KennoJournal

Drama to Spare!

Wait there’s more, let’s get closer!

That’s some tie job!

Thanx, Miss ::m:: it is divine

Shots of Janno in the gear soon to be published….

Dr Rice will be in Auckland on July 26, where she will meet with Prime Minister Helen Clark, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Opposition leader John Key.

A $5000 dollar reward is being offered to any Auckland University student who can make a successful citizen's arrest of Condoleezza for her role in "overseeing the illegal invasion and continued occupation" of Iraq.

Otherwise, she is due to leave New Zealand on Sunday, on route for Samoa where she will speak to ministers from the 16-nations, Pacific Islands Forum.

I don’t know, I have a lot of respect for “CR” I’d have even more I think if she worked for a better boss.  I am kind of sorry that Winston Peters is the mook we sent out to greet her, but being Foreign Minister, I guess he gets dibs.  Winston’s career may be rattling down a very steep hill, in a scandal over alleged donations to his political party, NZ First.  Right now, it looks like he either broke the elections finance Act and didn’t disclose some major donations or he took the cash as Winston Peters First and not NZ First.  If you are really paying attention, you’ll ask how does he get to be a Minister of the Crown if he’s from a Party other than the one that won the election?  Good question.  He promised his Party’s support of Labour in return for a front bench seat.  Helen made a deal with a devil. 

So, why does the “CR” get to meet with the Opposition Leader?  Is this a recognition by Helen that her gig is almost up and labour is gonna loooooose so bad?  Probably not.  John Key is the most conservative guy on the island, but even so, the “CR” will mistake him for a socialist.  My guess is, they brought him in so there’s a hope they will be able to talk about something and understand each other. 

Let me give you an example…

CR:  “I understand that you have denied your citizens the constitutional right to bare arms.  So, how popular is this gun control you talk about?”

JK:  “Well, it’s not very good at all and politically we are loosing ground.”

CR:  “Do tell.”

JK:  “Well, there is a growing number of people in this country who think the police should carry guns.”

Some philosopher once said that non-professional philosophers should just shut the fuck up. They sit in dark rooms and have thoughts, but these thoughts even if they are good, won’t be good. Thinking to yourself he said is a waste of time. Thinking only gets good when it is chewed by people at least as bright as you. Oh, that was his other point, only professional philosophers are bright. Other than these comments of his, I haven’t read anything he has written.

Some guy has an opinion on the New Photography, he said, middle-class white people with fancy DSLR’s are calling photos of poor people art. Other than that opinion, I haven’t seen any of his works.

I once met a woman driven by her art. She had no idea she was an artist, no idea that a muse called her name, she just liked what she saw. She operated an electron-microscope for a living. She hated her employer. She wanted a new job. Fair enough. How about an oil company I said, they do all kind of electronmiscoprocy. Not on my life she said, she found no beauty or truth in oil, like she did in a carcinoma, a microbe or an errant bit of RNA.

I once met a man who didn’t know why. The train he was driving hit a Propane Tanker Truck crossing the tracks into the driver’s home. The explosion evaporated the truck, the driver and his two children who were running out to greet their father. It’s not that I don't care, he said, I just don't feel it like I think I should. This was horrible.

I once met a woman who had been tied to a bed and had a shotgun put in her vagina. She continued to be a nice person who believed in the goodness of others.

I just saw a Man Ray photo of James Joyce, it was an okay portrait. It helped make Man Ray famous. I don’t know why, it was Joyce who was infamous. Man Ray is buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. Part of me would like to sign up. But no.

Life is for the

Sonnet of the garland of roses

Sonnet of the sweet complaint

Wounds of love

Love sleeps in the chest by the poet

Night of love insomne

As Lorca suggests, it must have its concerns

No, a man sitting in the dark alone will not make philosophy. He will no doubt have opinions that should not see the light of morn. He will make no progress to understanding beauty, truth, art, or redemption, but neither shall he be tempted into the comfortable, life does not bequeath comfort.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

Want to visit Wellington from wherever you are?  Okay, it’s not comprehensive, but it is something that you would do if you did visit here.  So, here is you visual video tour…

If you came here, one of the things you would do is take the cable-car (actually a funicular) up the 20 degree incline to the top .  This section is a nice place with the University of Victoria, the met service (National Weather Service), a historic observatory, a historic harbour protection gun, a series of parks and the Botanical gardens.  Once you got up there, you would look around in a 180 degree arch to see the city on the harbour and the terraces that lead you from the city to the sea.  Then you would head back down the cable car and take a bus back to Hobbit Hall, it’s actually a short walk, but you want to see more of the place. 

Let’s start at the top with the newest feature…

Met service has installed a streaming webcam on top of their building.  It pans 180 across the city in real time 24/7.  I just love it! 

STOP ONE:   Weather Webcam (streaming 180 views)

Where is Hobbit Hall? 
As the cam pans from right to left you will see the first tall building, kind of bronze with a white box on top, that’s the IBM building, the tallest in the city.  In the foreground, you can see the quad of Victoria Uni built in the 1930’s.  Hobbit hall lays on a terrace between those two sites.  In this reverse view from a traffic camera (again live) Reverse view Hobbit Hall is located about 45% up from the bottom of the left hand side of the image.  The Met service building is the first and the brown building at the top of the hill if you start following the hill rise from the left side of the image.  If you follow the road sloping down you will see it disappears into a tunnel.  The park above the Tunnel is un-officially called Foible’s Park, it’s a three minute walk from Hobbit Hall.

Now ride the Cable Car to the city,

and take the number 20 up the Terrace to Hobbit Hall.

If you are going to do this little trip, be warned, it’s winter and there’s weather…

STRONG WIND WARNING
TARANAKI TAIHAPE WANGANUI MANAWATU WELLINGTON In the period from Saturday midnight to midday Sunday, southeast winds may gust to around 110 km/h at times in some exposed places.

Wellington warning funded by NZ Government

Also, the weather and traffic cams are in real time, the time at your location may not be real and therefore you may need to come back when it is daylight here to get the full effect. 

We hope you enjoyed your virtual tour of Wellington today.  This is the most environmentally sound way of travelling and especially so to islands in the South Pacific.  Travel like this can save the planet.  Please don’t forget to find other EnZeddy things to enjoy while you take your virtual tour, like our dead and frozen lamb parts in your grocer’s freezer and some EnZed wine.  Oh, the more of that you have the better this tour will seem!

The map of your tour.  This is an interactive map, it should be zoomed into the Cable car track, a thin black diagonal line transecting the The Terrace (The TCE) the street on which Hobbit Hall lives, Upland Rd, at the top, where the Met Service Building is and Lambdon Quay at the bottom, where you caught the bus to come home. The bus took you on Lambton Quay from Willis Street all the way to Bowen Street and around the corner, then up the Terrace.  

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4629994a11.html?source=RSStopstories_20080725

Now that’s the photo I wanted to catch of this swell!

A few days ago, I wanted to photograph something, but being so sick, it would have to be a studio job. Now, if I only had a studio. Naw, wherever there are photons there can be photos, so I decided it would be from right here, the room in which I have spend most of my recovery. Now, what to shoot?

I came up with this theme. Produce a series of photos, all with three or so objects on the same table that reflects the theme of the masculine. Something that says, ah, a fella was here. “Yes, Detective, we are clearly looking for a man.”

I kind of liked the idea, it’s kind of a recapturing of masculinity, not as an evil to driven from the earth (too much grad school for me!) but in a representative post-feminist way of reflective gender. Besides, the neat stuff about guys is the older the guy gets the cooler his guy stuff is.

I know, a lot of it is cliché, or is it, maybe it’s me who’s cliché. It’s my pipe and alabaster tobacco jar, it’s my Greek Fisherman’s cap and tomato, Jan’s grandfather’s cane – I was going for a romantic shot here, old man goes for walk and takes a snack. The Whisky and cigars, well, sort of a trademark of my moderate vices. The pen and rings, oh, evil sources of paternalistic power, yeah, I’m past that crap, I have style, I’ll express it. Is it powerful? I hope so. Living in a country where the male aesthetic is defined by rubber boots and mullets, they are just going to have to learn to live with a city boy in their midst, we can’t all be farmers. The tops and coins? Men will be boys, we always draw to ourselves collections of things we hunt and capture.

I’m not overly enchanted with the results, I’m not sure if it’s because I left it until too late in the day and I was tired, or I’m tired, so I can’t really appreciate the prints.

More on my Flickr page…

There's this little Greek place in this part of town that I can't remember the name of. It's not as Greek as I would like it, but it's not so Greek that they don't want me in there at three in the afternoon for a cup of coffee or a plate of calamari.

It's a nice part of town, full of new migrants and the like, it's near the airport and on the south coast of the island. Boredom brings me here today. Foibles and I haven't been out in the world since I tripped home from Melbourne two weeks ago now. Today this Southerly is busting a move with winds in the 80's. So, Foibles and I are off in the car to do some wave watching. Foibles wonders why I have the temperature in the car at 23, but I think she knows.

The rain is crazy and the waves are dramatic, but not of the height I expected. You can expect a nine meter swell in the Cook straight, with it getting to twenty-three on a really good day. I don't know the water well enough to say where this one is at. I love the look of a breaking wave hitting a rock and having it's top blown off.

I love the drama of the sea. Okay, I didn't get out of the car, but I love the drama. So does Foibles, but she wants to get out of the car. I don't get it, this is the same dog who this morning tried to tell me she didn't need to pee after a 12 hour nap, because the deck was wet and she likes her paws dry. Now she wants to romp in a gale that could lift her off the ground? If I had any real wet weather gear, and I wasn't still sick, I would love to do that with her. Today though, we'll settle for the quainter drama of a photo out the window and me blogging over a plate of calamari and a coffee in a Greek place, not too Greek though.

We'll make the last leg home in the car and tell Janno all about it.

My most recent trend in viewing photos has naturally melded itself around a species I like to call, the New Female Photographer. They tend to be about 25 to 40 years of age, they own reasonably good glass, Canon’s, Nikon’s DSLR, they are savvy with Photo editing software and they are good. The material is post-modern, post-feminist, expressional, often auto-biographical and generally filled with humour. When I reflect on the body of work of this emerging group, it appears to be views of an intelligent mainstream who are comfortable with themselves, expressing that and using technology to do it.

This is clearly not the work of the pre-digital female photographer or the overly self-conscious politically motivated work of the past generation. That work was marked by a stark, humourless, feminist, social realism, with the creative breadth of a Trotskyite Committee Representation of the Art for the Elucidation and Education of the People. Okay, I am talking about a group of gals, some of whom I went to school with, but most of whom where in the teaching seats of the day. Back then, you couldn’t be a serious photographer if you were a woman; you had to be a serious woman photographer. It was a world, where it was felt, that photography had to be broken into, not enjoined or embraced.

Well, that was the nature of photography too. You had to struggle with the physics, the practical technology, the elements, the uncomfortable chemistry and the amazing amount of time it took to learn how to process a good shot. Before you could say what was on your mind, heck, before you could even discover if you had anything on your mind to say, you had to dig deep and do a lot of learning and spend a lot of time and money to do it. My Comrades struggling with solid oak and steel tripods, setting clamps on bellows cameras and shuffling plates, were climbing a mountain to plant a flag, only a few would want to fight through this to find art on the other side.

I have a hunch, that Women over 40 might still be inhibited by this past problem of photography. You have to remember, back in the day, a photograph was an expensive item to produce, the one good shot out of 50, meant two rolls of film, half an hour developing, an hour of proofing and two to three hours of printing, another hour of brush touching and there you had it. In today’s dollars, probably thirty bucks later you had one thing that people near you could look at. You put it on the wall or in an album.

First generation digital was not much better. The cost was huge, the printing poor or very expensive, and the technological learning curve just as large. You did get out of the darkroom though and that was a blessing. In the end, though, you put it on the wall and watched it fade fast or stuck it in an album.

Now, however, we really have something. We have good sensors in good bodies with good glass and you can get there without a second mortgage. We have good software (with the exception of Adobe), reasonable printers for our happy snaps and proofing, good printers around the corner for the big pics and most importantly, Web 2.0. All of this has served to lower the technological topography so if you do have something to say a) you can, b) it’s not so bloody difficult to do that you have to say something serious, and c) when you say it, people all over the world can see it, raw and un-judged and can talk about it. Now that’s what photography should be!

Oh, Adobe Corp, yes you, you are responsible for holding this great movement back with your insistence on ridiculously complex software for the self-serving motive of supporting revenue from service and education streams, when what is needed is simply better software design. Even the crap you put out to amateurs propagates that retrograde elitism that photography is an art open only to those who are willing to endure the mastery of technology first.

Photography is the art of the people and finally, the digital age has made that possible. Now the people can spent their time developing their artistic skills and voices and engage in the dialogues of art across the planet with their photos. This is what I think is energising a group of women into what will be the next significant evolutionary step in self expression and the elimination of a needless gender barrier in the arts.

Hmm.  not as well as I think I thought I was.    I think I’ll hang out here at Hobbit Hall and continue to drive Janno crazy until Monday.  That’s the conventional wisdom.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.  --John Kenneth Galbraith

Yes, four more days of exploring the semantic space between home-fries and hash-browns.  Sensible.

Well, some of the blush has gone off the rose, since this was an act of domestic terrorism and not   international terrorism, but still bona fide terrorism, Canadian Style.  I’ll get to the caveat in a minute.

(Ummm, I had to make a few ammendments here, I am so bad at my own life.)

It was back in old ‘82.  I was still in high school, grade 12 with just my academic year, grade 13 to go.   It was October, I was probably happy.  I was going to school and buy that time, I was likely out of my 40 hour per week fast food and catering gig and was in my second year at the University of Tornonto and working at Sears, I’m not certain of this, but it was around this time.  I had decided to settle down a bit, work less, party less and get better grades, since one of the only things I have ever dreamed for in life was about to come true – I was getting the hell out of high school!   I had really settled down and was very studious, this university stuff was hard work and I was going to get it like nothing before.  This wasn't high school play anymore.

Here’s what I can remember about life at the time:

Long time girl friend, our last good year together if I recall, after which I kept encouraging her to date other guys, she declined and really didn’t seem to get the message, but this is another story.

A big ass old office desk that I inherited from my brother who died seven years earlier.  A bottle of Port or Small Cask Ontario Brandy in the bottom left drawer.  I think this would have been the first year I could legally buy this stuff (after November), but I recall starting to buy hooch a tick earlier than that (like four years)! 

A stereo system on which I endlessly played every album Joni Mitchell had produced to that date, interspersed with a eclectic collection of classical, with preferences at the time towards, Bach, Chopin and the Russians. 

I had $8000 in the bank – an early indication that I would work too hard and have too little time left over to spend it.  I’ve tried to work on this as an adult, but I have only accomplished the ability to spend more faster and still not have the time I really want to play with the toys I acquire (one reason, this week has been fun aside from thinking I was on my way out).

I was an oil painter, who spent a lot of time in the chemistry of colour and painting and paint. 

I had stopped painting and was just working my butt off.  The second year was the requiste courses  for a specailist programme I wanted.

This might have been the year in which my parents left me at home for three months while they went off to England (Oh, another thing one of my nieces will try to deny, I’m sure – but also true).  I do recall not having them around made girl-friend time much nicer. 

In politics, there was a controversy in Canada about how we were getting  too cosy with the US on their nuclear weapons programme.  The hot button of the day was the cruise missile.  The yanks wanted vast stretches of barren flat land over which to test these things without killing to many people and obviously not killing any Americans when they go wrong.  Well, sir, Canada had plenty of that:  huge vast glacier scrapped flat bits with a very low density of Americans who could be killed.  And this is where the story begins…

Most of the opposition to the cruise missile programme was coming from environmentalists who objected to low-level flying objects with rocket engines because they scare the antlers off herds of Caribou, Muskoxen and big fat migratory birds.  I remember, even at the time thinking, it is strange how these “environmentalists” didn’t seem to know that migratory birds don’t have antlers.

There were some reasonable arguments that the cruise could disrupt the balance achieved by the MAD doctrine and that it was a first strike weapon.  It’s easily concealed, designed for rapid deployment from multiple platforms and approaches by stealth. That is the definition of a first strike weapon. But hey, Jimmy Carter had just left the white house, and no one thought of him as a problem, his brother Billy seemed a bigger risk somehow.  Canada wasn’t too happy about Reagan, but we were about détente.  And we were happy about the SALT II treaty, signed with Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev June 1979. This cold war thing was showing a few cracks, maybe, da?

