In the light of 1000 smiles

The Screaming Meemees sound as fresh and vibrant today as they did in 1981 and 1982. They still leap out of the speakers full of teenage verve to a pounding almost martial rhythm from Joh and Peter. Tony Drumm adding the off-true Kiwi vocal and ear for a memorable hook line Jordan Luck would work into a high art. Michael O’Neill – style and guitar – never too little and never too much – punk sting and intent intact – but always so much more than that – finding power in the melody and colour.

[From Mysterex: The Screaming Meemees revisited]

Andrew Schmidt's overview of the Meemees' career is both incisive and honest (as his blog, which is utterly essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in music from the southern isles).

Did we do 104 gigs in 1982? ..shit....

They were, and I'm biased of course, a thoroughly brilliant band.

Got to know how to pony / Like Bony Maronie

Assuming this is correctly reported, not only is Palin ignorant about much of what surrounds her on this planet of ours, but she can't count either:

He said she shied from discussing U.S. politics, though she did say it had been 10 months since Obama took office and Americans were questioning whether he had made significant headway.

[From Some early exits as Palin woos Hong Kong investors - CNN.com]

Little men tapping things out / points of view

Paul Holmes slaps tweeting in the NZ Herald and comes across as vacuous and grumpy...

I think tweeting is inane.....

....Whatever tweeting is - and I genuinely don't know what it is - it ain't for me.

[From Paul Holmes : Tweeting ain't for me - Technology - NZ Herald News]

No Paul, inane better describes the substance of 90% of the grossly self-important television you hosted over the past few decades, from The Grunt Machine onwards. If it's passed you by, WTF bother to comment? Or were you just trying to finish something to fill space, as with many of those shows?

I'm a tower full of power with rain and hail...

Gosh.......

The failure was traced to an interconnection circuit beneath the Java-Bali straits that officials claim was stuck by lightning resulting in the sudden loss of 100 megawatts of transmission power.

[From Bali News: Bali Suffers a Blackout]

Lost in translation or......

We Gave Our Today For Your To-Morrow

Brigid, our 14 year old, Bella, and I spent two hours on a local bus to Kanchanaburi today, to the North West of Bangkok, to visit the site of the famous River Kwai bridge, as mythologized, not altogether accurately in the 1957 movie.

For all the tackiness of the surroundings of the actual bridge, which sits amongst countless souvenir stalls, people with very sad looking tigers and leopards (100 Baht to sit next to them for a photo, poor bloody things), it is something humbling to see. The most bizarre part of it was a young, quite clearly Japanese, girl, selling "Death Railway" postcards. Odd.

In the centre of the town sits Kanchanaburi Cemetery, where many, just under 7,000, of those who died on the Death Railway are interred (or at least the Commonwealth dead...the graves of some 270,000 Asian forced labourers are mostly unknown).

And you wonder again, despite everything you have read and seen on screen and paper, when confronted with the awful reality of it all, about the horror and pointlessness of what humans, mostly men, do to each other, century after century.

Nothing I could write here could express more than the images below, and most especially some of the very sad and poignant messages from home on the grave markers: