The · Adventure · of · the · Enigmatic · Journal · (or · the · Strange · Cases · of · Hyperreality)

Sometimes I feel as though we inhabit a strange alternate reality.

Look at this picture of Bundeswehr soldiers in Bosnia.

Don't they bear more than a little resemblance to their forefathers in the Balkans a half century ago? From their helmets to their camouflage patterns - you can either tell where the Bundeswehr gets its inspiration from, or that the Wehrmacht was well ahead of its time. Or both.

It's almost as though Germany didn't suffer a catastrophic defeat and the design sensibilities of the Third Reich evolved well into the 21st century.

When he the broke the cover of a dusty fig orchard and charged uphill towards Taliban machine guns in Afghanistan last summer, Corporal Benjamin Roberts-Smith did not spare a thought for his own safety.

It was the thought of his comrades’ families that spurred him to hurl himself into a hail of bullets and draw fire away from his platoon, before single-handedly flattening two enemy machine gun squads.

The same humility and dedication to duty was on show as the 32-year-old Australian was awarded the Victoria Cross at his Special Air Service regiment's home base, Campbell Barracks, in Perth yesterday.

Brushing off praise for his gallantry as he accepted the highest military decoration for valour in the face of the enemy, he insisted that the real heroes are those who have lost their lives in combat and dedicated his award to his regiment, with whom he said he was “so proud” to serve.

His wife, Emma, beamed with pride with the couple’s five-month-old twins in her arms as she watched her husband become the most decorated soldier in Australia.

Corporal Roberts-Smith now wears one of only four Victoria Crosses awarded in the almost decade-long war in Afghanistan, and he adds it to the Medal of Gallantry which he won in 2006 for an earlier tour of duty.

Australia has the largest military commitment in Afghanistan of any country outside NATO, with 1,550 Australian troops there. Last year was the deadliest on record, with the deployment seeing 10 of its 21 deaths since 2001.

The Victoria Cross citation said the soldier's actions showed "most conspicuous gallantry" and "total disregard for his own safety". His bravery was a living enactment of a pledge tattooed across his chest: "I will not fail my brothers".

Corporal Roberts-Smith described how his platoon came under heavy fire as he lead a patrol in northern Kandahar Province last June 11, with two men to his left pinned down and dangerously exposed as gunfire ripping up the ground around them.

"One of them was copping a lot," he said. "He couldn't even fight back, couldn't move. At that point I decided I'd had enough. I wasn't going to wait until someone got hit.

"I know their families, they know mine. They were fighting hard. I saw an opportunity to move forward, so I did that. I'm not going to let someone get hit while I sit here doing nothing."

After breaking cover and drawing fire away from his patrol, allowing his comrades to return fire, he charged to within 65 feet (20 metres).

Crawling along the low stone wall shielding the enemy, he killed one gunner with a sniper shot and single-handedly overpowered two other squads.

Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister, told him yesterday: "You went to Afghanistan a soldier, you came back a hero. Our nation is enriched by you being among our number."

After accepting the award, Corporal Roberts-Smith said he had no interest in being called a hero. "I hear the word hero a lot. To me heroes are ... the guys that put their hand up willingly and they didn't come back. They're our mates and their families live with that every day."

He went on: ''I do what I do because I believe in the country that we live in. I believe we are making a difference in stemming the flow of terrorism into Australia. I want my children to be able to live as everyone does now without the fear of getting on a bus and having it blow up.''

His father, Len, said that he was "immensely proud" of his son. "As a parent, of course I worry enormously. We know the circumstances he goes into and we know our son, so we know he's going to be at the forefront. But we're very proud of him," he said.

Corporal Roberts-Smith now joins an elite group of Victoria Cross winners. Mark Donaldson became the first Australian to be decorated with the award since the Vietnam war in 2009 in recognition of his gallantry in exposing himself to enemy fire to protect injured troops and rescuing an interpreter.

The New Zealand commando Willie Apiata was decorated with the award in 2007 and Bryan Budd, a British paratrooper, was given a posthumous award that same year.

- Heidi Blake, for The Daily Telegraph, 24 Jan 2011

By Kate Bingham

No island is an island
but when the bright brass band Jerusalem
of Blake and Perry puts its hand
on its heart I find I cannot fight

that beat, I feel my face on fire,
my awkward angled arms unfold,
and in my feet of feet desire
to march in step through streets of gold.

From council flat or cotton mill,
as long as we stand singing here
I am as English as the hills,
half only human, half divine,

and shake, as overhead, unseen,
the organ's rising voice of god
rings out across the village green
of England's once upon a time.

Wow. I don't think I've ever had a Christmas/New Year as bad as this. Let me enumerate the ways.

1) I train my ass off for three months and I still fail my bloody jump. I would like to blame those stupid new automated machines that measure the static stations, but maybe that's ungracious. I cower at the thought of RT during practicum.

