Movies and Reality
The movie Sahara (2005) might not be one of the greats. In fact, the planned sequel was cancelled because of its poor box office takings. Even so, it’s not a bad bit of escapism if that’s what one’s psyche needs.
It popped up last night on my list of the least unlikely movies I might watch yet again.
Except that this time it took on a new dimension.
While I recalled in broad terms the overall plot and could remember specific scenes, I would have failed even a multiple choice questionnaire relating to country of setting, nationalities or ethnic groups involved, or any subplots embedded in the movie (not that subplots are necessarily multi-layered in movies of this genre).
So, while more focussed on a crumbling pizza, I became aware that we were in Mali. My first reaction was ‘that’s a coincidence!’ After all, Mali has lately been prominent on the World pages of The Australian and leading off on SBS World News Australia. I doubt, however, if it made the grade in those media outlets whose main items are usually about neighbourhood shootings or attested drunken footballers.
But here I was transported to Mali, whose middle-ranking military had recently staged a coup against a supposedly model democratically elected government. It added a touch of reality to an otherwise nondescript fiction, especially since the military commander of the movie, presumably a presidential usurper from a pre-movie coup, manifested every evil that military take-overs conjure up. Not that I imagined the movie would have been shot in Mali. As with nearly every other such-like movie, the desert scenes (most of the movie) were shot in Morocco.
Then, I could hardly believe, villagers adversely affected by the corrupt activities of the military leadership and who were struggling to retain and protect their very existence let alone their livelihood and ethnic identity were the Tuareg.
I must have watched this movie at least three times before but the word Tuareg never once registered with me. I don’t think I ever really heard it – at least not in any recognisable form. But now it howled at me from the screen: the Tuaregs! Hey, I know about them.
The Tuaregs are also featuring in the news about Mali. They’re an ethnic group in the north of Mali, according to the news items, who seem to have taken advantage of the distraction of coup activity happening in the south, to stage their own uprising. One aspect that has featured prominently has been their seizure of the World Heritage listed town of Timbuktu. There are concerns for the safety and security of the many historical treasures of the town.
There were even scenes in the movie that closely resembled pictures of Timbuktu in recent news items. Morocco has everything. And, of course,
Timbuktu is only 52 days from the town of Zagora in Morocco, close to where the movie was filmed!
It seems that there are two groups involved in the current local uprisings in the north: “Tuareg separatists” and “Islamist rebels” – no doubt each with its own agenda.
A little reading of Wikipedia reveals that the Tuaregs are “the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa.” In the 19th century, they resisted French colonialisation until suppressed by the colonisers. In the post-colonial era, traditional Tuareg territory was divided amongst six new nations. From the 1960s there have been 2 or 3 Tuareg uprisings claiming autonomy for traditional Tuareg homelands. More recently – prior to the current uprisings – there has been a Tuareg ethnic revival.
Little wonder, against that background, Tuareg groups would jump at the opportunity to show the flag. The Tuareg scenes in the movie certainly brought to life the eagerness of the Tuareg separatists to push their cause. I suspect the contemporary reality might be grimer than the happy victors of the movie; and a lot more unpredictable with the added mix of Islamist objectives.
I had watched half of Wolf Creek the night before, but I’m disinclined to continue it at this stage.
Road or Driver?
Although inspired to write something following a tragic accident on the King’s Hwy on Friday that took the lives of a 52 year Dad and his two daughters aged 8 and 10, I hadn’t put finger to key board before another tragic accident that claimed the lives of the driver and his front seat passenger (from initial reports late teens or early twenties).
Two days. Two accidents. Five dead. Within an eight kilometre stretch of the 250kms highway between Canberra and the Princes Hwy on the east coast of NSW.
The immediate vocal reaction of the road advocates was to decry the state of the road, blame governments, and call for improvements and upgrades. It’s all the fault of the road!
