Just when you think everything is getting back to normal

The Canberra Centre decides it is time to install two gigantic fake jellyfish in the main entry way.

Woebegone revisited

Talking of insurance. On early Sunday morning, I was up early watching the sun rise when the sky started to white out with the rain.  They were the medium size drops of a temperate area rather than the big drops I was use to in Queensland.  But many, many more, misting out the distance. Automatically, like I did on Russell, I took the bristle broom and started sweeping the water accumulating on the patio.  The water lapped at the patio door and I swept harder. Fortunately, the Gods gave up before I did. We didn't have contents insurance and the carpet would have been soaked.  Eeek!
We now have content coverage. It was cheap.

The complex basement was badly flooded because the electricity was shorted out and thus the expensive new pump the body corporate installed recently did not work. It is a good thing that the water didn't rise anymore than the bottom of the car doors.  Even so, the people with the lower storage lockups have a lot of cleaning up to do. Wet mattresses smell gross.

Two more photos that I took yesterday that show the force of the creek's once in a hundred years flash flood.

 The downed fence was about 100m away from where I was sitting.  About a kilometre away, at the Dickson shopping centre, a concrete section of the waterway was ripped off, swept downstream and ended up in the catcher grate designed to prevent victims from being drowned in the tunnel under Northbourne Avenue. It was installed 40 years ago when a similar flood on the South side of Canberra took the lives of five kids in the 1970s.   Probably the worse long term damage was  to the ANU's Chifley Library basement archive but we don't know to what extent. Serious questions are being asked about the capacity of the floodways with the size of the developments being done along the light rail corridor.

All is quiet now.  The creek barely trickles.

Tomorrow we celebrate Nancy's birthday with tickets to the French Film Festival opening night. Appropriately the film is titled "C'est La Vie".

Fig leaf gone

Today China is scrapping Presidential time limits clearing way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely 

It won't end well. 

Napoleon crowned himself Emporer vowed to maintain the integrity of Republican territory, to bring about respect for equal rights, and to enforce political, civic and religious freedoms.

Then there was Hitler who famously climbed the ladder of democracy and then kicked it away it with the Enabling Act of 1933. 

His speech was full of assurances, and combating unemployment was a primary concern. He promised parliamentarians a "thorough moral cleansing of the body politic."

But in the words of John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

Twas a quiet day in Lake Woebegone

Early morning deluge, usually pathetic trickles of Sullivan's Creek running through our suburb become raging brown torrents in minutes. Fields flood. Roads cut. Path and cycleway swirl with water. At least one rescue. Police out in force sorting the gawkers in cars and patrol with a stack of rubber dinghies.  Several unit basements flooded. Our basement is too but car moved to safe spot. Sorry mess in some storage cages. Great for garden though.

Remember https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Canberra_flood

Harley in Bunda Street

Politics this week

And Christensen jokes

I thought we had got beyond the thuggery of NSW Liberal Premier Sir Robin Askin but I took the time to reread his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography 

Meanwhile, a very short distance from Parliament House

Towards a better standard of graffiti

Location: male toilet, Tlley"'s Lyneham, ACT

When Google goes wrong

Normally, Google Assistant does a good job of summarising what films are showing in an area. It makes the job of deciding what movie to see and what theatre to target so much easier

But sometimes, especially for those pesky foreign language films, it gets it very wrong. Today it list a new offering. 

Google says it is the poorly rated Sci-Fi, Les derniers jours du monde, (2009) 

The real film showing is the Palme d'Or nominated Michael Haneke movie, Happy End(2017)

Lesson: always check with your  friendly local cinema.

Trumping the Trumpsters

I've always tried to balance my sampling of Tweet sources but reputable studies like this shake my faith in even-handedness. 

The amount of junk news is overwhelming. I spend a lot of time trying to sort out the truth from fiction on Twitter.

A good example was yesterday when this faked up tweet from Donald Trump was circulated.

 A lot of normally good sources were caught out. The perpetrator meant the "tweet" as a joke and in a long stream of mea culpas tried to rescue his reputation. 

I twigged almost immediately because it was over the character limits for Twittering in 2015 but my first reaction was to be fooled too. Snopes was quick off the mark and quickly spread the word 

Which bring us to the current news reports about the videos posted by Senator Molan. He is reported to have said he has no regrets about reposting some videos from a Brit Right-wing group. One purports to show young Muslim men attacking a woman.

I immediately hit Snopes and it quickly pointed out that atleast one of the videos had falsely been described as an attack on the woman for not covering herself properly. It wasn't. See here. Note that Molan says on his Twitter page that "Retweets do not indicate approval". Problem is the video story is presented as fact.

This is where the world is really changing. Until only a few years ago, we didn't have to fact check to hard. Gross distortion was relatively easy to spot. For example the crude and cruel Nazi WW2 conspiracy theory poster...obvious to us with 20/20 hindsight but not for Herman Schmidt in 1943 Germany.

We armour ourselves daily. Sorting out the good and bad sources, doing our own research and detective work, finding sound factchecker sites such as Polifact on US politics and the careful articles or The Conversation and finding the journalists and commentators who have not succumbed to complete partisanship to the point where they bend or make up facts.  And then there is the effort we must make to work out what images represent reality.

 Will it be enough? this excellent NY Times article on how hackable our future may be is not hopeful. But I am, we are getting better at sorting.

Flag of our fathers

WW1 recruiting poster held in Australian War Memorial, Canberra

Some history:

Manning Clark, History of Australia, p.497

Scenes from a #StopAdani Rally

All played out on the lawn in front of New Parliament House. Numbers not big but lots of well done agitprop. Relaxed police; frenetic press because no one looked like they were cruising for a bruising. Lovely morning. Protest at its best.

Ferry McFerryface-gate

The Sydney ferry naming scandal deepens when you carefully examine a list of names initially rejected as nonsense.

The Minister's insistence on Ferry McFerryface is what people get upset about but I love some of the other suggestions. I liked "Halal Snack Pack" myself.

However, the most insensitive dismissal is number 10 "Pemulwuy" the name of an Sydney Aboriginal who resisted early white settlement.

  

According to Richard Green in an ABC Message Stick episode, "with simple spears, rocks, boomerangs, stones, he [Pemulwuy] defeated the British army that they sent here. Every single soldier except for Watkin Tench, that they sent in pursuit of Pemulwuy either walked back into the community with their saddle over their shoulders or they didn't make it back."

More detail on Wikipedia 

Originally discovered by BuzzFeed

Movie: Phantom Thread

Overdressed.
A more sympathetic view in The Guardian

One person's squeezy toy is another's bicycle bell

Canberra's bike culture, unlike much of Australia's is not dominated by the Lycra set with expensive carbon fibre racers. Here the typical bike is more likely to be a humble city cycle with an aging pannier stuffed with work clothes or veggie shopping. 

But, like their equivalents in other cities, they often sport colourful mods so they can be easily spotted in the racks. Custom colour schemes, faux flowers, stickers and unusual 'accessorising' are common. A favourite practice is sentimental: conversion of globe trotting touring frames that have seen thousands of kilometres to hauling new families