NEIT was the unequivocal answer from a group of home grown terrorists.  We, the Canadian people needed to wake up and smell the plutonium 235!  Right in one of our quiet suburbs of Toronto we were complicit with the American Military-Industrial complex and we had better know about it.  If the truth be known, I don’t think is was widely known that a company called Litton Industries was building guidance systems for cruise missiles in Oakville Ontario until after the attack.  From the QEW highway, you couldn’t see the factory, all you could see was the General Electric Plant that said it made parts for jet engines and industrial light bulbs and had a huge Christmas light show.  There was a smallish plant around back, tucked away with a small square unlighted sign that said Litton Systems. I say it. I was there.

Well, to try to get our attention to these things there was this group of terrorists, see, and they planned to blow-up a demonstration bomb that would draw attention to the issue with the hope of garnering public support not to do this kind of work in this country.  Yes, it sounds very naïve, and it is, but these were the times you see. 

This group had already blown the crap out of a hydro substation that was attached to a project they felt was not environmentally friendly.  They used a car bomb to blow four hydro transformers to smithereens.   Now, if you met any anarchist environmentalist today and asked about blowing four large 1980’s vintage hydro transfers to kingdom-come, they’d tackle you as a daft loon.  Those beasts were filled with Polychlorinated Biphenyls one of the most dangerous toxic substances known to humankind!  Vaporising that stuff is just not a Green extreme thing thing to do!

Enter the  Squamish Five.  They were a loosely coordinated group of  non-Marist Anarchists (i.e. they were okay about blowing stuff up, but they didn’t want to generate a social revolution, were they would personally gain).  So, here’s the caveat, Canadian style. 

Top Secret Urban Guerrilla Memo
by DIRECT ACTION
against
Litton Industries, Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

Goal:  Big Bang, wake up the Canuks Theory!

Platform:  White Econoline Van

Payload:  One box of dynamite stolen in British Columbia

Method: 

1. park in full view of corporate security
2. Duct tape an elaborate "warning box"  to the hood
3. Duct Tape a poster describing your intention to the hood
4. show a digital clock counting down
5. Duct tape a single stick of dynamite to the van
6. call the security desk and warn them of the explosion
7. give instructions on exactly what to do and where the danger area is

I mean, could they be any nicer about it?  To bad, security personnel, suspected a hoax, ten people were injured. 

The bomb was detonated on October 14, 1982. I was home that evening, two miles from the plant, I heard it.  It came on the news as a breaking story.  It caused a stir, it caused a lot of people to question Canada’s role in the cold war, it caused a lot of outrage that people were injured.  It didn’t change how Canadians lived.  General Electric, I remember, didn’t put up a light display that Christmas.  They were not popular anymore.  This had nothing to do with the cold war or politics, they had brought a pox on our house, blood was shed.

I have my first official appointment outside the house today, the first time I will have crossed the threshold in nine days.  I wonder how much the world has changed since I became a hermit monk?

Heavy rain set to batter NZ in coming days
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id...

A storm building over the Tasman Sea is set to strike New Zealand for much of the rest of the week. MetService this morning put out a severe weather…

Just catching up on what otherwise has been a week of physical recovery, but a very good week for the blogging of it.

Man is it raining here! Today is constant buckets. I mean rain of biblical proportions. Evidence of that? Being the highest house in the hood, some guy with a beard is Shepherding animals on pairs onto the deck.

More Wireless Equipment at Hobbit Hall. Just when you thought it couldn’t happen, we’ve become an even brighter star on the electromagnetic spectrum, this time in the 4 GHz band. Turns out, if you want a home security system, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper if you go wireless. It also turns out they now come with wireless key-fob activators, I like that. We haven’t had an alarm in this place since we moved in two years ago, but then there has been someone home most days and at irregular patterns. Me, I’d like to take off a bit more on weekends and we are planning an extended trip in November. Since we got taken off in Toronto, I just feel better knowing the place is buttoned up. There is little in the world that feels as bad as coming home from vacation and finding a cop sitting on your sofa. Crime here is very low, but then we’ve never seen what happens when the economy takes a plunge. I also notice that about every house in our range has an alarm, even the rentals.

