CleverBlogName

One of discoveries Sunday’s first excursion into the wonderful world of kiddy football was unexpected side effect of having spent three or so years working on concepts of playing nice (sharing, taking turns and so on), which is the furious, pitiable wailing that accompanies the discovery that in competitive sport you have to take your turn, not wait for it.

Much howling, a mix of self-pitying and righteous indignation, ensued. This is, the coach/referee assured me, entirely normal with three years olds, and I guess it would be. But still: an unexpected side effect; it encourages me in the belief, though, that the whole business is a good thing, not least because while “playing nice with others” is a life skill that’s valuable, so is “I’ll go get it myself, no-one’s going to give it to me.”

Other than that, and a plaintitave “I’m too cold, I want to go home”, swiftly fixed by another layer of jacketing, we had a ball, and Ada managed an absolute gem of a perfectly-executed tackle, timing a textbook interception of another player on his run into her goal.

After the game Ada worked on her dribbling some more, controlling the ball through 90 and 180 degree turns, and frustrating her mother’s attempts to regain control of the ball. I’m looking forward to see how she’ll handle next week.

Ada veut faire du foot. Je ne sais pas; mais toute façon papa, je aide.

Aujourd’hui nous faisons du coursé; nous sommes rentré avec protege-tibia et beaucoup petit les chaussures de football.

Of all the Pythons, John Cleese depresses me the most. His wholehearted embrace of Americanisms—therapies, marriages up the wazoo, self-help, management videos, you name it—seems in some way the second most appalling fate of any member of the troupe.

I think it’s because so much of his finest humour flowed from venting his spleen at the most hateful characteristics of the Little Englander, the crawling, craven middle-class Englishman who licks the boots of his social superious, the uptight neuroses of the stiff upper lip. It was the high-octane hate that so brilliantly powered Faulty Towers. Now, it’s not really healthy to hold onto that, and I imagine that had Cleese spent the next thirty years doing so the results would be less than healthy.

But I have to wonder if replacing the quintessential English middle-class neurosis he grew up around with the quintessential SoCal neurosis is really that much of a win.

This story annoys me more than a little.

Health Minister Tony Ryall said the “inequitable geographic provision” of the surgery was concerning.

Well, this is hardly the only surgery that’s targeted. Premature birth? You’ll fly to the nearest regional centre for care. We don’t have surgeons and nurse specialists in every hospital in the country. Seriously ill child? Move to Auckland, because they’ll be going to Starship. There is a never-ending list of procedures you won’t get in Patea, or Hawera, or New Plymouth, or even Hamilton. Unless the health budget is infinite, or unless fat advocacy has gained enough clout we’ll start running down other medical care options to fund it, obesity surgery is no different. Perhaps that’s where the money saved by slashing mental heath services, in a country that traditionally tops lists for suicides, will end up; unless Ryall’s ministerial wishes are backed by increased funding.

“It’s terrifying that I’ve got a life expectancy of five years.” The Whanganui woman, who has been morbidly obese since she was 16, has been told she will be dead by 30 without bariatric surgery.

That is fucking terrifying. I guess that’s why:

In February last year the minister stood alongside Health Minister Tony Ryall as they announced that the Government was removing the healthy-food requirement for school tuckshops. The policy had been put in place by Labour and required schools to sell healthy foods and limit the sale of the likes of donuts, sausage rolls and meat pies.

I guess Tony can work out how to make DHBs spend more on morbidly obese 25 year olds, but he’s unalterably opposed to doing anything useful about it when they’re teenagers.

She said she could move to the catchment in Counties-Manukau. “But that’s a huge thing – to leave all the support of my family and friends – and not to mention costly, for only a possible `maybe’.”

At this point I’m afraid I lost all fucking sympathy. If my daughter got sick enough to need care only available in the Starship catchment area and I refused to move to get her treated, would we get loving newspaper articles about hard done by we were? Would we fuck. We’d be vilified for being unwilling to endure a little hardship to save our daughter’s life, and rightly so. And if you aren’t willing to move cities to have a shot at saving your own life, well, that says it all, really.

