Painting Fakes

I've just been reading a marvellous book by Tom Fort, fishing correspondent for the British Financial Times (the Financial Times has a fishing correspondent? I hear you ask) called The Book of Eels.   I've always been aware of eels.  One of my early Australian memories is going with my family and some neighbours for a swim and picnic on the Logan River.  Us kids (I must have been about eight) were terrified to discover there was a large eel in the swimming hole, so our neighbour stuck a bit of sausage on the end of his fishing line and five minutes later the eel was writhing furiously in a bucket.  Later attempts at eel capture were less successful.  My mates and I used to play down at Stable Swamp Creek behind the Sunnybank train station.  Once during the wet season when the creek was bulging with recent rains we saw a huge eel.  We were convinced it was four feet long.  They can actually grow this big, but it's also possible it grew in the telling.  We went back late

So, the weirdest of elections just got nasty.  Not only did the Queensland Labor Party lose the house (which was expected) they lost the furniture (which was always possible) and their clothes as well.  In an 89 seat house they look like they'll have a maximum of 9 members.  One of these, former Premier Anna Bligh, has already announced her resignation from Parliament.  Far from losing in Ashgrove and leaving the rabble to govern themselves, President-elect Newman won easily with nearly twice the swing he needed and now gets to lead the biggest rabble in the history of the Queensland Parliament.  Labor's deperate last minute plea to voters to provide a decent opposition and their reported tactic of pretending to be Greens and handing out how-to-vote cards with themselves as second preference were to no avail.  Of course we've known for a long time that the Labor Government was on its last legs, but this is unprecedented.  I'd like to be able to say something witty a

The end is nigh for one of the weirdest election campaigns I have ever witnessed.  My poor sitting local member Simon Finn, who Anthony Green's Election Tracker says will narrowly lose his previously safe seat according to the March 16 Galaxy poll, must be exhausted after weeks of listening, acting and getting results.  To all appearances he has had to do it on his own, with the Labor Party presence on his flyers getting so small that it has disappeared from some of them altogether - like this one where his mock ballot paper does not show his party affiliation even though the real one will.  Still, someone must be footing the bill for all these flyers. Meanwhile in another first in my 32 years as a Queensland elector, I can now tell you the result ahead of time because in a break with normal protocol, the Labor Party has officially conceded before election day.  The concession has come in the form of flyer addressed to my wife, which appears below.  They know they'

Here's a little something which appeared in my letterbox this morning.  It looks like an environmental flyer, doesn't it?  I'm not sure who it comes from because contrary to Section 181 of the Queensland Electoral Act 1992, it doesn't contain a name or contact details of the person who authorised it.  However, it does bear a few clues. Firstly, one column talks about "Simon Finn and Labor", while the other talks about "Campbell Newman's LNP".  So which party is promoting the identity of its local candidates while trying to smear the man attempting to become President of Queensland ? Secondly, you may notice that we are not explicitly urged to vote for any particular candidate - not, for instance, Greens candidate Libby Connors whose properly authorised flyer also arrived today.  So this is clearly not a Greens pamphlet.  It is certainly not a piece of LNP advertising.  We are, however, not very subtly encouraged to give our preference t

Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God is a sustained critique of the concept of Biblical inerrancy, particularly as outlined in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  Stark is a young Bible scholar whose origins lie in the Stone-Campbell movement , a 19th century church reform movement which led, among other things, to the creation of the Churches of Christ.  Those who have had anything to do with members of this branch of the church will know them as conservative Evangelicals with a strong congregational ethos and (at least theoretically) a focus on ecumenism.  Stark was brought up on the idea of inerrancy, so in a sense this book is his "coming out". He cites many of the problems with inerrancy that will be familiar to readers of this blog.  He finds it impossible to read the Bible without seeing its mutiple points of view, its variants on the same story, its factual discrepancies.  The early chapters of this book focus on these questions, and the internal cont

