Tuckerucci Fairytales

 EULOGY - DAVID JAMES SMITH 30/3/1981 - 17/2/2023 [ Editorial note : There is more in this written version of the eulogy than was delivered on the day of David's funeral. It will continue to be edited until all that needs to be said has been added.]   Today we gather to remember, to mourn and to celebrate the life and existence of David James Smith. I use the words life and existence together because there good reason to think that life is an aspect of existence. I hope to catch some sense of that in what I say about David today. David was born in Ipswich, Queensland, on 30 March 1981 to Beris and Jim Smith. His elder brother and sister are Michael and Wendy. We extend our condolences to Jim and Beris, David’s partner Cassie and their children, Jasmin and Jayden, To Michael and Denni, and to Wendy and her children Chloe, Nicola, Georgia and Nikita, and her husband, Steve; and also to the extended Bell and Smith families. David grew up first in Ipswich and then, while still i...

"I don't hold a hose"   This post resembles an email thread. The issue that kicked it off is at the bottom. But don’t go there yet. What started as a flippant comment on the banality of urging people to pray for rain, became the opportunity to ponder the level of maturity required to thus exhort the nation; and then to suggest the response of a mature spirituality to the nation’s distress; and finally to get serious about the question that is begged by the ill-conceived assurances of the half-baked - nay, the processed and packaged  - prosperity franchise of Christendom. You could scroll to the end and read your way up, but I don’t recommend it , because the effect of reading the material in reverse order is like being hit by a sledge hammer before tapping the funny bone. It’s, like, bootcamp first, the better to see the funny side of fool’s gold. ACQUIRED HUMAN INFANTILISM IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD-AS-MAGICIAN YES           DON’T KNOW   ...

An amusing piece, All Possible Plots by Major Authors , published on the website Lit Hub, suggests that everything an author writes is a variation on a single idiosyncratic plot. Here are some examples: Jane Austen Your obligation to make a judicious alliance with an alluring newcomer is constantly pressed upon you by your relations. You despise them all. Ernest Hemingway On the journey you drink beer from cold bottles, and peasant’s wine from the big leather sacks the fisherman gave you. When you arrive in the town square, you stop by a café for a bottle of champagne and a bottle of cheap wine. You hate the man you are with. You order more beer. Soon it will be time for lunch. F Scott Fitzgerald Ginevra Beauregard and Redmond Ingram (known as Red at Princeton) are honeymooning in the South of France. They are beautiful, clever and rich. For reasons never fully explored, they have resolved to make themselves unhappy. D H Lawrence You look upon his bright loins of darkness as they g...

I come late to many good things, the books of Jane Austen being a regrettable instance. I was put off in my wanton youth by that sentence. You know the one: the most celebrated 23 words ever written in English. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. I was 22, six months out of military service as a Nasho in Vietnam, and a fresher at James Cook University of North Queensland (to give it its name at the time). Pride and Prejudice was a prescribed text for English 101. I read the first sentence and closed the book - slammed it shut, actually, and threw it against the wall - and never read another word of Jane Austen. It is said, by people who claim to know - though I don’t know how they can - that at the moment of death, when confronted by the perfection of the beatific vision, we judge ourselves. Fifty years after my run-in with language used so skilfully that it provoked harsh judgement - I thought it sop...