Eat too much, you get fat, Bolivian adventure continued, for whom the bell tolls.

Locals may enjoy this next cartoon

After my experience playing guitar with James Wakeling (at the famour blue raincoat) last Thursday, I feel the urge to do more technical work. ie Scales, chords and there relationships and connections.

Wow, it seems to James that making music is just like walking or talking, and I think to aquire the ability to do that needs more than just mindless repetitions of learned standard repertoire pieces.

Like I've been working on some pieces for years, yet he still played them very much better and more imaginatively than me, and that's without any prior familiarity with them.
(Bloody Hell)

And by the way, if anyone reading this here blog is into guitar playing and needs good free tution and advice, may I humbly recommend the following site. http://www.berkleeshares.com/guitar

My friend Michael (in Bolivia) has updated his blog. I recommend it to all and sundry. It's at ---
http://correspondienteboliviano.blogspot.com/

My favourite letter from the age today:
Let's face it: eat too much, you get fat
FOOD advertisers have never had it so easy (Insight, 29/4).

As they say, it's like selling candy to babies. The products taste and look good, they are relatively cheap, and manufacturers and marketers know just which buttons to push.
On the other side, parents, consumer groups, teachers, dietitians and politicians send hopelessly confusing messages about healthy, balanced diets and exercise — which the public has to digest along with the decades of blather they've been hearing about fats, carbs, organic foods, natural supplements, glands, metabolic rates, glycemic indexes, chewing slowly, and all the rest of it.

It's time to face the hard truths and deliver the facts: we get fat when we consume more calories than we burn; it matters not when and in what form. The gym is not enough. Rewards need to be postponed, we need to go hungry now and then.
It can be tough. If parents get to understand this, the battle is at least half won.
Tom Biegler, Brighton [individuals too, not just parents]

And my favourite opinion piece: (also from the age)
Can you hear that bell tolling?
PerspectiveBy Terry LaneApril 30, 2006

John Donne entered all the books of famous quotations with the line: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
It is a noble sentiment, but does anyone believe it? Just how far does Donne's "continent" of humanity reach, and is there some propinquity qualifier? We might all be a continent but the intensity of my identification with other bits of the main is inversely proportional to my distance from them.

Take the case of Private Jake Kovco. There is all-pervasive indignation in the media over the manner of his death, the mendacity of the army and the incompetence of the American corpse handlers. But has anyone asked the obvious question: What about the Bosnian family wondering where the body of their son/brother/husband/father has ended up? If we are truly a "piece of the same continent", where if a "clod is washed away" we are all diminished, then should we not spare a thought for the other family that has lost the body of a loved one?
Should we not be regretting the deaths of all the Iraqis who have been killed by the invaders for not having weapons of mass destruction?

Mrs Kovco rings the Prime Minister at night and bawls him out for having lost the body of her husband. The Defence Minister says that she was quite right to do so. The PM is suitably chastened and promises it will never happen again.
I am thinking of asking the Spouse to give the Man of Steel a call in the wee small hours to let him know what she thinks about sending our army to Iraq to kill people who are a piece of our continent. Will he opine that she is right to do so?

While thinking about this, I was reflecting on Hugh Morgan's equating of dual citizenship with bipolar disorder. He's on a public opinion winner here because, John Donne notwithstanding, we do hear the bell toll louder the nearer we stand to it. Morgan reckons that you can't love two countries simultaneously and with the same passion. Why not? Is it not the experience of many, if not most, migrants that while they are in Australia they feel most Greek/Italian/Iraqi etc and when they are in Greece, Italy or Iraq they call Australia home? How can that be a bad thing in this tired and troubled old world?

Some people were disturbed by the participation of immigrants in the Italian election process but they wouldn't be surprised or appalled if the Australians living in Italy popped along to the embassy to cast their vote in our elections.

The more places we identify with the kinder the world might be. Dual citizenship can't be a bad thing if it makes us think that our familial connections extend beyond the girding sea.
Dual allegiance is a complex issue. There are Iraqis living in Australia who applaud the invasion. There are members of parliament whose loyalty is first and foremost to a foreign power and who put the interests of that foreign nation before Australia's. There are migrants fighting the civil wars they left behind.

But, as a principle, the more we bring together our part of the human continent with the remoter bits the better.
Grieving families in Australia, Bosnia and Iraq are part of the common human experience, all equally close and equally remote.