What is George Hamilton doing in IACGMOOH?

Before starting I would like to remind Annabella that it is two weeks until the anniversary of her first (and only) blog entry.

Not that I am being critical - but I am anxious to see how she has moved on since 17 December 2008. I would particularly (for example) like to see some pictures of Stan and Ollie so that I can compare their plumpness with Monika.

We are now in the Swissotel overlooking the Bosphorus and Cate has gone off to do things with other people in the office. I used to do these sorts things and would go to the office every day to talk to people, have meetings, write notes and talk on the telephone.

At breakfast this morning I marveled at all the people having meetings about really vital things when all I had to do was wonder about where I was going to go to mooch around for the day.

You will see that I have an Internet connection. I was able to achieve this because my operating system is now in English and I can work my way through the maze of questions which need to be answered in order to establish a connection. It is horrendously expensive to do this in the hotel but I pawned my watch so that I could hook up long enough to post a Blog.

Since we arrived in Wien we have wanted to go to Do & Co. We have tried to book on a few occasions but have never been able to get in. Indeed – we could not for last Saturday for the main restaurant in Kärntnerstrasse so settled for the one in the Albertina.

Do & Co does the catering for Austrian Airlines so when Cate travels Business Class she gets to eat the food. I have had it twice when we flew Austrian Airlines on home leave and it is outstanding.

Of course some of the planes are not in real good shape. We have been on planes that were so old they had toilet seats held together with gaffer tape and they had to paint over the Swastikas on the wings – but this and the constant rattling and loose bits falling from the ceiling are nothing if you can have a decent meal.

Anyway Do & Co in Albertina was brilliant – and smoke free – and I can thoroughly recommend it.

We were not in Business Class coming to Turkey but I had a nice sandwich which I was able to scrunch up and insert into my nostrils so that I could not smell the very fat, hairy and odorous man seated next to me. He took up a great deal of room and I spent the flight perched at an angle hoping that my jacket wouldn't get stuck to his hairy forearms and require us to be separated by the emergency crews in Istanbul.

I was flicking around on the TV looking for something I could do to avoid learning German irregular verbs when I saw someone who looked like George Hamilton’s grandfather dressed in rags sitting on a log.

A watching this for a few minutes I realised that this was no ordinary TV show but something special – because I also recognised Joe Bugner who was at one stage the British Heavyweight Boxing Champion and now lives in Australia.

So I discovered this show ‘I’m a Celebrity – get me out of here’ (IACGMOOH).

I now know that this is a show where they take people who were almost famous and put them in the jungle where they wrestle snakes and eat beetles.

This is not a problem as we have discussed before that there are 350,000 different types of beetles and while it is tough going for the beetles that get eaten – and of course their families – it would do their little hearts good to know that millions of people around the world are watching them get eaten and this is a damned sight more coverage than they would get by being eaten in the dead of night by a Lesser Crested Mugwump.

I did a bit of research on IACGMOOH and they apparently do lots of other very unsavory things - many involving ropes, snakes and mud – I am not sure why but it is TV and apparently that’s what people want to watch – no I don’t know why – it beats the hell out of me.

Anyway – it was George Hamilton. What in the name of the Great Lizard King is George doing in a show like this where he can’t wear a tan and a cravat?

And I regret to say that Joe was beaten in whatever the contest was he had with a much younger man and was booted off the reservation – which was in Australia somewhere.

I read too much current affairs and too much history and I know things that it is not good for a person to know and to dwell on.

I am just about to delve into a ‘Europe: A History’ by Norman Davies. This runs to about 1,500 pages so it may be a while before I can report back. In the interim for the Turkey trip I am reading about Ataturk. I have to do this so that I can tell Cate all about the history of modern Turkey.

She can in turn belabor me with the history of the Habsburgs. She has told me many things about this enormous family but so far I have retained nothing.

Today I am going walking to take photos.

Home Wanted for Morris Dancing Cat

It will be nice to get away for a while so that we can actually get some sleep. This has become a rare commodity for some time now as Muffin is becoming increasingly deranged and Sissi has a toe fetish.