…players, viewers, and journalists from the part of the world that gives us such stadium spectacles as St Pauli’s, Ultras or such charmers as these Spurs creations, or squabbling over whether it’s worse to play sing-a-long-a-paedophile or mock the dead. None of which quite hold a candle to some charmers from the Netherlands.

But those very same people are such shrinking violets they want plastic trumpets banned?

One of the more annoying arguments that I have noticed creeping into the arguments of vaccine deniers, as their arguments based on the fraudulent junk science produced by a shill for a law firm are being more widely understood as disreputable nonsense, is the notion of choice; choice is, apparently, an irrefutable, unassailable right; one may not over-ride the choices of parents who wish to expose their children to disease.

This one really gets on my tits.

My minor objection, one which is commonly voiced with regard to this line of argument, is that because vaccination relies to herd immunity to function effectively across a population this is a choice which is not self-contained. It’s an argument that ought to be treated with the contempt we’d hold for someone arguing they ought to be able to drive drunk because they’re only risking their own life—unless they only drive on private roads, that’s simply untrue. Even the most fervent libertarians usually recognise that the right to swing your fist ends at my nose; the right to kill your kids with whooping cough likewise ends at my daughter’s respiratory tract.

Which leads me into the second, less commonly articulated, but, to my mind, more important point. Children are, in fact “someone else.” We do not allow parents to decide not to educate their children, or to beat them, or hire them out as prostitutes. If parents claim this is undue interference in their rights we say, well, tough luck—because my right as a parent ends at my daughter’s nose. I may not starve her, beat her, or deprive her of an education. Why should I be allowed to prevent her from receiving provably valuable medical treatments?

Crane on the Dock

Autumn has begun to feel like autumn; for the first month or so we enjoyed a late summer of cool (but not cold), crisp, brilliantly clear days; that particular spell of the closing of summer and the opening of the colder season which is perhaps my favourite time of year.

That is rounding to a close now; the weather is closing in with early nights, pitch black by the time I trek home from work; enlivened by the lights of the harbour, perhaps, but during the working week the only glimpses of sun are those of a morning walk or time snatched from the office during the day; not yet, though, closing me in the suffocating period where the day is black when leaving the house as well as when arriving back at it.

Red Leaves of Autumn

There are pronounced pleasures, though; the ducks at the Botanic Gardens have not grown fat, as they do in Spring, on the offerings of the people rushing to offer bread to ducklings; they’re eager to enjoy the ministrations of a small girl and her gifts, and my heart soars as my spring enjoys her autumn.

Foggy Autumn Morning

With autumn comes thick fog, rolling in from the sea over Rongotai and up Hataitai.

To elaborate on my earlier comments: when a movie starts with a montage of one character’s life which runs through a lost pregnancy (or possibly news of infertility, it’s hard to tell), a lifelong regret at not having fulfilled a dream, the death of one of the principal character’s wife and then plunges into him going to court and being committed to elderly care with the resultant loss of his home, I find myself thinking a number of things; high amongst them are “No wonder Ada wanted to re-watch this with me so she could ask questions about what’s going on after seeing it at her creche’s movie day”, and “What the hell? Did her creche really think this was a great movie for three year olds?”

(And yes, I know a three year old is probably missing/glossing over a bunch of stuff in Up that I might find disturbing or distressing; the fact she wanted to re-watch it with me so she could ask questions rather suggested she noticed something was up, though.)

I can also add that when there’s the scene where Fredrickson sets the chairs back in the house, the most poignant question you can be asked is, “Daddy, why is he putting the chairs back up and sitting in them?”, because getting “Because he misses his wife” out is something of a challenge at that point.

Is it a good movie? Absolutely. But definitely one that may require a bunch of talking through with a small.

(On the other hand it’s less disturbing than Ice Age, which Ada doesn’t, unlike Ice Age 2, want to watch again.)

“Shall we if there’s good music on the radio?”

“No. I want Nightwish.”

“I see. Which Nightwish song do you want?”

“The one where he is running away because they think he has done something wrong.”

Daddy’s little metalhead.

Also, Up. Ada likes it. I found it verging on the harrowing. Good, you understand, but, my, that’s a pile of emotive in a kid’s movie.