It's two weeks until the Queensland Election and the contest is an interesting study in contrasts.  In the blue corner we have perhaps the most Presidential campaign in Australian history.  Campbell Newman, the LNP leader, is not even a member of Parliament , trying to gain a 7% swing in Ashgrove as well as lead his party to success.  The campaign is all about Newman.  The LNP campaign slogan is his nick-name, "Can-Do", usually said in a slightly ironic tone.  His party is not bidding to be the government, it is bidding to make him the Premier. Meanwhile in the pale pink corner, beyond the daily media grind the Labor campaign is just the opposite.  Premier Anna Bligh is all but invisible in local campaign material, the focus firmly on the local candidates.  This is most obvious in the seat of Ashgrove, where Newman's bid for a seat is opposed by the " Keep Kate " campaign.  Labour MP Kate Jones quit her cabinet post almost a year ago to devote herself to

In the rush to congratulate Julia Gillard on the coup of enticing Bob Carr to take on the role of Foreign Minister, no-one seems to have noticed that this is another sign of the Americanisation of Australian politics.  Even conservative critics are lauding the choice of Carr, one of the most able and intelligent men in Australian politics.  They are also, albeit sometimes backhandedly, expressing admiration for the fact that Gillard was able to assert her authority, over some apparent cabinet resistance, to make it happen. Here in Queensland we are in mid-election, and the man most likely to become our next Premier is not even a member of the current parliament , running a Presidential campaign which, almost as a sidelight, includes the need to win his own electorate.  I've been whingeing about this issue for a while, so let me do so again in relation to Carr's appointment. The issue is not whether Carr will make a good Foreign Minister.  Chances are he will, although h

My daughter recently introduced me to Elfriede Jelinek .  It was not so much a recommendation as a complaint.  Having run out of subjects that interested her she was forced to study postmodern literature to complete her major.  Jelinek's Women as Lovers was on the reading list.  I said it sounded interesting.  She handed it to me and said "it's all yours". It was interesting, too.  Jelinek is a Viennese novelist and plawright, largely unknown outside the German-speaking world until the 2004 Nobel Literature Prize thrust her reluctantly into the global spotlight.  The Nobel judges cited her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." I suppose that's one way of putting it.  Women as Lovers, written in 1974 but not translated into English until 20 years later, is a parody of the romance novel.  It traces the courtshi

As I was making my lunch today, I noticed the label on the margarine container (pictured).  It occured to me to ask - why are the large bold words "Lowers Cholesterol" followed by the small-type word "absorption"? I'm sure you don't need me to labour the answer.  The message the Unilever marketing department wants me to get from the package is not the literal meaning of the words, even though these are actually the truth.  They want me to get the much more hopeful (but untrue) message in bold type. Meanwhile, having survived floods, cyclones and the GFC, the Queensland Labor Party is faced with what may be the biggest disaster of them all, a landslide at the March 24 State election.  Forecasts indicate mass unemployment for current Labor members of parliament. Cue the arrival of some marketing material from my local MP, Simon Finn.  Mr Finn's name and smiling face loom large on the flyer, listening carefully to local constituents, acting on local

I first heard of Francis Collins in Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , where his faith journey served as a contrast for Shermer's own journey from evangelical Christianity to atheism.   The Language of God is Collins' own telling of that story, along with his reflections on the relationship between science and faith. Collins is famous for his role as the director of the Human Genome Project, in which a host of geneticists pooled their efforts to develop a complete map of the human genome.  He is also a committed evangelical Christian, and this makes him something of a poster boy for the idea that Christianity and science can be compatible.  After all, if such a distinguished scientist is also a believer then faith must be smart. The Language of God opens with his own description of his conversion.  Brought up in a non-religious household, he more or less drifted into atheism as the default option for a budding scientist, before his switch to medicine brought him i

The final fall story in Genesis is the story of the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11:1-9.  Here it is. 1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped

For the past couple of weeks I've been obsessing about Richard and Linda Thompson , and in particular their beautiful song A Heart Needs a Home. Richard and Linda first met around 1969.  Richard was already famous as the guitarist and sometime songwriter with folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention, his guitar playing reportedly the reason for their initial recording contract.  Linda, then performing as Linda Peters, was a struggling singer,  recording advertising jingles and doing folk club gigs in the evenings. In 1971 Richard left Fairport, seeking more scope for his own songwriting.  In between earning his living as a session player he recorded his first album, Henry the Human Fly, with a band that included Linda as a backing vocalist.  By the end of 1972 the couple were married and officially performing as a duet.  Richard had found his muse and Linda her voice and a set of songs to sing.  Of course it was not an entirely equal partnership.  Richard wrote the songs,