Cate works late almost every night so we don’t usually get to bed before midnight. This is the time Muffin decides to explore the bed and bedroom before settling down on the bed to suck her toes for an hour or so.

In the interim Sissi is pouncing on everything that moves so we have to make sure that our extremities are well and truly covered.

After licking herself from head to toe Muffin will then try to burrow into the bed. If she can do this (and I fight hard against it) she will inevitably settle down uncomfortably close to some delicate parts of my anatomy and I will lie awake hoping she doesn’t have a bad dream and lash out at an imaginary boo bah badbilly.

Muffin may then return to her perch behind the bed before early morning Morris Dancing on the bed. For amusement she will sometimes find a sock and carry it around the bedroom yowling pitifully.

At 4:00 AM Sissi’s eyes pop open and she starts to play – and with any sort of luck she will find a stray toe that has inadvertently found its way from under the bed clothes. There will be a shriek, gushes of blood - and a hurried retreat of all moving parts under the Doona again.

Muffin will decide that it’s time to explore the house to see what’s happening (nothing) and will need to be let out of the bedroom and which time I will take the opportunity to evict the Toe Slasher.

I will get to sleep again and them Muffin will want to come back into the bedroom and will yowl and bang on the door until this happens.

Then the alarm goes off.

The answers to your questions are:

We have to keep the bedroom closed because if Monika comes in there she does unspeakable things in Cate’s bathroom or – if the door is closed – on the floor or bed.

We can’t lock Muffin out (and we have tried) because if we do she yowls at the door like a Banshee and can be heard in Simmering – and then punishes us in the worst possible way. (I can’t say on this Blog what this is but if you send a stamped self-addressed envelope I will provide details).

Yes we have considered murdering the cats and burying them in the garden but would miss them terribly. (You need to be a cat person to understand this)

We bought some new fire implements – including some tongs – so that we can move logs around.

The picture is of the brush after Cate had swept up some loose bits of burning wood. We have had a training session and I have explained that metal does not burn but brushes do.

I am sure this will not happen again because she is a very quick learner. Although it doesn't really matter if it happens with this particular brush.

Incidentally the vet says that Sissi is very intelligent. I am not sure how this was determined by the vet but perhaps they have some basic tests with Cuisenaire rods they run cats through before surgery.

We bought a gigantic Christmas wreathy thing at the markets on Saturday. It is too big to fit anywhere so we have hung it from the ceiling. I will provide a picture if it survives Sissi during our trip to Turkey.

Two wannabe reality TV stars crashed a White House Dinner and want to sell their story for ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’. Has it come to this that people would pay them money to tell how they walked into the White House and had their photo taken with the President. What a breathless, tense and dramatic story this would be.

‘Well we walked into the White House and the security people didn’t stop us so we had out photo taken with the President’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Oh really nice he said hi’

‘Oh Fabulous stuff – and what happened then?’

‘Well nothing really. We left.’

‘OK Great – look forward to the book. Who would you like to play your parts in the movie?'

'Hmm....not sure about that yet but probably Brad and Angelina.'

The Grey Nurse is on the way out!

Palau 2008. Photos by Philippe Lebris of Marseille.

A reminder that we are off to Turkey on Tuesday. This may mean that I cannot Blog because my track record of getting an internet connection while we are travelling is not so good – awful in fact.

However – there may be some hope this time as when I upgraded to Windows 7 I was able to change the operating system on my notebook PC to English. This means that when the numerous error messages appear as I am trying to connect to the internet - I may be able to decipher them and take remedial action. We shall see.

Cate is working for three days and the we are renting a car and driving to Gallipoli. The Turkish one not the Italian one. Gallipoli – as all Australians know –is one of the many places where the Australians benefited from legendary British war planning and tactics.

Gallipoli

They didn’t manage to kill us all at Gallipoli but shipped the survivors off to the Somme where the Germans used us for gunnery practice until they ran out of shells and had to surrender.

