Painting Fakes

Today's Australian featured an article titled "Belief in Climate Change Dives". At first I was supicious, given that this is a Murdoch paper which devotes more column inches to the views of climate change skeptics than to the crimes of drunken footballers. However, their source for the article is that most impeccable of left-wing papers, the UK Guardian , whose report actually identifies the source of the data! This is essentially a poll of 1000 people between the ages of 16 and 64, and reveals that compared to a similar poll conducted a year ago, the proportion of people who believe that climate change is "definitely" a reality has fallen from 44% to 31%, while the proportion believing the problem is exaggerated increased from 15% to 30%. It also references a recent BBC poll with similar results. There are two candidates mentioned as the reason for this change although neither is conclusive Climate science has had some bad PR lately, with leaking of snarky e-...

I've been playing guitar long enough to know I'll never be much good at at. I always enjoy listening to a really good guitarist, and some of my all time favourite artists are people who can play guitar parts I can hardly dream of playing. Lately I've been enjoying Jeff Lang's new CD, "Chimeradour", as I always enjoy pretty much everything he does. First and foremost Lang is a guitarists' guitarist. He has a devoted following which I suspect includes way more than the average proportion of wannabe guitar players like me. He's essentially a blues player, but if that label conjures up stereotype pictures of guys playing 12-bar and singing about their dead dog, think again. Lang skips easily between lap steel, acoustic, electric and resophonic guitars, with intricate parts played in all variety of weird tunings. But I'm not here to write about the technicalities of guitar playing - as if I could! Instead, I want tell you about the stories he tells. Un...

At church recently we've been reading the Book of Ruth, and it's got me thinking about a few things. For those who don't know the story, here's a summary. An Israelite man called Elimelech goes off with his wife Naomi and two sons to live in Moab to escape a famine. While there, the two sons marry Moabite women, then all three men die. Because men owned all the property in their society widows had few means of support,  Naomi decides to return to Israel, where her kinship networks are, and suggests to her daughters-in-law that they should likewise return to their families. One of them agrees, but the other, Ruth, vows to stick with her mother-in-law and go to Israel with her. "Your people shall be my people, your god shall be my god," she says. She claims the protection of the law and kinship networks of Israel. This is a brave and perhaps foolish decision. The Moabites and Israelites were often at war, and various Israelite laws discriminated against fo...