This will hurt me...

With Ezra's foray into The Sorrows of Young Werther , Henry was feeling a little put out so has started to explore Daddy's extensive library on the works of one G.W.F. Hegel. So Saturday afternoon, when Jen was out knitting, he starts on about Elements of the Philosophy of Right , and was asking me what defines the actualisation of freedom . I said that I doubted that history had an actualisation point and wanted to leave it at that, but then he started on about what it was to lead a ' moral life ', so I asked him what it was to lead an ' ethical life ', and then Ez got started on the unity of being and nothing which Henry confused with the master-slave dialectic and things were just getting out of hand, and I was rapidly getting a headache. We did however, find some common ground regarding the owl of Minerva, that is, its big eyes made it appear quite cute.

Can you believe that it is time for Theme Thursday already? Today we are not talking chocolate , toddlers , mess or ignominy . No, today we're dealing with ANIMAL . Now I could have posted a picture of a possum, numbat, wombat, wallaby or any other furry killing machine that roams our fair isle, but I figure that I'd use a far more deadly creature as an example of an animal . Some people - I know them as fools - have chosen to embrace that highfalutin idea that human beans are for some ungodly reason superior to animals. Of course, what these imbeciles seem to forget is that were are simple animals ourselves ! Anyone with a baby, toddler, teenage boy or Queenslander in their household could tell you this. Look at Henry [above]. One chocolate frog in the back of the car on a sunny day and all of a sudden it's Elagabalus meets Bacchus for a quick shandy in the Serengeti and we're down on all fours carrying on like a cat in heat. Fair dinkum, anyone who chooses to ...

Here is Henry zealously approaching the slide down at Bicentennial Park for the umpteenth time. Oh how I long for those blissful, carefree and innocent days of youth. A time when one's greatest concern tended towards whether one would be able to squeeze in one more go of the slide before dusk set in. [Such a memory must have been before the public housing estate really kicked off, and one's concern tended towards "is that a human poo/broken glass/a used condom/syringe on the slide?"] Where was I? Ah,the heady days of youth! A time far away from the realisation of the crushing reality of bills, mortgages and the soul destroying banality of a job you now struggle to remember even getting. Alienated from the ends of my production? Check. Uh oh. Somehow I've been denied my capacity to transform the world and it turns out that Marx was right! In having to work , rather than slide , I've become alienated from my very own nature. It is a spiritual, rather than mate...