The NRMA spokesman condemned government inaction and called for dual carriageway; or, as a cheap, simple solution, the installation of “wire rope barriers at $18 a metre [that] can prevent head-on collisions.”
This was the pattern of reaction after a previous fatal accident on the King’s Highway.
It would be inappropriate to speculate on the cause of the tragic accidents while police are still investigating. However, as with the previous fatal accident, initial reports suggest the road might not necessarily be the culprit. Weather conditions, speed, severity of impact, fatal outcomes all conspire to suggest a strong element of driver carelessness. Initial police reactions seemed to confirm this.
Yet the NRMA kept up its barrage about the state of the road and the need for more funding!
It’s dreaming to imagine that the road is going to be dual carriageway any time soon.
It’s also simplistically reckless to propose that a cheap, easy, quick solution is to install wire barriers. Not only would they be ineffective in preventing the sorts of accidents we have seen over the past two days, they are highly potentially fatal to motorcyclists. So why glibly throw them into the political ring? And it is only a political ring that’s being conjured. There’s no practicable or effective solutions being proffered.
A constructively responsible reaction, while perhaps acknowledging the shortcomings of the road in places, might have been a bit more pertinently targeted to the real issues: the need for driver care and responsibility.
Grammatical Non-Constructions
Please spare me from ridiculously ungrammatically non-sensical constructions.
ABC news item on Local ABC (Canberra) Saturday at 7:00am. The item was about the collapse of talks between Qantas and Malaysian Airlines. And why did they collapse? According to the ABC news, the reason was that “neither side could reach mutually agreeable commercial terms".
I was tormenting myself by trying to envisage a situation in which only one party was able to reach mutually agreeable commercial terms!
By the 8:45 news, someone must have twigged or else just copied the Qantas statement, which, by the time I saw the ABC web version, was quoted simply as “Qantas says the airlines could not reach “mutually agreeable commercial terms”.”
Then, in the Forum section of Saturday’s Canberra Times, Jack Waterford, “editor-at-large” (an old hand), in the context of the Bruce Kafer/Stephen Smith spat, says “neither man has been operating in the same plane.”
Could one of them be actually operating in the same plane while the other is not?
Cricks and Cricket
Last weekend I attended a celebration for the 100th birthday of Aileen Crick. There were five generations of her family present. They boast the longest line of
generations in any one family in Australia.In the Weekend Australian, the same weekend, there was an article by Gregory Pemberton (Inquirer, page 8) whose starting point was Australian cricketer Nathan Lyon’s first-ball test wicket in Sri Lanka earlier in the month.
You might be wondering where this is heading!
It’s all a bit like the recent genre of movies that takes three or four quite separate stories and draws sometimes tenuous links between them.
As Pemberton remarks – as did other commentators at the time – Nathan Lyon’s feat was only the second time in Australian cricket history that a test debutant has taken a wicket with his first ball. The only other person to do so was Arthur Coningham in 1894-95.
But back to Pemberton’s story: he uses the coincidence to weave a story of Church/State issues around the very public, divisive and sectarian-charged divorce case between Coningham and his wife, the grounds being his wife’s alleged adultery with the Fr Denis O’Haran, the Dean of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
While Pemberton includes Fr O’Haran’s vindication and Coningham’s loss in the second trial; and the role of the secret source of information against O’Haran, namely the anonymous letters signed by Zero, he doesn’t mention the key details that provide the link between these events and the 100th birthday of Aileen Crick.
After a hung jury in the first trial, the Church secured the services of W P (Paddy) Crick, a somewhat notorious defence lawyer, who was an uncle of Ted Crick, who would become Aileen’s husband, although neither Ted nor Aileen was yet born when the Coningham case was being played out.
Paddy Crick, helpfully being Post Master General, a NSW post at the time, was able to track the source of the damning information against O’Haran contained in Zero’s letters; and proceed to impersonate Zero with information that would ensure O’Haran’s victory.
