Clifford Tucker – Australia sends convict to UK

Oh the irony! Crickey! Bonza! Fair dinkum, can you tell what it is yet, no this is a knife.

All positive Australian exports.

Then there’s the beer, and all the bar staff in West London. The occasional sportsman. Very occasional. Rolf Harris, Dame Edna. running a bit short now…oo Kylie, of course.

But poor old crim Clifford? Come off it you Aussies, get rid of the non- aussie crims first!!

Laughing stock I’m afraid. Seriously.

But, in the interests of a good story getting in the way of the truth – how’s it being reported over there?

BBC Linky thingy

Our (Autism East Cape) new home

Who would have thought it? Certainly not me!

After goodness knows how many years running Autism Eastern Cape from my dining room, we finally have a proper home. Hats off to my wife and other dedicated members, as I mentioned previously, we (eventually) got a lottery grant, we’ve spent the money wisely, a full time field worker, a car, office equipment and furnishings but now… a new home!

Not really a ‘new’ home, but a proper home! A home where concerned family members have easy access, a home not 100 meters from Quest school, a home on a main thoroughfare, a home where the telephones are permanently staffed and a properly qualified person will talk to you.

As a wrote the Chairman’s report for this years AGM I quoted Neil Armstrong, “one small step for man….” and emphasized that just as the moon landing didn’t end space exploration our successes this year are just that, the culmination of years of hard work but just a small step forward towards our ultimate goal. Continue reading “Our (Autism East Cape) new home”

Post-Imperial Discourse and the Emergence of a new Racism

Recently I had a discussion with a professor in training regarding history and approaches to it. Though our fields are different, both are subject to a “post-imperial” discourse. (Latin America and East Asia, respectively, for those who do not know) Though he tends to favour the post-imperialist approach, he stated that it has its own number of defects — namely that it tends to pressure people not from that cultural background to avoid studying it on the ground that to understand a culture, one must come from a culture. We were in agreement that this was too extreme.

It would seem that this mentality brings up a new sort of racism — a revised racial exclusivity in which the “other” can be neither scrutinised nor fully studied. Rather than promoting cross-cultural understanding in any meaningful way, white-wash is applied to one and the other is subject to unquestionable rights to vilify. To clarify this, less developed regions such as Latin America, Africa, and South Asia are not to have their historical record or traditional defects questioned while developed regions such as North America, the UK, Europe, and Japan are subject to having their histories scrutinised and subject to unfair, unfounded commentaries and these are to be respected as “new approaches”.

This does not apply only to history. I recently had a rather severe falling out with a classmate over the nature of linguistics and their application. I knew that this man is in many respects a racist and does little to hide this fact, as he is of Chinese ancestry this is not to be challenged as he is allowed to be as racist as he wishes. The nature of our falling out was in how to classify languages. Cantonese, Mandarin, Hoklo, and Hakka, among others, are categorised as different languages within the family of Chinese languages, not dialects. This is a result of the fact that they evolved independently of each other. While language classification is at times arbitrary and imperfect, general guidelines are usually followed. He did not wish to accept this fact and said that these guidelines were set up by “ignorant whites who don’t have a clue” and said that he can back his thesis up by saying a single word in Cantonese and then in Mandarin. (The word was “you”) (Quite, German, Danish, Italian, and Portuguese forms of “you” are even closer)

A trip to Oz: The animals

During our trip to Oz, Mrs FEEG and I took some interest in the fauna of Australia. Of course, it is well known that there are lots of nasty critters that will bite you and poison you at the drop of a hat (actually most of them are not aggressive and only bite if threatened.) and I have already talked about the penguins on the south coast. Continue reading “A trip to Oz: The animals”

A terminally boring post on the minutiae of a long boat trip

Technically it was a delivery run and not intended as a vacation, which would require an even longer and more boring post (want to see some holiday snaps?).
For those of you who missed the whole thing you can read all about it here or not as you wish.
The trip started at mile 803 of the ICW at Palm Coast, Florida and ended 199 miles north of mile zero (Norfolk, VA) at the boat’s new home. Total distance from the charts 1002 nautical miles, and allowing another 40 nm for deviations to find overnight anchorages the distance traveled was around 1040 nm or 1200 statute miles. (well I did warn you this would be boring).
Continue reading “A terminally boring post on the minutiae of a long boat trip”