Self Referencing Behaviour

This is a picture of me taking pictures for this blog. It still amazes me that someone like me, in their fifties, not terrifically technically literate, with a cheap mobile phone, can make a website and put all sorts of crap up; all for nothing but an internet connection. Here on the edge of The Information Age. The jagged mad things he felt inside, they never jelled with the face he saw; so ordinary despite the voices so loud in his head.

I never expected to be this old. I still can't get used to it.

Cindy Sheahan, the US mother who's son died in Iraq, flew into Sydney yesterday. There was a presser nearby Lady Macquarie's Chair. I arrived early and wandered around the foreshore. It was freezing cold and I've had the flu. I bought a coffee at the takeaway van. There were busloads of Japanese, 500 altogether a driver told me. It was hard to get near the stone chair; there were so many of them, photographing each other as they took turns to sit in it; the wintry harbour behind. Cindy was nice. I learnt there were worse things than dying, she said. I learnt I was stronger than I thought I was. I'm sure her son would be enormously proud of her. An immoral and illegal war, she declared, brought out here by the doctors against the war mob, speaking at several functions in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Hard to argue with a mum who's lost her son. American casualties have topped 2400, not to mention the rest.

IRAQ WATCH

From the Hindustan Times:

A college student, a police officer, a shop owner, two street vendors and a taxi driver became the latest victims of drive-by shootings in Iraq on Wednesday.
The bodies of eight people who apparently had been kidnapped and tortured by death squads also were found in Baghdad and another area.
US forces also killed seven insurgents in two operations outside the capital, and a bomb set fire to an oil pipeline south of Baghdad, officials said.
Al-Maliki was scheduled later today to meet in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone with the prime minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a staunch supporter of Bush.
Rasmussen and his defence minister, Soeren Gade, began their visit to Iraq on Tuesday by visiting the 530 Danish troops based near Basra, a southern city.
Rasmussen is the second world leader to visit Iraq since al-Maliki and his new government of Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds was sworn in on Saturday.