What happened to Allan Hill?

The video is a few years old so the inevitable question arises - what happened to Allan Hill? An article from last year suggests he was still around even though development appears to be creeping up on his strange kingdom.

I enjoy stories like Mr Hill's even though I could never emulate it and would not wish to. There is an abiding fascination in spite of the obvious gaps in the story and his apparent difficulties in coping with life outside.

It is a common enough fascination because most of us, maybe all of us seem to need some degree of temporary isolation, opportunities to put aside the clamour of the world and pull ourselves together, opportunities to reassert our sense of self within the complex pressures of daily life.

The Tunnel of Oppression

From the University of Kansas

Earlier this month, over a thousand students, faculty members, staff persons, and administrators toured the Tunnel of Oppression. Presented by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Tunnel is an annual immersive experience of interactive exhibits. Participants engage with different forms of oppression associated with disabilities, economic class, body image, gender, gender expression, sexuality immigration, race and ethnicity. This year, in what is believed to be the first time, the Office of the Provost invited KU’s leadership team to participate in the tour as a group.

We left the tour with decisions to make as individuals and as KU leaders – do we stand idle and tolerate people being treated in a discriminatory manner? Or do we assert our leadership and purposefully act to create greater justice in our part of the world and beyond? We choose the latter and we need you to join us.

We can start by understanding the meaning of oppression for us, our neighbors, and communities. What the Tunnel makes clear is that oppression is violence…and violence takes many forms. In this tour, for example, we experienced brutality visited upon children by police officers; CEOs and government officials choosing to poison the water in low-income neighborhoods; unprovoked viciousness toward queer, trans and gender non-conforming communities; families lying dead together in the aftermath of war; inadequate governmental responses to natural disasters in places such as Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico. While these multiple visual scenes of cruelty and subjugation were disturbing, equally difficult was the collective debriefing discussion that followed. You see, even University administrators struggle with how to understand and do justice work. But we will not shy away from the challenge.

Personally I blame evolution which is clearly going backwards.

Boom time

A number of sources have reported the mysterious planetary boom story.

Something very strange is going on, and it seems to be happening all around our planet. Reports continue to emerge of booming sounds of mysterious origin echoing from the sky, from Colorado and Alabama to the Middle East, United Kingdom and Australia, according to News Corp Australia.

The sounds, understandably startling for those who hear them, are certainly not the voices of gods, although their source has thus far defied scientific explanation as well.

A recent example occurred in Alabama, when a thunderous noise shook houses and frightened residents on Nov. 20. Not long after, explosion-like sounds were also heard in Colorado, although officials now believe that the Colorado clamor was unrelated to the worldwide phenomenon, likely caused by oil and gas extraction.

Other booms around the world, like the one in Alabama, remain unexplained. Locals in Cairns, Australia, were shaken by a loud rumble on Oct. 10. Then two weeks later, another boom was heard over the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. Other mysterious sounds have been heard in as far reaching places as Michigan and Yorkshire, U.K.

How exciting. I'm almost tempted to dream up a theory, but the best response I've seen was a reader's comment on the above piece.

C Peterson
Things "boom" all the time. Construction noise. Traffic. Wind gusts hitting the house. We don't pay much attention, we don't remember them. Until there's a news story somewhere that rises high enough for a lot of people to see it. Then, people are tuned in to the idea, and they do remember when they hear something odd. They make false correlations, and before you know it a story like this goes viral and lots of people are sure something unusual or mysterious is going on, when in fact, there's nothing at all.

And the news outlets themselves make news. A small local story gets picked up and lots of other sources either reprint it or essentially copy it. I've seen this same story, citing the same small number of incidents, in dozens of outlets the last few days. This makes it seem like something much larger is going on.

Christmas crap

Today found us wandering through the Christmas section of a large local retail outlet. Mountains of Christmas crap as far as the eye could see, which I suppose one just has to accept at this time of year. Ghastly but traditional.

One of the objects on display was a particularly hideous figurine cast from some kind resin. It was supposed to be a fairy about ten inches high in pastel colours and sparkly bits, priced at a ridiculously expensive £22. It isn't at all easy to find words to describe how unpleasant and absurdly twee the thing was. Even Disney might have rejected it as a step too far.

An equally appalling item was a plastic bird in a plastic tree which played a plastic tune when one pressed a plastic button partly hidden in plastic grass beneath the tree. Again there are no words - 'horrible' just doesn't do it justice.

However there is a spooky side to all this Christmas crap, because as far as I could see nobody was buying any of it. Not a single item was picked up and taken to the till. Strange eh? What is it all doing there? Is it a cunning retail plan to make us sick of the whole charade and even out spending patterns?