Are rethinking Thailand? Well, if they go to war with Cambodia, we will be. This has been a bit of a secret, but Janno and I are planning a trip, not a vacation, a major trip, like three weeks, maybe, somewhere interesting and given our locale, likely somewhere in Asia. Thailand came to mind because of it’s great reputation as a sex tourist destination, because of the Elephants. Janno found us a kind of dude ranch, were you go to look after the baby elephants for days on end, living with the little beasts, I gather. You get up and peel the bananas, they go to the babies, the peels go to the mom’s, then after that, everyone gets a car wash before morning nap and mid-day soccer practice. It sounds like fun, but I’m not really into sports, so I don't know how much I could teach a pachyderm about football.

The other thing is still problematic, but I have recently been convinced that there has been good government cooperation on all sides to reduce Western paedophiles from going there for that sick reason. Oh, don't think for a minute it’s got anything to do with some moral high-ground, it’s economics all the way around. Australia doesn’t want to pick up the tab for a bunch of yahoo’s coming home HIV positive.

I would like to go to Thailand, I’m just not sure this is it. I’d love to see Beijing I could do a week of that, maybe with Singapore as a stopover, then a week on a tropical island and a drive down the coast of Aussie. For Beijing, I’d be happy with a tour, I think that would be best given the amount of stuff to see and the limited time, then some real down time or a totally free drive vacation in Aussie, followed by some tropical downtime with coconut drinks. I’m starting to get excited! Well, this is Janno’s retirement trip, and it’s funded out of her pension. I know she’s too young to retire, but that’s what you get when you sink decades of hard work into some good jobs, she can retire, so she did and we still get to play.

Did this make you hungry for some Thai food? It did for me, but did I mention the rain, and I’m still too sick to go out.

Here’s Kenno’s Pseudo-Pad-Thai lunch. Boil up some fettuccini noodles past al dente almost soft (15 minutes). Meanwhile, stir fry some chopped cold-cuts, in this case ham and chicken in some olive oil with some pumpkin seeds and Thai spices from a grocery store jar. Once the seeds start to pop, add one half can of coconut cream and two heaping tablespoons of peanut butter. Lower the heat to 40% of max and stir, letting the peanut butter melt in the coconut cream. Then add garlic and a hot chili powder (but not the chili powder you would use for Chili con Carne in North America), both to taste. Then drain and stir in the noodles until they are covered with the sauce. If you are lucky enough to have some bean sprouts around, they go in the stir fry in the middle, just before the coconut cream. It’s quick and dirty and made form leftovers in the kitchen but it balances the Thai flavours which are almost always a balance of sweet and sour, hot and garlic. If you think of Thai cooking as this kind of two x two grid, you can’t go wrong.

The health update. It’s coming along… Both eyes open now and this morning neither of them were stuck together with goop. This was the worst part, the itching and pain in the peepers. I can almost swallow, so it feels as if the strep is on the wane. Breathing is still not too easy but I’m less stuffy and my lungs are clearing. I hate that cough until you faint process, but I’m used to it. No more skin lesions either, which is nice, the meds must be doing their tricks. I can sort of track my healing rate and if it is a straight line, I should be functional by next week.

The landlord of the Chocolate Fish Cafe died after being criticised by "rather uninformed" bloggers for the cafe owners' decision to close the business, an inquest has found.

Oh, I can’t wait to see if this is true.  An inquest finding of death by blogging!  That has to be a first in what will become a whole anthropological field of study, like Voodoo death, death by being given the hairy eyeball, the evil eye, shunned, and having a likeness of you stuck with pins!  “Criticised to death!  That’s what happened, mate, by bloggers, I blame the Internet, why can’t people just go behind your back like they used to, there’s no lethal harm in that, it’s a national tradition.  You know the saying, if you have something to say to someone, tell everyone else.”   What did Pogo say?  A sinner can be forgiven but stupid is forever. Raaather!

