declared
illegal one day. I discovered SpamCop ,
a good place to report spammers, and this site tells
you how to 'mung' or spam-block your e-mail address so it can't be harvested.
But I've had a more fun idea:
What
would happen if all of us - and I mean hundreds of thousands
of bloggers - started making fun of spammers, using
their own spam, their own words, to laugh them
off the net? For one thing, Google and all the other search
engines would pick up these words from our blogs and that
would create chaos among the spammers because nobody would
know which was their product and which our jolly japes. I'd
like to hear what other people think: could it be a deterrent?
I've made an experimental spamcollage, 
with
special attention to the 419
Fraud gangsters who think I'm an easy touch - they send
me offers of billions of dollars every day, each with a new
see-through tale, a new alias and a new country of origin
- some are even bringing God into their stories. I imagine
them sitting around in their ill-gotten villas, competing
to see who can come up with the best scam, falling off their
chairs laughing as they visualise the suckers who will line
up to offer them full access to their bank accounts. Well,
bloggers, let's show 'em who has the last laugh, heh heh.
Put your creative hats on and start recycling spam in amazing
new ways.
November 4, 2003
A page
with current Bloggers Parliament members' mini-biographies
and photos has been set up and is gradually being filled
as people slowly send them in, after considerable nagging
by N. She gets rather irritated when I remind her that if
one wants to undertake a major project one must expect to
both dish out, and endure, some major nagging. Has anything
of consequence ever been achieved, I point out, without a
lot of nagging? If it's not nagging or being nagged by other
people, it's nagging one's self.
So we put on our red Einstein T-shirt 
and
went to the gym. Let me tell you, it takes a lot of self-nagging to achieve
this, even though said gym is just round the corner and, had we but discipline
enough and time, would be a piece of cake to attend six mornings a week rain
or shine, resulting in a glow of well-being emanating from a perfectly toned
body. Our gym is not one of those posh fitness temples where slim, beautiful
people go to sweat seductively in their designer gear. Ours is a more proletarian
establishment where sweat smells sweaty and agonized grunts from massive
weight lifters mingles with the pounding noise of, what is it? Muzak for
gyms? I said to N that our financial problems would be solved if we could
create one of these noises and sell it to the disco industry. You take any
random word, preferably BAYBEE, chant it a few hundred times whilst
repeatedly thumping any handy hard surface, record it with some techno tweaking,
and Bob's your uncle.
The indefatigable Heather, our friend of SoulFood Cafe fame, is in the throes of producing an inspiration-filled Advent calendar and asked us to contribute something.
November 2, 2003
Every so often I'm overcome by a feeling that everything must change. Not so much in the outside world (yes, that too) but in me. Then I start clearing out closets, bookshelves, drawers, putting things in plastic sacks to take to the charity shop. And that's just the externals. I attempt to do the same with whatever seems superfluous in me. Can't count the number of times in my life that I've decided to start from scratch. This is good. And not so good. It's like being in a permanent state of What shall I be when I grow up? No, that's the wrong image. It's not about immaturity. It's that you sense the picture is not quite right so you keep erasing and erasing. You'll know when it's right but you don't know what you know or how to get to that point when you can say yes! that's it! And it keeps on changing. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Here's something from, um, a few years ago.
(fromAugustine & Identity by Natalie d'Arbeloff, 1986. The Augustine Adventures)
That's another thing I haven't got round to doing - putting more of those comics on my Comics page. And the gnovel, the gnovel! Just because you haven't seen any new pages of it for a while doesn't mean I'm not working on it. I am and in fact, yesterday at the Comic Festival in Bloomsbury, I got up on a stage and pitched my gnovel. Like scriptwriters do in Hollywood only this was for comic artists. Twelve of us had only two minutes - two minutes - each to present our ideas, with some ilustrations, to a panel of comics luminaries and an audience. Didn't have time to do more than skim the surface but I got lots of applause and really good responses. So onward gnovelita, they're waiting for you!
Excellent new members have joined and there's a wonderful mention of Bloggers Parliament at Nick's place. And Kiril also gives us the thumbs up at his Sneakeasys joint though he admits he's a Republican. And we are also mentioned at Steve Cayzer's HP Semantic Blogging Demonstrator. And delightful frizzylogic pays us (me & N) the greatest compliment, saying we are two wild and woolly women! What more can one ask?