2) Parish turf war. Started by people who aren't even involved in anything. I do not appreciate the hypocrisy of people who raise a stink over a functional situation, and who don't even have any intention of helping out to begin with. It recalls the old saying about people in glass houses...

3) T is running off to Oz in a couple weeks. It's like the whole debacle with G again, only in reverse.

4) Stupid deployment policies will probably mean that my secondment request will get the axe and that I'm going to some cesspit school in a few weeks time instead. Shouldn't schools be the best judge of the personnel they want to meet their needs? This whole thing is an exercise in compromising current needs for some hypothetical long-term HR development - hypothetical because these absurd HR practices mean that nobody is going to remain in service long enough for their long-term plans to bear fruit. And they wonder about the high attrition rates.

5) Friends who give unhelpful advice.

I shudder to think what else 2011 has in store. Still, dum spiro spero.

Some years ago, I mentioned in passing that there was a curious convergence between the world of Sesame Street and Cole Porter songs. And here, with the magic that is youtube, are some examples of Sesame Street deliberately referencing Cole Porter.

Here's an obvious one:




(Hmm - so how about U Do Something to Me?)

Now, Let's Do It - Let's Lay an Egg!




The next one's a bit less intuitive. Here's the Count and Countess singing 'Seven'. It may not sound like 'Dancing Cheek to Cheek' at first, but listen to the music carefully, it's there - some of the phrases have been tweaked that's all. But that's what makes it clever.

I picked up Generations/Classics 3.0/whatever you want to call it Red Alert the other day. Good figure, natural and obvious re-use/repaint of the Sideswipe/Sunstreaker mold, and I needed to put him on the shelf next to his old buddy Inferno. When it comes to a toss up between getting Sideswipe or Red Alert, I've always had a softspot for Red Alert. Sure, Sideswipe and Sunstreaker go together like Frenzy and Rumble, but there was something about an ultra-paranoid unit security officer that appealed to me more than an aggro shiny red Lamborghini. And sometimes shiny red can be boring, and it's a breath of fresh air to have the Sideswipe mold in white instead.

But Classics Red Alert has his problems. A loose waist, loose thigh swivels, one loose ankle joint - mold degradation. But is this deja-vu? Have we seen a degraded Red Alert before in the past?

A few years back HasTak released an RiD Prowl in a Red Alert colour scheme. Same problems: loose joints. Why? Because the mold had already been used for: Mach Alert (Jap release), Blue Mach Alert, Prowl (US release), Blue Prowl, BotCon Sideswipe, Botcon Sunstreaker. The Red Alert deco was the seventh to figure to use this mold. No surprises that the joints were no longer nice and tight.

And that's the problem really. Because each time you have a Sideswipe mold (or any Lamborghini type mold), you go through at least a Sunstreaker repaint, and maybe some exclusive in a G2 paint scheme or 'Tigertrack' paint scheme or what not (and multiply everything by two to take into account production on either side of the Pacific) before you reach poor old Red Alert. By the time Red Alert comes off the assembly line, mold degration has crept in.

We've seen it once. We've seen it again. And no doubt, ten years in the future, when the next 'Classics' type line comes round, we'll see it again. Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, G2 Sideswipe, Breakdown, G2 Breakdown, Tigertrack - before we get to poor paranoid Red Alert. This is the curse of Red Alert, and like all curses, every generation is doomed to suffer from it.

(Same thing applies to the Seeker mold: Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp, 'Sunstorm', some random paint scheme seekr, Ramjet, G2 Ramjet, Thrust, Dirge. No wonder the Classics coneheads have slightly loose hip joints. That being said, Classics Thrust and Dirge are very handsome!)

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On that note, let me make a mention of the best mass release figure that HasTak has produced in a long, long time - Classics Jazz! This is the Jazz figure we've waited all our lives to get our hands on! And to think that when I was five or six I was all moody because I couldn't get Pretender Jazz - the folly of youth!

Anyhow, Classics Jazz is just superb. He's got a great transformation - neither too involved, nor too simple. He feels solid in robot mode (though from some angles he looks slightly hollow). He has a great headsculpt, though many have commented that he's got the facial expression of Judge Dredd. He's got a gun that looks slightly more menacing than the peashooters that most of the Classics Autobots cars have gotten. He's got good sculpted details (look at the back of the door panels, and even his forearms - they just scream G1), and decent articulation. One thing that could have been done better: they should have made his chest peg down into his abdomen in robot mode. As it is now, extreme arm movement causes his chest piece to swing free.

This is the standard that the Classics Prowl figure should have met (really disappointed with Prowl: fiddly doors, strange head/neck, underwhelming in general). And nice as his wave-mate Tracks is, Jazz is just that much more solid and fun a toy.

This is how Classics should have been from the start.