Later in Pemberton’s story he notes that Coningham subsequently, in 1937, ‘was admitted to a Sydney asylum.’ What Pemberton doesn’t mention was that the asylum was what was then known as Gladesville Lunatic Asylum – only much later to become known as a psychiatric hospital. Nor does he mention – and probably didn’t even know – that one of the carers of Arthur Coningham in the asylum was none other than Ted Crick, who, by that time, had become a psychiatric nurse.
When I first heard the story about Ted Crick’s link to Coningham (one of Ted’s daughters remembers her father talking about it). I couldn’t help but think that poor Arthur Coningham must have thought the gods were truly ganging up on him. He probably attributed Paddy Crick’s role (and skulduggery) as in part responsible for his subsequent sinking into bankruptcy, convictions of fraud and insanity; only to find that another Crick, Paddy’s nephew, was there to greet him when he arrived at the asylum!
In the spirit of such movies as Babel and others with interlocking stories, I couldn’t help being taken by the coincidence of the article in the Weekend Australian in which, albeit unnamed, there were two Crick family members involved – and one of them being the very person who, with Aileen, was the beginning, in his role as father, grandfather, great grandfather and greatx2 grandfather, of the very large family assemblage gathered that same weekend to celebrate Aileen’s 100th birthday.
The Miracle of Pi
One is frequently confronted by the tensions of illogicality, not least when reading, listening to or watching political arguments, debate or commentary. But all that was relegated to the blur of an ill-focussed lens by an exposition I just read by no less than The Times [of London] on the importance of that ubiquitous mathematical formula, π.
Although the Greek letter π (written in English as pi and pronounced pie) didn’t come into use to express its famous mathematical formula until 1706, recognition and use of the formula can be traced back to the work and writings of early Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Indian and Chinese mathematicians, as well as renowned Islamic scholars. There is also evidence of it in the Old Testament of the Bible.
The concept that has had such diverse recognition and use is the constant, universally and eternally applicable, ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. In other words, no matter what the size of the circle, the ratio of its circumference to its diameter will always be exactly the same. That simple ‘constant’ in mathematics underpins much in many disciplines.
Calculating the ratio, however, was not without its challenges, with many early solutions being in conflict with one another. The heart of the problem is that π turns out to be an ‘irrational’ number. That term has a mathematical definition, as do all the definition’s component parts. Simply put, the ratio can never be expressed in whole numbers, so you end up with fractions or decimal calculations. I recall at school we always settled on 22/7 as the mathematical expression of π. That was probably a cheap and easy way out. More accurately, π is calculated as 3.14159....etc. The decimal places never end. Wikipedia comments, however, that, while the decimal representation of π has been computed to more than a trillion decimal places, elementary applications, such as estimating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places! (The exclamation mark is mine.)
And what about The Times foray into the analysis of the significance of π?
In an article from The Times, written by Mark Henderson and reproduced in The Australian on 29 June 2011, the author states enlighteningly and, of course, correctly that “pi is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and it is fundamental to many formulas in mathematics, science and engineering.” Well, so far, so good. He then proceeds to back up his claim of its fundamental role by asserting “the circumference of a circle, for example, is calculated by multiplying its diameter by pi.”
I had to read it twice to satisfy myself that I hadn’t missed a vital step in the argument. No, I did get it the first time; probably because my grandson has recently been telling me that his grade 6 maths class was learning that if 4 x 3 = 12, then 12 ÷ 3 = 4.
Maybe, it’s not quite that simple, but ratios are legitimately and frequently expressed as a quotient, for example, the quotient of the ratio 4:3 (1.333..etc) lets me construct templates for resizing photos in this web site that ensure the 4:3 ratio is preserved; but I do draw the line (or decimal fence) well short of a dozen places.
When I was at school – and for a time afterwards – I recall being constantly amazed at how a figure plucked out of the air, such as π, could deliver the circumference of a circle when it (π) is multiplied by the circle’s diameter. I don’t recall ever being told that π was actually the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter! Hence...