the Chocolate Fish Cafe

Well, I miss the place, hugely popular, stuffed to the gills, it floundered on the seaside like a fish out of the water.  What the CF needed was a much bigger tank.  The deck across the road above the beach, with quaint sings, “Caution, Waiters Crossing,” is never going to do it in this town.  It must have been a frustration to run this place.  The food was mediocre, which is to say good, here.  That is, there was noting distinctive about it, it was the the same food you get everywhere else without variation, which may be how the Kiwi’s like it – not that they appear to know differently.  The service at this place set it apart.  It was managed.  You got a seat, you got a waiter, the tables were cleaned.  I know, the stuff you expect, but “front of house” is a foreign concept here.  It had a temporary or transient quality about it, you sort of knew it wouldn’t last.  Hey, they tried, they really did, but the cafe proper was way too small, the canvas curtained front, which spoiled the view was a brave attempt to keep the table numbers up and having your waiters endlessly set up and remove tables from across the street was insanity itself, but that’s why we loved it.  It was more than just a cafe, it was like a dog walking on it’s hind legs – not notable for something done well, notable for being done at all.  

I’m not surprised the owner closed the joint.  It seemed kind of weird the way he did it, I thought it was just hardball negotiations with the council about his table rates, but nope.  You’d think anyone who run a cafe that difficult to run into a success would have just moved on to a more profitable operation that was less taxing.  The landlord, I bet he took a real hit when the place closed, his RoI must have been huge!  But was there anything he could have done differently, other than find a new operator who’d be happier with a lower margin and a different format?  It’s what you do. 

I mean, this place has location Location Location, no one else is around sell anything for miles, it takes forever to get here and when you do, you are at a beach!  It’s brilliant!  It needs imagination and a bit of thought about why it is a success where it is.  Imagine, instead of trying to be every other cafe, you run coffee, muffins, sausage grills, fries and dogs all day – beach food, with candy floss and corn dogs.  At night, three seatings, reservations only, upscale fish place.  Intimate, quite, beach-side, and elegant with lots of garlic.  Put a kingfish on the menu and I’m there. 

I’ve got more meds in me than a pharmaceutical truck, yet it’s not making a dent in these infections.  The fever seems to have gone now, but I’m sucking back this hot lemon cold drink every few hours, and it may be the only thing that’s helping.  My eye seems to be getting worse.  Man, what a drag to blog about this crap. 

Usually I try to live around an illness, and get on with things while the animal does whatever the animal needs to do to fight tiny packs of genetic material wrapped tightly in protein cases.  There’s no point in thinking too deeply about these things, it’s a old battle that started long before we arrived and we are just the latest pawns in the game.  We like to think we are taking a round or two out of these gene replicating machines, but really, not so much. 

I’m actually using one of the oldest antibiotics invented.  It was made in 1949.  It’s only used in eye drops now in the West, since it has a side effect that can kill you if you use it to treat anything bigger than an eyeball.   Yeah, only in the west, in the rest of the world, because it is so cheap to make, they still use it.  It kills people, but not everyone who takes it.   That’s called Medical Economics.  Medical Economics is what you have when you are too poor to have Medical Ethics. 

Antibiotics came to the rich about the same time that in the West we decided we really have to get behind the notion that all ‘men’ are equal.  Eugenics as social policy had taken a bit of a beating, it almost made it, but not so much – the best thing to come out of most of all to that was antibiotics.  It means the rich get to live longer and our genes like that.  By 1970, if you ask white folks, eugenic social policy was pretty much a thing of the past, well, there were pockets of countries were, you know, ‘the superior races’ still walked a fraction of an inch off the earth higher then everyone else, but hey the social policy was a changin’. 

Hey, did you catch that error?  Yuppers, no one said all ‘men’ are equal, they said all ‘men’ are born equal.  I sometimes wonder if that gets to mean in the minds of some policy makers that all ‘babies’ are born equal.  Of course they are not, but what is implied here is that they should be given an equal chance at life.  Is this what started the West galloping around the globe inoculating babies and giving them a better chance to grow old enough to recognise the desperation of the their circumstances before they die from the side-effects of a flawed but cheap antibiotic?   Did we even have a choice in this or is it just our DNA pushing us on as it does to max its spread? 

