Vandals of the Commons

Roads soaked in fossil fuel leaks, toxic surface runoff and throwaway junk will now become safe from young criminals that vandalise the hot cooking bitumen and footpaths with their chalk.

Since the 17th century children who 'go and play outside' have been engaging together with equals in the game of 'scotch-hop'.

Proposed new anti-graffiti laws in New South Wales will make it an offence to intentionally mark any premises...That means it will technically outlaw things like chalk hopscotch squares or handball courts drawn on footpaths or bitumen...Unless the kids get the consent of the local council they're committing an offence" abc.

Obese and attention deficient young people have to navigate a visual cacophony of solid state spam (advertising) on walls or all the other surfaces in their ever shrinking public spaces.

Are they really the 'criminal vandals' that deprive all living beings of a habitable planet?
Their guardians would do well to provide Intergenerational Justice and Intergenerational Equity for their offspring or the writing will be on the wall...


Related:
Investing in public art and young people in Manly 2007
Power and Attention Hogs in Social Spaces, 2008

Beach Sand, Fecal Contamination and Salmonella

Salmonella has been found in sand of playgrounds in Mona Vale, Winnererremy Bay, Warriewood, Palm Beach and North Avalon. One year on and the bacteria (Salmonella paratyphi bio var java) have resurfaced in the sand. In Dunbar Park, which is now closed the sand will be replaced with 'treated bark'. Both in May 08 and November 08 Mnly wrote about the connections between(exotic) pets, fecal contamination and aggregation of minors in beach sand.

New research has also found that people digging in beach sand or building sandcastles risk gastrointestinal diseases and diarrhea. The epidemiological study looked into sand contact activities and illnesses.

"Researchers found evidence of gastrointestinal illnesses, upper respiratory illnesses, rash, eye ailments, earache and infected cuts. Diarrhea and other gastrointestinal illnesses were more common in about 13 percent of people who reported digging in sand, and in about 23 percent of those who reported being buried in sand...We have known for some time that swimming in waters polluted by fecal contamination can result in illness, but few previous studies have focused on sand."

Beach users should use a hand sanitizer or wash their hands/body after contacting beach sand.

The runoff from urinating and defecating dogs at the beach promenade/wall, draining through the pvc pipes/stairs onto the beach sand does not seem to make the beach sand less risky.
Questions remain:
Where was the sand sourced from that covered the playgrounds?
Where can information be obtained regarding fecal contamination of beach sand at Manly Beach?

Links
Sand, salmonella, e-coli and that cute pet, May 08
More salmonella mysteries on the Northern Beaches, November 08
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2009, July 10). Digging In Beach Sand Increases Risk Of Gastrointestinal Illness. Via ScienceDaily
Christopher D. Heaney et al., Contact With Beach Sand Among Beachgoers and Risk of Illness, American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access published on June 18, 2009, Am. J. Epidemiol. 2009 170: 164-172; doi:10.1093/aje/kwp152

Manly Beach Riot Day

Following a long celebration period, during which adults modelled marathon drinking in sub-urbia, Australia Day or Invasion Day should be the final bang of the same thing.

To flee sub-urban misery, the oversized cars where packed with plonk, meat, dogs and kids. THE public space in which it all has to take place is of course the beach in Australia. Walkers invest their life racing no less than three dogs in harness (on average) along the beach to empty them there. Schoolies had settled on their towels with endless containers of alcohol and smokes. National flags covered the Corso, most bodies and their skin.

From beach to town the ubiquitous primal sound of "woo hoo" could be heard. The utterance of 'winners' borrowed from another culture and sphere has long replaced the endemic home-grown articulations of "cooee".

Public intoxication, violence, rage and glassing are not foreign to Manly. "Violent attacks have risen on the northern beaches by almost 10 per cent in the past two years." Violence is often said to be 'alcohol-fuelled' amongst mostly young men. Even businesses on the Corso are 'feuding' and 'brawling' diplaying violent behaviour in public.

Later in the day a group of 80 young Australians arrived (by public transport?) also clad in the national flag and said to be sedated by alcohol. Their utterances are claimed to have consisted of: "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie’’, "Aussie Pride", "f*** the pigs’’ "f--k off we're full", "we’re celebrating we are Australian, f*** the ethnics", "lets go f--k with these Lebs" and "tits out for the boys" .
Their deeds were violence against people and vandalism towards objects."They jumped on top of cars and smashed windows as they ran up and down Manly's Corso." "An 18-year-old Asian female in one of the cars was showered with shattered glass, giving her numerous cuts to her arms... A taxi driven by a Sikh Indian was also targeted". Manly Police and the riot squad attempted to restore civic order.

