I began noting Heart Week. On 3 May – you must recall The Australian was still open to the unwashed – I noted a good story about NAPLAN: “NAPLAN risks ‘repeating US mistakes’”–The Australian.
… look at what I have said here in the past, starting with:
Memo to Julie Gillard and Kevin Rudd
Having pumped up an ‘education revolution’ be very careful about visiting sales reps…
You will be very tempted by anyone claiming to have invented an Education Thermometer which, when stuck up the patient’s fundament, will magically tell you just what’s wrong and how to fix it. The more amazing numbers on that thermometer and the more it flashes and whirs the more politicians, bureaucrats and parents believe in its powers…
It’s never so simple…
Yes, we have been roaring down blind alleys…
Next day morning coffee was at Connie’s at North Beach. I must go again soon!
On 7 May I went back through the archives for that day in various years. This made a pretty good post in fact! I see 9 May was Yesterday–great but also frustrating. Now I wonder what that was…
I set the tone for some of yesterday by just missing the train I meant to catch to Sydney. Being Wollongong on Sunday that meant an hour wait for the next one. You see I had walked to the station at the crack of dawn, more or less. Sunday buses in the Gong don’t wake up until 8 am. But I may as well have caught the bus, as it happened….
Ah yes! I was planning to water M’s plants as he was at the time in the USA, but couldn’t get into M’s place in Surry Hills. The plants never did get watered but fortunately there was enough rain.
Next day When you have a choice between the uninspired and the unspeakable…. is one of a number of posts expressing disappointment with politics 2011 style. Enough said! Both posts on 11 May are tagged climate change and one — The sun rose this morning–no budget cut on that apparently – is also labelled “crap detection”. Oh I do get weary! Thus on 12 May I wrote Back to what matters.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in the comment department this morning because yet again we see how the same old crap passes for fact in the fantasy world of climate change denial. *** SIGHS! *** …
How was Australia’s Got Talent last night, eh!
That’s the one that really amazed me: Consentino the illusionist…
I now had a regular date with Channel Seven and much pleasure to come. 
But I was back to out pathetic politics with The mess we have let ourselves be sucked into… next day, the topic this time being asylum seeker policy – the non-problem having become a total incubus on both sides of politics.
So I turned again to sensible topics – like food.
That’s a bowl of pho from The Steelers Club in Wollongong. That same weekend I went to The giant remainder sale.
Got some good DVDs. One of them generated some memories: Going back to Katoomba 60 years ago–Charlie Chaplin’s “Limelight”. Took a walk around Mangerton the next day. Looks good in autumn.
Galileo, Galileo! on 19 May is Alan Jones’s idea of what science is. SIGH!
On 20 May I turned to happier things.
Yes, Australia’s Got Talent! Then 21 May was the TIGS Fete. “The first one I went to? 1971 probably! But then I was 27 or 28 and a staff member. Today I was just a pensioner visiting… Good fete though. Multiculturalism is alive and well at TIGS too these days.”
I also published one of my nicest photos, taken at lunch time at Wollongong Diggers.
On 22 May I asked you to Spare a thought for Harold Camping. He was the very silly old man who prophesied the world would end by systematically failing to read the Bible intelligently. Selling dog turds as pearls and diamonds was my take on the proposed highly laudable scheme to put tobacco products where they belong. Some people were upset by this post.
I reported This story exploded inside my brain on 24 May.
It’s a long time since anything I have read has had such a powerful effect, where I have closed the book and just sat there saying “Oh my God!” This story did that.
Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice
My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter’s keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem–perhaps the best I’d ever written. When I woke up, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine. Framed by the bedroom doorway, he appeared even smaller, gaunter, than I remembered. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.
"What time is it?"
"Hello, Son," he said in Vietnamese. "I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened."
The fields are glass, I thought. Then tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, end line, then the words excuse and alloyin the line after. Come on, I thought…The author is an Australian. Currently he is fiction editor of The Harvard Review. He was born in 1978 – his name: Nam Le…
Next day Personal catch-ups and other things was partly about Wollongong High ex-students becoming my friends on Facebook – 30 to 40 years on. Nice. That seems to have led me going retro for the rest of the month – for example Still in retro mode,
The last day of May I went up to Sydney and saw Sirdan for lunch, then Dr Cassy. (Haven’t seen her since…)
Here is the photo blog image for May.