There’s a lot of wisdom in those strands of proteins, they know there is no such thing as race, there is species and anything else is culture and only parts of that are of interest to its project.  Someday, humans will say that there are only two guiding forces in our existence, genetic replication, which is evolution and culture which is economics.  The rest is just window dressing. One can only hope that – that too will be a transitional state and culture will require re-definition to purge the crap we’ve built in.  It will be a great day for the world to disavow race as a concept other than a historical mistake.  It will free us from our tribalism to see culture as economics. 

We will then be able to talk about humanity and not just ‘men’ (Man, that one is sticking to the wall pretty hard isn’t it?  It’s actually a very good example of cultural determinants of gender inequality or equality as a correlate of societal wealth.  The cultural overlays of things like religions, that hold the status quo, means they may take lots of time to change, but in theory, as the world’s wealth concentrates to oil producing nations and if it holds long enough, they will find gender equality, conversely  the increasingly poorer consumer nations will fall back to preserve wealth production across families (just as at the end of the WW II).  

It’s all a bit frighteningly fragile isn’t it?   In the fifty years since my eye-drops were invented, even they are mis-used as an economic lever and my gods, the development of antibiotics was touted as the greatest humanising discovery since hygiene.  Yeah, in the last fifty years, economics may have saved us from blowing our asses off the planet – thank the gods nuclear missiles are expensive, and having lots of that black goo around made life good, not so much for air quality though.  But hey, now that we are rich we have standards, so we breathe fresh air, while the poor countries who make the stuff we can’t afford to anymore do the coughing.  Yeah, fifty years of pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals, life has been good, I was lucky to have fallen to earth just then, what luck.  I’m not sure my eye-drops are working.

It’s 430am and I am Kenno.

When most people say they live on the grid, they mean the electrical infrastructure network.  It appears that when I say this, I mean, I live to the dictates of a 5x12 matrix that tells me when my next meds are.  Thanks Janno.  No, really, it’s helpful. 

Oh great news.  I’m an immunocompromised individual. 

For about the first time in ten years, I went to the doc because I feel rather poorly.  Initially she gave me that, “Oh a man with a cold” look.  She felt my lymph nodes that are the size of small dill pickles and I told her I remember the feeling of Strep Throat and this is it.  She agrees.  I tell her I’m feeling more lethargic than I should.  She asks me if I’ve had a prolonged period of stress lately.  “Werk” I say.  That’s some stress you’ve been under she says.  I rarely expect empathy from a GP, it’s almost unbecoming, so I say something like, well that’s the gig.  I’m curious though, what’s this all about?  I told her I just got back from a conference where peeps where coughing and sneezing all over the place.  So you know, Strep is pretty contagious and I probably cough a cold and this too.  What is she on about?

Tell me about you eye, she says.  Oh, funny thing, it been weeping goop and last night it sealed itself shut.  Was that ever weird, I couldn’t get it open until I rinsed it in the shower.  You’ve got some kind of infection in there, that goop is a give away.  Oh, and those lesions over your ear, that’s the zoster virus.  When did you have chickenpox?  When I was 28, I said.  So, she tells me the zoster virus never goes away it just hangs out in the ganglia of the nerve cells and waits around.  After a prolonged period of stress the virus may break out of nerve cell bodies and travel down nerve axons to cause viral infection of the skin in the region of the nerve.  Mine has escaped a cranial nerve and is chewing away from my left ear to my left eyeball.  She gets pretty serious about this eyeball stuff, seems it can go seriously bad sometimes.  The zoster, it seems also explains my malaise.  So, she comes up with one streptococcus infection, some kind of respiratory infection, a neural-dermal infection varicella zoster virus (VZV), and some other thing churning yellow-mellow custard from my eyeball.  Some stress, she says.

I have a whack of antibiotics,  and antivirals with a schedule so complicated that this is about all I’ll be doing is figuring out when the next pill goes in.   The upside is, I won’t be going to work at least a week, so I can drive Janno nuts and see what stress related illness she can conjure up! 

Stress can significantly affect many of the body's immune systems.  In the final stage , all the body's resources are eventually depleted and the body is unable to maintain normal function. If this stage is extended, long term damage may result as the capacity of glands, especially the adrenal gland, and the immune system is exhausted and function is impaired resulting in decompensation. The result can manifest itself in obvious illnesses.  The term psychoneuroimmunology is used to describe the interactions between the mental state, nervous and immune systems, as well as research on the interconnections of these systems.