Incidentally – the nice people at the Palazzo del Corso in Gallipoli in Italy allowed me to cancel my reservation without any cost. They no doubt did this on the basis that anyone stupid enough to book a hotel in the wrong country would be dangerous to have as a guest -and they could not guarantee that I would not turn up there instead of Turkey. So next time you go to Gallipoli in Italy please stay with them.

I took Cate to the Central Friedhof at Simmering on Sunday and she was most impressed – as I knew she would be. It is a colossal cemetery and well worth a visit. For some reason the old Jewish section is entirely overgrown and not maintained at all.

There could be a number of reasons for this including that there were not a whole lot of Jews left in Wien after the war – and are not that many now. Or maybe they decided to let it become overgrown for dramatic effect – and it certainly works.

Parts of the Jewish section were bombed during the war. Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris was entirely focused on flattening Germany and Austria (well the residential parts anyway) and it is a bizarre thought that in this process he bombed dead Jews.

I finished reading a book last week that suggested that the war could have been shortened by some months had Churchill and others been able persuade Mr. Harris to bomb something useful – say for example the synthetic oil plants.

But he was very single minded – and popular in Britain – and instead of being sacked for disobeying direct orders from his superiors he was allowed month after month to flatten every city in Germany.

The additional penalty for this – apart from the obvious one of costing the lives of very many allied soldiers because the war went on for months longer than it should have – was that when the allies arrived in the German cities that had been subjected to Bomber’s attention – the infrastructure was completely destroyed – and the Americans and British had to start from scratch to rebuild Europe.

They erected a statue to Arthur Harris in London a few years ago and there were many protestors. For my money I think Harris should have been hanged as a war criminal – but in war this only ever happens to the losers.

Many things these days make me unhappy. One is the annihilation of sharks globally for finning. This grotesque and barbaric practice kills millions of sharks each year and is one of the major contributors to the death of ocean life.

However, in Australia we have had not had to resort to finning to kill all our sharks and have done it by more subtle means. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald says that:

“A new survey of grey nurse sharks shows the species is still in severe danger of becoming extinct.

The study, commissioned by the Federal Government, found just over 1,000 of the sharks along the east coast of Australia.

That figure is significantly lower than the 5,000 needed to sustain the population.
Accidental hooking is one of the main threats to the survival of the species.

Nicky Hammond, the marine program manager for the National Parks Association of New South Wales, says the State Government must act now to protect key habitat sites.

"Here we've got a critically endangered species, we know what the key threat to their survival is, we know where they spend the majority of their time," she said.

"It's a relatively simple process to protect those sites from that key threat of fishing by creating marine sanctuaries and that way hopefully we can actually save this shark from going extinct.

"Time and time again they continue to ignore putting in place the proper protection of marine sanctuaries in these areas and provide tokenistic protection instead.

"We're calling on the NSW Government, we're saying enough is enough, that we need to now get these sanctuaries in place before the shark goes extinct."

Now grey nurse sharks are pretty well the most harmless critters on the planet. In the 60s I used to surf with these creatures and it was not unusual at dusk to catch a wave and find yourself alongside a grey nurse shark.

Cate and I have dived with these sharks many times and I have patted them (If pat is the right word.

One of the major killers of sharks on the East Coast of Australia is the nets used to ‘protect’ surfers from sharks. Long nets are strung off beaches and these catch and kill sharks in their thousands – or did - nowadays of course there are so few sharks that the catch rate has dropped to negligible proportions.

You would think that this may prompt governments to stop netting and give the sharks a chance – no way. Nothing will be done and in a few years or sooner the grey nurse shark will be extinct and we will be added to the many thousands of species that have vanished since the arrival of the white man in Australia.

The recreational and commercial fishing lobbies in NSW in particular have as much power there as the NRA does in the USA. They dictate what governments can and cannot do – and grey nurse sharks are not high on their list of priorities.

I used to fret about this and about many other things like it. I now understand that the destruction of many species is unstoppable. We are rapacious beasts and absolutely nothing will be allowed to stand between us and the next meal – or the next dollar.