farmdoc's blog post number 450

You’d think that as a man whose father died 40 years ago today, I’d be old and wise enough to have things sorted, and to know why things happen. But I don’t. For example, I don’t know…

why prime minister Rudd, having said Sorry so eloquently on 13 February 2008, thinks tourists should be allowed to climb Uluru against the traditional owners’ wishes. [1]

why Tasmanians drive like there’s no tomorrow, having no regard for weather and road conditions. Six deaths last Thursday brought Tasmania’s road toll so far this year to 45 compared with 40 for the whole of 2008. [2]

why governments persist is supporting clean coal rather than genuine clean renewable energy. Clean coal’s the mother of oxymorons. [3]

why left wing liberals support Hamas which is, no doubt, a regime of fundamentalist religious totalitarianism. Yet Israel, which is a parliamentary democracy with a free press, is their knee-jerk nemesis. [4]

who exactly ex-footballers Rex Hunt and John Newman think they are. Hunt was recently convicted for road rage; and last Friday police interviewed Newman about an alleged road rage incident. Did I just use the word ‘think’? Oops. Sorry. [5]

In Paul Simon’s Kathy’s Song, there’s a line:

‘And so you see I have come to doubt all that I once held as true.’

I don’t know if I’d understand these things any better if I talked about them with my Dad. But I’d give everything I own to find out.

farmdoc's blog post number 436

The musical genius of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel inspired a generation. My generation. Including me. Unselfishly, and unexpectedly, last Friday darling Emily offered Sweetheart Vivienne and me tickets to Simon and Garfunkel’s live concert. That night. Did we accept? Is the Pope Catholic? Dubbing their tour the ‘Old Friends ’ tour’ was apposite: First meeting when they were aged 11, they’re now both aged 67; I guess the youngest of their 10 band members is in his 40s; and their audience members were overwhelmingly Baby Boomers. Simon and Garfunkel’s songs first spoke to me in the early 1970s. Newly graduated in medicine, I felt knowledgeable, powerful, and excited on the threshold of my medical career and my marriage to Sweetheart Vivienne which both beckoned tantalisingly and infinitely into the future. In The Brain That Changes Itself, an axiom is: ‘Neurons that fire together wire together’. Almost all of last Friday’s music accompanied me in my early 20s; so of course the concert caused powerful feelings to well up from the depths of my psyche. I shed more tears than I had for years. Nowadays I no longer feel knowledgeable or powerful; I’m on the threshold of the end of my medical career; and nothing about my life feels infinite. Though Last Friday night, ‘in the naked light I saw 10,000 people, maybe more’, I had this weird feeling Simon and Garfunkel aimed their music directly at me. Thank you. Old Friends.