How did that matter? You, me, finished now, he heard the voice shout. He could hear them coming out of all the houses. He could hear every sputter of a bike in the surrounding network of sois, coming for me, coming to see me, he thought, but of course these were all illusions masquerading in a masque, the fabric of things. He had sat in front of the computer finishing off Chaos and now it was time to move on to something else. Fortunes were made and lost. Midlake and the Deep Dark Woods had been getting a bit of a thrashing, inter-cut with Bob Dylan's Desire, Blonde on Blonde and even Stranger Strange, how you listen to the river of my curdled song. These were the days, but were they really? The synapses misfiring. Mistrust all around. Treachery. He knew he was being set up. He walked the other way. He talked for hours to the strange little man. Was there any way around this, or through this? Crashing, crashing. Preoccupations came and went so swiftly. The boys all told him later the owner was in hospital. They had all seen him being embraced by the top dog. The man with business interests on every continent. Wish I had his brain for business, he thought. And outside the night swirled into another enterprise, the bus connection to the sky train station Chong Nongsi cutting a dramatic ark in the middle of the night, the welding sparks cascading onto the street and the traffic below.
He wasn't, he noticed a day or two later, the only one who thought the sight of those Thai workers dangling from the metal structure not just dramatic but beautiful, with a foreigner, falang, having set up his tripod and carefully taking shot after of the ultimate urban landscape. It's astonishing, he commented to Alex, whose books sold by the bucket load to teenage girls across the English speaking world, the amount of building going on in Bangkok. Boyfriends with Girlfriends was the latest title, to be released in the New Year. The title spelt instant sales and he said as much. Alex was one of the few program people he had ever met who showed a genuine interest in other people, asking perceptive, searching questions about their lives and actually listening to the answers. I care about you, he said, over the restaurant table, the gold fish swimming at their feet. Shawn, who had done his PHD on Foucault and could well be one of the thousand or so people in the world it is estimated who genuinely understand the famous French philosopher, gave a curious exposition about Camus and a book he reminded him was called The Plague, about the nature of humanity, the core principles, the things that make us what we are. The fish, their white and gold and red lit by under-lights, swirled past their feet. How did you end up in South Africa, Alex asked Shawn.
The world has become as one, Alex observed. I went to the Seychelles last year, Alex added, looking for somewhere completely isolated, different, uncorrupted by the world. Might as well have been in America. I went to the place Al, the whisky priest, had in Africa. Incredibly remote. Yet the nearest shops were the same. Could have been anywhere. Chiang Mai, he contributed, used to be one of the most picturesque places on earth, flowers everywhere, no one could afford a car, there was no traffic, the most dominant sound was the ringing of the rick shaw bells. Now it's just another place. Same with Lahore in northern Pakistan. Once it was biblical in feel, beautiful, remote, Muslim. Now it's just another bustling place. The world was converging. But it's a fascinating time to be alive, he observed. At no other time in history has it been possible to access so much information, to snoop on such a myriad of stories, to see so much of the world from your own home. What drives you, Alex asked. Pain. No, he said. I am not suicidal. Bored, Shawn piped in. That's an easy one. Only yesterday Shawn had texted him, at Coffee Society, come buy me something and I'll pretend to be interested in your life. No go, he responded in the simple English he had adopted amongst the non-English speakers with which he spent so much time. I want to be one of the few people in your life who don't pay for your company in one way or another, financially, in personal grief, he messaged through the ether. How many hearts did you torment, white whore in Thailand? Oh John, I'm so gorgeous, if I could f... myself I'd never leave the apartment. You're 50 dear, he snapped back, get a grip. I'm not too old to be a whore, I'm sure, he whipped back. Amazing what you can do with trickery and light. Blind lust and eyes that will never see. The dark velvet that is there where only you can be carried. As if it all meant something, these tangled webs. Check bin kab, he said to the passing waiter, noticing the flick of another large carp as it passed beneath their feet.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s3078907.htm
PETER CAVE: In Victoria this morning Premier John Brumby is under pressure to concede defeat. The Victorian Electoral Commission is counting the hundreds of thousands of pre-poll votes which were cast ahead of Saturday's election but it appears that the Liberal-National Coalition may have already reached the crucial 45 seats needed to claim victory.
The Liberals are ahead in the seat of Bentleigh by a margin of about 423 votes.
Alison Caldwell reports.
ALISON CALDWELL: Some would say Labor in Victoria is in a state of complete denial. Others would say the party is just fighting to the end to defend what has been theirs for over a decade.
But late last night the Victorian Electoral Commission declared that on its provisional figures the Liberals have won the seat of Bentleigh in Melbourne's inner south-east. That would give the Coalition the 45 seats it needs to win government.
PETER RYAN: They have had a vote against them of proportions that this state has so seldom seen.
ALISON CALDWELL: For Nationals leader Peter Ryan it is just a matter of time before the Coalition forms government.
PETER RYAN: I believe that we will pick up the extra seat and I believe we will form government.
ALISON CALDWELL: The electoral commission will resume counting today in the seats of Eltham, Ballarat East and Macedon. Labor is pessimistic about Eltham. The other seats in doubt are Albert Park which was provisionally given to Labor on Saturday night, Narre Warren North and Monbulk.
Steve Tully is Victoria's electoral commissioner. He spoke to ABC News Breakfast this morning.
STEVE TULLY: Our major focus is on a recheck of all results that were taken in the voting centres on Saturday and continuing with the large task of moving ballot papers from around the state to where they need to be to be counted.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hCmJGkU23bUki_4NgxNdkYBAUK5Q?docId=CNG.050a9c8c5fd91a430d7e435fcc325b90.f51
WASHINGTON — The WikiLeaks release of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables on Sunday has infuriated Washington, where officials said it could put lives in danger and threaten national security.
At least one US lawmaker called for the prosecution of the founder of the whistle-blower website, which had previously released nearly a half million classified military reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The White House called Sunday's release a "reckless and dangerous action" in a statement released after the first batch of cables was published by The New York Times and European newspapers.
"To be clear -- such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
Democratic Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the release a "reckless action which jeopardizes lives" and rejected Assange's claims to be acting in the public interest.
"This is not an academic exercise about freedom of information and it is not akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers, which involved an analysis aimed at saving American lives and exposing government deception," he added, referring to a secret history of the Vietnam War leaked in 1971.
US Republican congressman Peter King, the ranking member of the House of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee, urged the attorney general to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage.
The latest release "manifests Mr Assange's purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan."
He went on to urge the State Department to designate WikiLeaks a "Foreign Terrorist Organization," saying it "posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," in a statement from his office.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the United States was mulling criminal charges against Assange, saying only that it was assisting the Pentagon in its "ongoing investigation" into the disclosure.
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said the release was "an embarrassment to the (Barack) Obama administration and represents a critical failure by the Pentagon and intelligence community."
Representative Pete Hoekstra called on the intelligence community to "move quickly to assess the failures in this case" and said Congress should also take up the matter.
The Pentagon, which also strongly condemned the release, said it had taken new steps to "prevent further compromise of sensitive data."
The steps were taken after Pentagon reviews launched in August that followed the disclosure of tens of thousands of US military intelligence files on the war in Afghanistan.
The measures included disabling all write-capability for flash drives or removable media on classified computers, restricting transfers of information from classified to unclassified systems and better monitoring of suspicious computer activity using similar tactics employed by credit card companies.
Simon Sharratt
Cloud Appreciation Society
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