Welcome to Sarajevo
Five months after being transfixed during my Dalmatia Tour by seeing and feeling the destruction and horror of the war against Bosnia, I reacted today to a sudden urge to watch Welcome to Sarajevo – the main movie made about the siege of Sarajevo (1992-96) during the Bosnian War.
While Bosnia and its Muslim inhabitants suffered intolerably at the hands of the prejudice, hatred and brutality of both Croatia and Serbia, the remnants of which we saw every day while in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the siege of Sarajevo was perpetrated by Serbian forces. The reality and aftermath of the siege were evident everywhere in Sarajevo. You can sense this from the section on Sarajevo on my Dalmatia Tour page.
Welcome to Sarajevo struck me as a movie you’d not necessarily choose to watch or be enthralled by now – in 2010 – unless you had some ulterior driver, such as having recently been in Sarajevo and inevitably been steeped in the events of the siege. However, even thinking that was enough to make me feel a bit sad, almost guilty, that I hadn’t seen it before; and decidedly guilty that I couldn’t recall much of what took place at the time. Perhaps, as the movie evoked, that might have been, at least partly, because media outlets tired of the war and gave more prominence to events like the relationship between the Duke and Duchess of York! And, of course, the international community’s response at the time was more one of avoidance than resolution. The movie made a lot of the UN’s pitch that Sarajevo was 14th on the list of the world's dangerous places!
Watching the movie, which constantly intersperses real video of the events with movie shoots, almost transported me back to Sarajevo during those awful days. The blending is at times very clever and almost seamless. What caught my attention were so many recognisable scenes that featured in the real video shots with their horrific bloodshed – key buildings and streets; the so-called ‘snipers alley’; the old city’s main square; the airport, with its UN status and the renown tunnel running underneath. All that made the experience so much like one of those dreams that you’re so convinced are real even after you’ve woken up.
If you haven’t seen the movie and you’ve had the experience of visiting Sarajevo, I think the movie is worth a look. If you’re feeling a bit depressed and want to feel worse, it’s a sure guarantee. If you’re feeling teary but can’t quite make it happen, this is the movie for you.
Re Rebus Randomis
Venice, 21 May 2010
A Few Random Things –
Booking accommodation on-line contains a lot of guess work and considerable faith. I’ve not had a problem, so have stuck with the one on-line booking company. I should say I haven’t had a problem this trip either; just a couple of surprises.
The hotel in Rome was close to the main station – Termini – so I set out on foot to find it, having come in from the airport by train. I found the street all right. It was only a short block from the Termini entrance. But it took some help to find the hotel. I was looking for a ‘regular’ hotel, i.e. a hotel-looking entrance and a foyer of some sort. What I eventually found was a very unassuming entrance to a block of apartments. And it was no swanky entrance, as you might imagine in a river-side apartment block in Melbourne! It was a large, stone-floored, cavernous entry with nothing but a single, caged lift half-way along. There were a few ‘hotels’ inside – on different floors, all simply a few apartments combined.
Mine was on the fifth floor. It seemed to consist of three of the four apartments coming off the landing. The ‘foyer’ was just inside one of the
doors and was about as big as an average entry hall of a three bedroom house. The continental breakfast, part of the deal, consisted of taking a voucher across the road to a small cafe and collecting a cappuccino and a croissant in a paper napkin, which, if you were lucky, you could eat sitting at a bench; otherwise you stood around like many others. (A cappuccino in Italy is essentially a flat white in our terms, with a little froth on top – about as much as you might get from one of the designer tops we often get on flat whites gone wrong. It all certainly exuded dodgy on first encounter; but it all worked. The neighbourhood seemed a mix of levels: lots of immigrants, a few students and some suited folk. The Termini location was perfect for easy access to any direction of sights.
