A number of international readers (I get wonderful readers here!) have asked about online donations to help those who have lost homes, jobs and businesses as a result of Cyclone Larry. This is now possible. Go here and follow the instructions.

Queensland premier Peter Beattie has launched a disaster relief fund to help Cyclone Larry victims, kicking off fundraising with a donation of $100,000.

To make a donation to the cyclone Disaster Relief Fund, you can ring 1800 150 411 with your credit card details, between 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday.
Cheques can be made out to the “Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal Fund” with the account number being 064-013-1000-6800.

Donations can also be made at any branch of the Commonwealth Bank and any gifts over $2 are tax deductible.

Cyclone Larry has just passed over the Atherton Tablelands, where quite a few members of my family live, having earlier crossed the coast near Innisfail, with winds up to 290 km/h. Cyclones weaken as they go inland, so hopefully there won’t be too much damage and destruction on the Tablelands, but the speed with which this one has moved means its still very strong.

No real news from Innisfail yet, but it sounds as though there have been quite a few houses destroyed or damaged and that the the banana crop has probably been wiped out. Best wishes to any readers in the region, and to everyone else there as well.

CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. The great majority of real traditions having been swept away or reduced to irrelevance with the rise of capitalism, the 19th century saw the rise of a whole set of new ones, which were then fixed in shape by the system of nation-states, each with their own newly-codified language and officially sanctioned history that took shape at the same time[1]

Via Barista and an interesting link on the theatrical origins of the ninja, I came to this great piece by Craig Colbeck on Karate and Modernity, a lot closer to my own interests than black-clad stage assassins. Although the jargon is a bit heavy going in places, there’s a pretty clear argument to show that the Okinawa karate tradition developed in the late C19 and was derived from China.

Living in the 21st century, and in Australia, I can’t say I’m too worried about the invention of tradition. Anything more than 100 years old is old enough for me.

OT PS: At my local shops at the weekend, I passed a woman (20s?) wearing a T-shirt that stated “Kickboxers are Nancy Boys”. I was struck by the rather antique slang (unless it’s come back in while I wasn’t paying attention), but also a bit bemused by the subtext. Worn by a man, the implication would presumably be one of aggressive bravado, but I don’t know what it means worn by a woman. And what about women kickboxers?

fn1, This process began a bit earlier in Britain and France and still hasn’t reached finality, but the crucial period, including German and Italian unification and the creation of the US in its current form, took place between 1850 and 1900.

This event, in which a prominent indigenous opera singer suffered a stroke at a Griffith University bus stop and was left semi-conscious and vomiting for hours on end by commuters and bus drivers alike, is a source of shame for Brisbane, and should be one for all Australians.

Obviously, despite being a well-dressed visitor to a university, Delmae Barton’s skin colour was enough to create the assumption that she was drunk. I don’t want to throw too many stones at the individuals involved: the fact that we live in a society where drunken black people are a fairly common sight is just as shameful as the episode itself. And I don’t have any easy answers. But it’s something for which all Australians need to take some responsibility.

This NYT piece about America’s emptiest county starts off with the usual stuff about closed-down schools and vanished churches. Then, without any warning, it segues into a story about Libertarians plotting to take over the county and legalise cannibalism (no, really!).

As they say, read the whole thing.

Riffing off a comment from Mark Bahnisch, Andrew Norton has a nice post on Latte Leftism/Libertarianism. This gives me the chance to reprise this old post from 2003 (Over the fold). There were some good comments, now lost forever.
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My wife forwarded this sequence of photos that are doing the rounds, headed “Irish Salvage”.

No doubt eagle-eyed Irish readers will be able to point out that the truck is of a make used exclusively in the UK, or that the superscript on the manifest is of a type not found in the Irish localisation of MS Word.

Update: As expected, too good to be true. The second spill is faked. Still, it’s pretty funny.
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Last weekend my wife pointed out a channel-billed cuckoo chick being fed by its “adoptive” parents, two crows. Crows are fair-sized birds but the cuckoo was already bigger than either. I’d never seen this before except in books.