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...

  OPENING SEQUENCE Flags & Magpies audio, Title, Warriors Graphic PROEM On ANZAC Day The Word ‘Remember” Is On Everyone’s Lips But What Is It To Remember To Re-Member ON RE-MEMBERING Studies of memory show that a remembered experience has hundreds if not thousands of parts. When I remember an experience it is constructed anew from the ground up, each time with a slightly different set of parts and in a slightly different order. Every memory I have is not only about a thing or event in the past but also about the way I choose to re-member in the present. Every experience I remember is re- membered. The way I remember is mostly shaped by what is going on around me at the time. Context shapes the way I re-member. Though I am rarely deliberate in the way I choose to remember, I can deliberate. I can shape, change and choose the context in which I re-member. Today’s ceremony is about deliberating on who and how we choose to remember. MCs INTRODUCE THEMSELVES (RW) Welcome everyone to...

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE DAY WHEN JOHN HOWARD WILL SHUFFLE OFF THIS MORTAL COIL AND CLICHES AND PLATITUDES WILL RAIN DOWN LIKE AN APOCALYPSE This was written in March 2008. Nothing has happened since then to change my views on JWH. Johnny who? What a pathetic coward. John Howard waits until he’s out of the country before he makes any comment about current affairs in Australia, and when he does, (in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Thursday 6/3/08) he pretends that he wasn’t given the most humiliating thrashing any political leader in Australia, and possibly the world, has ever had. Howard slams the Rudd government for abandoning Work Choices as though it wasn’t the single most significant issue on which Labor won the 2007 election. Oh, and he makes no reference to the fact that the party he lead to utter ignominy abandoned every last link to Work Choices after being thrashed yet again by public opinion when Julie Bishop foreshadowed opposing the abolition of...

  Hey Lori, I said in my reply to your text message that I would get back to you about “Woke culture” which you mentioned at lunch last week. You asked what I think of the idea that you can’t call men, men any more or women, women .Trying to address that issue to the depth needed would have been too disruptive to the spirit of get-together that we were there for, so I didn’t even try. I just said that if anyone ever says that to you tell them to GF themselves; and I made a mental note to get back to you about it. The word Woke originated in African-American culture and was used for decades before a distorted version of it found its way into the broader American society, and from there to the rest of the (Western) world. In African-American language the word Woke means awareness of what keeps racism alive . That awareness is a critique of the sense of entitlement of many (or probably most) white Americans who are, but won’t admit to being, white supremacists . Entitlement assumes...