I almost messed up in Venice by aiming for an area that I had thought was the main station. It was also the place where I would catch the bus to Ljubljana. Fortunately, I double checked just before committing. That was when I discovered Venice was such an island half way across the bay. I had an instant image of James and Vesper racing around St Mark’s and decided that’s where I needed to be. To my pleasant surprise, I ended up with a very recently renovated hotel in a pretty fancy little street just metres from the St Mark Basin. The hotel is undoubtedly compact. You need to be somewhat contortionist to manage the bathroom, including the shower; but it’s all new, extremely pleasant and quite delightful.
There’s no shortage of tourists. I had thought that May might be way ahead of the tourist rush; and it might be. But if it is, I’d hate to be sight-seeing and queuing in July or August. I suppose it was really only the Vatican Museums and St Peter’s where waits were over the hour. Most other places have been pretty straight-forward, although I returned to St Mark’s this morning for another visit and was confronted by a queue at least four times the length of yesterday’s. I must have struck it lucky yesterday. I’ll try my luck again tomorrow.
There are a lot of Indian tourists – invariably families travelling by themselves: Mum, Dad and two or three kids, sometimes with grandparents or other extended family. I was sitting on the steps of the Trevi Fountain, when a boy of about 13 next to me caught my attention.
“Are you a Roman?” he asked boldly.
I felt almost guilty in having to disappoint him, “No, I’m Australian.”
“I’m Indian,” was the rapid and proud response.
“Oh, where do you live?”
“Kolkata.”
“You speak English very well.”
“Yes, I learn it at school.
And so we went on to the bemusement or amusement of his parents and big sister. I think it might have been more to her embarrassment.
I have made a distinction in a few places between Classical or Ancient Rome and Christian Rome. There is also a blending of the two. You couldn’t seem to go anywhere amongst the ruins of Classical Rome without finding that some Pope or other had laid claim by consecrating it, blessing it, taking possession of it or declaring it sacred in some way. Inscriptions attesting to Pont Max (Pontifex Maximus) adorn triumphal arches of Roman emperors, theatres, the Colosseum, the column of Marcus Aurelius etc...More understandably, anything in Christian times got an inscription, such as the Trevi Fountain. There’s no escaping Papal Rome.
Motorcyclist Deaths
It’s always devastating to hear or read about yet another motorcyclist death. While it’s no less tragic than any other road death, it permeates you, as a fellow motorcyclist, with a foreboding resonance. It’s both rending and chilling.
The revelation that the motorcyclist was powerless to avoid the impact, such as when a vehicle (or other obstacle, for that matter) appears in front as suddenly as the unexpected vision of the shadowy scythe, is haunting enough; but it’s almost comforting in comparison to discovering that the motorcyclist had it in his or her power to avoid the meeting, but, in effect, abdicated power and control.
It’s sad that there are always “genuine” accidents, where a driver momentarily makes a fatal mistake – often a once-only aberration. The outcome, with its horror and tragedy, still devastates all parties and their families.
But how much more frustrating, painful and tormenting for those left to cope is the totally avoidable tragedy. I’m putting aside the incident where only the motorcycle is involved (no other vehicle, animal or obstacle) – no less tragic, by any means – but likely attributable to the motorcyclist losing rather than abdicating control.
All too often there is an apparent element of the abdication in reports of motorcyclist deaths. This clearly seemed to be the case yesterday just
outside the ACT. There’ve also been strong indications that it was present in other motorcyclist deaths in and around the ACT.
There are so many stupidities that we motorcyclists can easily avoid; stupidities that add significantly to the likelihood of an early encounter with our scythe-bearing nemesis. So why do many of us ignore them, even embrace them, as if they will transform us into some latter day, impregnable Ghost Rider?
We often hear the adage “ride to the conditions!” Do we do that? Do we all have the same understanding of the riding ‘conditions’?
Even within the parameters of the same weather conditions, the riding ‘conditions’ are vastly different on the city or suburban road to what they are on the motorway to what they are on the country back road to what they are at dawn or dusk to what they are with a low rising or setting sun, to what they are in day or night to what they are on weekdays to what they are on weekends to what they are ......
