“Do you know,” one of my students said, “that somewhere in NSW is the hottest place in the world today?”

“I really like your air conditioning,” I replied.

“That’s hotter than the Middle East!”

“Maybe you’re wrong?”

But, no, apparently not, though the fact that it was winter over there might have made that target a little easier to get.

Still, when you have a weekend of heat that can buckle train tracks, overload powerlines–maybe it was the heat that killed my microwave–what you really need is a bit of arson. Because that really brings the whole thing home, yes it does.

I picked this off Warren Ellis’ blog:

When I first saw this picture, I thought, ‘Heh, it’s a relationship joke; people found each other and now they fuck instead of wank.’ Well, I was wrong. That was so not what the t-shirt was about; rather it was about how wrong masturbation was, and how you were caught to sin and the such:

Masturbation. This is the thing that many people do but don’t really talk about, especially women. It’s looked on as not ladylike and not pure. It’s a shameful thing for many women and men alike. I struggled with masturbation for many years but this wasn’t the only sexually immoral thing that I was enslaved to. I started masturbating as early as 7th or 8th grade, but overall my imprisonment to lust started as early as 4 or 5 years of age. When I was a little girl, I had a friend that I played with. Something must have happened to her because it was from playing with her that I had my first sexual experience. After this one time experience I wasn’t the same and I developed homosexual tendencies as well. The seed of lust was planted and grew to maturity in my heart. I went from “humping” the floors, to sexually stimulate myself, to full on masturbation, which became my most shameful secret. The frequency to which I masturbated and the degree to which I did it was so bad that I actually ended up tearing the tissue on my clitoris. This sent me into depression for months because I thought I had mutilated myself. I had contemplated suicide because of it but I still didn’t stop. The real battle began for me when I desired freedom.

…

If your dealing with this, you need to confess it to God, confess everything. God is so serious about this sin . He said ” if your eye—even your good eye —causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. ” ( Matthew 5:29) and in Job 31:11 its says” For lust is a shameful sin,a crime that should be punished. The heart of lust is so wicked. In Romans 3, its says that people didn’t want to honor God as God. One of the firsts sins it lists after that is sexual sin. Its a form of self worhsip. Its may sound crazy but think about this, why do we watch people sin sexually or even ourselves sin sexaully? I ‘d get that hot and heavy feeling from just watching myself masturbate, from sexually admiring some other part of my body, or from watching porn. . In my heart was rebelling against God because I really wanted to be God, you know, do what felt right to me. That’s the heart of this sin. Please don’t take this lightly. Self worshippers and sexually immoral will end up in Hell. But those that agree with God, who confess and forsake it, will have mercy.

Really, the only thing I could think here was, ‘It starts off kinky, but then it loses its way.’ I’m sure we all could have done with more of the porn, and the early lesbian experiences. Especially with the Bible quoting at the end. Maybe if she’d met a priest, somewhere in there, and he’d taken her to porn theatres or into the back room, perhaps the quoting would be funnier.

Do you know, you can also buy a t-shirt from these people that says ‘Ex-Hyopcrite’?

It’s true. They look so proud in the photos.

I think I might go watch that video of the priest who said there no Jews died in gas chambers in Nazi Germany, or perhaps look over the old news reels where the Pope brushed all the paedophilia away, or… well, one of the other many, many things that make me laugh here.

Link.

Suspected militant recruiter Samira Jassim reportedly calls herself “the Mother of Believers”.

Detained in January by Iraqi security forces, the mother of six is accused of converting dozens of vulnerable women into suicide attackers.

In an apparent video confession, the middle-aged woman described how she identified potential bombers, helped supply them with explosives and led them to their targets.

She also explained, in a separate interview with the Associated Press, how insurgents used rape as a tool, with the “shamed” women persuaded to redeem themselves through suicide attacks.

…

That claim was impossible to verify, AP said, and during their interview with her police interrogators sat in an adjoining room.

But in a culture where rape is considered very shameful for the victim, it is not implausible, correspondents say.

I wonder how true this is?

To a degree, there’s no doubt a truth, somewhere. I don’t find it particularly hard to believe that raped women can be manipulated into walking into a building with explosives later. It’s sad, but true.

But I wonder about this so called militant recruiter, of who very little information is given in the article. Even the writing at the start of the piece give syou reason for doubt, but there’s more. There’s no reason for how she ended here, no reason why she would willingly convince women to do this. There’s probably a slant put on the article to make it appear as if she’s using the women that she recruits. There was probably never going to be, but still, I’d like it.  When it comes to suicide bombing, however, there’s a mild indignation that runs through the Western news, as if to say that this couldn’t possibly happen here in this civilized world. It only happens in places when morals are lacking. Also, tanks. And new machine guns. And military might.

At any rate, a slight digression. I just found the idea to be interesting, in that sad way. The picture of Samira Jassim is telling, too: half pale from a veil, I suspect, that was worn regularly, eyes that look like they’ve just given up on whatever, a straight line for lips, and the rest of her lost in the black. She’s a face, but there’s nothing victorious there.

Link.

I laughed a bit when I read this:

The cash bonuses announced today will be paid in March and April.

About 8.7 million workers will get a lump sum tax-free bonus, depending on their annual income.

Those earning up to $80,000 a year will receive $950, those earning between $80,000 and $90,000 will get $650 and those earning between $90,000 and $100,000 get a $300 bonus.

I laughed, really, because this is the first time I’ll stand to get a bit of cash from the Government, ever. I do wonder about what purpose it really has in the long term, other than an immediate buttering up of the country, and a slight bump as people blow the cash away, but on the other hand, I’m going to have car registration to pay around that time, and nine hundred and fifty will cover that and a service on the car, maybe even if a few odds and ends on it if it turns out to need something. I live such a wild life that this was, in fact, the very first thought after I laughed.

So, like, thanks, Rudd.

…

Could I maybe get another chunk of cash around May?

It’s strange, how having finished the four books in Butler’s collection, Seed to Harvest, how much I think collecting them was a mistake.

Part of it has to do with the time the books were written, and the fact that these never correspond with how the suggested reading pattern should take place. Patternmaster, the final book in the collection, was published in 1976, and is the oldest book there. It feels it, too, especially after the poorly titled Clay’s Ark, which is the best book in the collection. Butler does a neat structure wherein she places the present of the story, that involving Blake and his daughters being captured by a group of men and women who plan to infect them, against the past, which details the arrival of Eli, the first man to come into contact with the virus. It’s a nice little braiding technique. However, the book isn’t without faults: the end is a rushed mash of violence that doesn’t really suit Butler’s style or tone, and some of the relationships never gel, but it remains the best book in the collection. Wild Seed hits pretty close to it, but there’s a four year difference between the two–Wild Seed was published in 1980 and Clay’s Ark in 84–and you can just feel the level of difference in Butler’s skills and focus.

The real problem, at least for me, is that there really doesn’t feel as if Butler had any plan with the novels to weld them into a whole, and as thus, they never really come together as a series. It’d be curious to see what Butler’s plans for it were, if she had any; maybe there’s an interview out there, but I’ll have to track it down a bit later. As they stand, however, there are interesting points to be made about power and ownership, and you can see the themes that are dominant in Butler’s work, especially in the two eldest books, but books like Mind of My Mind (she never really had good titles) and the already mentioned Patternmaster are fairly week, the novels of an author at the start of her body of work, and as such don’t resonate as strongly as the others. They are, to be honest, curiosities, things to read to see Butler’s evolution, but of works within their own right, she produced stronger novels.

Not, mind you, that there’s anything wrong with the former.