Hell of a way to fall

Since the weekend I've been less than 100% health-wise so I passed some time watching a few old black and white films. One featured Constance Smith. Not being a film buff I'd never heard of her and I'm not particularly interested in actors anyway but for some reason a brief biography caught my eye.

Strikingly attractive, but troubled Irish leading lady of the 1950's, born to a struggling family in Limerick. Constance's is, perhaps, one of the more lurid and tragic tales of a promising career ending up on the skids. It began with her winning a 1946 look-alike competition in a Dublin movie magazine, touting her as a dead ringer for Hedy Lamarr. A successful screen test with the Rank Organisation followed...

Briefly in the limelight as a presenter at the 1952 Academy Awards, she was featured in a string of B-movies, including Red Skies of Montana (1952), Treasure of the Golden Condor(1953) and the thriller Man in the Attic (1953). Whether too emotionally frail to mount the pressures of stardom, or simply not talented enough to be thought of as star material, Constance never made it beyond leading lady status...

in 1962 and 1968, she was twice sentenced to brief prison terms for attempting to stab her partner, the well-known documentarist and film historian Paul Rotha. She also tried several more times to kill herself. Her last decades were spent, dissipated, in and out of hospitals. When able to get herself together for brief periods, she worked as a cleaner. Constance died, in obscurity, as an alcoholic on a street in Islington, London. A sadder end is hard to imagine.

From the brink of Hollywood stardom to an alcoholic's death on a street in Islington - that's a hell of a way to fall.

Zimbabwe and lessons for South Africa

News24 has an interesting piece on Zimbabwe by Mpumelelo Mkhabela, written from a South African perspective.

The coup d'état in Zimbabwe – call it bloodless, benevolent, calm or whatever – holds so many lessons for South Africa.

In fact, the whole continent of Africa has a lot to teach us, mostly on how not to govern.

The question is whether we are taking notes. And if we are, whether we are going to act on what we are learning.

This has been the embarrassing aspect of African government for much of  my adult life - Africa has a lot to teach us, mostly on how not to govern. Yet in the UK there is a strange tendency to idolise Africa as the feckless political imbecile we should never criticise because... Because?

Whether Jacob Zuma likes it or not, there are no traces of Russia in our Constitution. We are closer to New York, London and Berlin than we are to Moscow. We have had what we might call the "cruel but distinct advantage" of seeing what worked better and what didn't in other jurisdictions.

The advantage was cruel because we learned from others while freedom fighters were being killed, tortured and jailed. But this is precisely one of the reasons we cannot afford to squander the lessons that Zimbabwe is offering to us now – on how not to run a country.

That seems to be Mr Mkhabela's main concern - the possibility that Jacob Zuma is not so much an aberration as an indication that South Africa could become infected with the Mugabe disease. I hope not, but when it comes to principled government Sub-Saharan Africa inspires as little confidence as it always has.

Not quite Swedish death-cleaning but -

At the moment we are busy chucking out masses of household clutter. Some of it goes to the charity shop, particularly large items of furniture, a few bits go to the auction and a fair bit goes to the tip. 

A particular pain has been reams and reams of old paperwork such as bills, receipts and financial info we need not have saved in the first place. In fact we've been really radical this time - we've dumped the filing cabinet. 

Altogether we've spent many happy hours clearing out the junk and still haven't finished although I'd rather not compare it with Swedish death-cleaning which achieved media prominence back in October.

Swedish debut author Margareta Magnusson wants you to tidy your house and think about death.

It might sound like a rather gloomy way to spend a weekend, but Magnusson – who describes herself as "between 80 and 100 years old", says she has spent the last 40 years cleaning her home in preparation for her death, and that she has "got a lot of pleasure out of it".

The uniquely Swedish practice of 'Döstädning' (death-cleaning) is a method of decluttering based on which objects will be of value to loved ones after your death.

Crikey - we certainly haven't spent the last 40 years cleaning our home in preparation for death. What a ghastly idea. A few days maybe, but this comment rings a bell.

"Today, people have enough jackets for a Siberian winter, and more shoes than a centipede could wear. When I was young it was completely different," Magnusson told The Local. "When I grew up we didn't really have brands, we didn't have logos, we had, if we were lucky, just what we needed. People today, in developed countries, have much more than they need, and that becomes a problem in the end."

Indeed - that's the real problem - we have more than we need which is why we find ourselves chucking lots of it away every now and then. Oh well - time to throw some more paperwork on the fire.