Well, I’ll let you finish. Actually, I can’t even do that. There’s no finish. The list is endless. The ‘conditions’ change constantly anywhere and everywhere on any and every day.
Horoscopes
I’m not seriously into horoscopes or astrology of any kind. In fact, I don’t think I’d even read a horoscope until about five years ago. That was when my wife decided that there were better pickings out there and took off in search of them. Well, with one of them! I must have thought or hoped that my future journey was surely written somewhere. I just needed to find it. I started reading horoscopes. It didn’t take long to discover they mostly had ambiguous, two-way bets. Sometimes I was encouraged to find a clearer, more positive outlook. But then, I was just as often depressed by peeking at my new-life-seeking wife’s horoscope – only to find it sounded better than mine!
However, I think I have just had a fillip in my belief in astrology. It might be telling me something after all. Having a coffee this morning at the Mall, while waiting for the first service of my new F800GS, which I purchased last week, I was paging through the Sydney Daily Telegraph. My horoscope for today told me the following:
Cancer: Events of the last week have changed the way you see things, probably forever. Boundaries have been crossed in such a way that there is now no return, no way of going back. It is increasingly clear that recent choices, made either by you or people close to you, are not negotiable. The only route is forward with no looking back. You should now be able to appreciate that those things, people, situations and environments that have survived the journey with you so far, have proved they are of real substance in your life - and likely to last for the long term. 
Wow! That certainly woke me up. Maybe there really are prospective alignments of stars.
Events of the last week included buying a new, dual purpose (on-road and off-road) F800GS (see photo opposite and at the end ofMy Bikes page). Boundaries have been crossed from road riding (as on my Big Trip North) to a future of more adventure riding. The choices are not negotiable. It has to be lots of off-road riding. The only route forward is to the roads and adventures I had to forego on my recent trip, especially having dropped the road bike in thick dirt on the William Creek to Coober Pedy Road. I have no doubt that all those factors that have contributed to this situation have proved themselves and will last for the long term. I collected my bike from the service with a renewed enthusiasm and commitment.
I didn’t read my wife’s horoscope. In fact, I stopped doing that a while ago.
.India and Racism
It’s interesting that India seems to love stirring the racism pot at any opportunity. It’s as though racism is a phenomenon exclusively exhibited by whites against non-whites. Tragically, racism is much more pervasive than that. And it’s exhibited, along with its frequent travelling companion – religious bigotry – extensively in so many countries that are often the first to cry ‘wolf’ when an issue arises involving Caucasians. I hope I’m not being too paranoid in saying this.
India’s current foray into racism controversy has been sparked by the India students issue and the aftermath of the 4 Corners ‘exposé’ of corruption in relevant migration and student sectors. (As an aside, I feel a need to say that, while I can easily believe and be influenced by 4 Corners, I have also been appalled, when I was familiar with the subject matter, at how they can subtly and not so subtly manipulate interviews.)
The Indian media, at least at the ‘popular’ program level, seems to be getting into the issue with a vengeance. It caught my attention partly because I’ve seen it all before at first hand. I was in Mumbai at the time of the controversy about a minor stoush on the UK Celebrity House TV show between Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty and UK contestant Jade Goody. That was 2007.The Indian media had a field day with the racism issue, but it was deeply split between those who wanted to stir the racism pot (probably the ‘popular’ segment) and many whose commentary articles and editorials decried the racism accusations, pointing to India’s own dubious record (their own words). Now we might be seeing the same thing all over. I haven’t delved into the Indian Media this time, but the ABC 4 Corners undercover correspondent has put some balance into the issue with her reported comments. Let’s hope the balance filters through to all layers of media in both countries.
Getting balance into the discussion of the issues doesn’t mean sweeping racism or religious bigotry under the carpet where they might exist. We have both in our society and we need to continue to address them. But seeing everything through racism tinted glasses doesn’t help any sensible, worthwhile cause.