"Australia Day became a scene of brawls and vandalism across the state - with anger spreading from Shellharbour in the south to Port Macquarie in the north." "Ambulance crews were called to a fight at Sutherland train station with reports of a 10-person brawl, with a glassing and a female with a fractured finger." "Police say about 1,000 people were involved in the fight at Burleigh Heads". Head injuries at Batemans Bay. A "massive brawl"erupted on the Queensland's Gold Coast.

The 2005 Cronulla riots in NSW also come to mind. District battles for the golden 'public' sands away from unsustainable hot sub-urbia.

Previous:
Sydney riots I, 05
Defending the turf II, 05
Sydney Riots, Beaches and Exclusionism, III, 05
Spooky for Australian Children, update: 040109 abc
Other:
Rebel Without a Cause
Riots With a Cause
Update:
Manly 'morons' rampage was racist: academic. SMH 270109, " racism dressed up as nationalism"

Including Pram Inhabitants in Communication

A bumper crop of babies, toddlers and advanced children are being pushed around Manly in prams. Mostly, turned away from the face2face position, leaving the young one deprived of interaction.

Parents/carers can be seen engaged in electronic interaction (mobile) for prolonged periods, as their most common posture. Awareness becomes entirely focused on the one physically absent.

Lack of (verbal) interaction can interfere with the language development of the young child. Shari Harpaz, a speech pathologist, specializing in children with PDD-NOS, social and play deficits, developmental verbal dyspraxia, and oral motor deficits "is seeing an increase in speech-delayed babies and toddlers" which is related to mobile phone usage. The social preconditions for language acquisition are withheld. Preverbal vocalizations are not responded to. "The social use of language, that's the piece that's getting lost,'' said Harpaz.
Speechless presence needs some inclusive quality face-time to become a member of the language-using human community.

'PDD-NOS': Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified
'Hey, cellphone mom: Your children are calling', Seattle Times, 070908
'Caregivers should turn off the phone and watch the kids' , mlive, 090908
How best to walk your baby, The Independent, 211108
Dr Suzanne Zeedyk, Dundee's School of Psychology

Manly's Plastic Legacy - From Plastic Toy to Fish

Time has come to pack the urban tank with plenty of plastic gear and drive to the beach. Unpack the bikes, prams, pack of dogs and convienence food and drink. At the end of the day, the full plastic-poo bags are left, leaking silently. The plastic wrapping for each mouth-full are 'blowin in the wind'. A large range of plastic toys, fast-food containers and lighters are being moved by the waves. The industrial beach cleaning machinery cannot keep up.

Finally, the Pacific becomes the tip full of trash. It is thought that 80 % of marine garbage originates from the shores. Most of the inferior plastic toys are broken by frustrated kids seeking non-plastic stimulation. The plastic that does not end up in the ocean, gets heaped up in the streets, awaiting petrol-transport to the 'land-fill'-tip, which is next to a national park. Some have started to recycle this plastic deluge in to art.

In the end, the terrestial tip leaches into the groundwater and the 'marine tip' grinds up all the plastic into tiny little pellets, leaching toxins. These in turn enter the food chain. An inheritance for all the off-spring and the remaining ecology from a plastic world.
Map showing where people are most desperate to keep developing human beings entertained via (mostly plastic) toys.
Map: Toys Import, map no. 58 via WorldMapper, © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan)
"Is there a present that a child or family member just has to have and you can't find it in any store?" Kidsource, 2000
- Keep the Sea plastic free

Halloween – it's kinda spooky

Manly Council is attempting to facilitate 'community' top down. The chosen event this time is Halloween. “Make your Street Spookier” goes the postcard-blurb. We should engage in a “creepy” orgy of consuming and line the streets with debris (plastics): “fake cobwebs, bats" etc., streamers and sugar/coloured lollies and spend big on costumes. Strange ideas for a council that purports minimising waste and has a sustainability statement. The promise is that the road will be closed, but no mention is made where the many spectators will park and what the increased traffic hazard means for wildlife and adjoining streets capes.

Halloween has its origin in the agricultural rites of death and renewal for a new sustainable year. Part of the produce had to be sacrificed to the land spirits and shared within the community. Dark forces had to be soothed with gifts and bonfires held darkness and death at bay. This renewal festival has long been co-opted and commercialised to flog off (mainly plastic) merchandise. Australia has just recently hopped on to this bandwagon.
The are a lot of spooky skeletons in the Australian closet. The plastic bats, spiders, owls, crows, skeletons, the cats, werewolves, haunted houses and zombies might be contemporary props to ward off the the inevitable hot dry future created by mischief-making adults. The horror is ususally projected onto the living native spiders and bats etc - till the ritual spray or habitat destruction puts an end to the spook. The defense mechanism must lay the blame on a sacrificial being, to heal the denial, the anxious state of being. Halloween is a welcomed purging as well as an economic healer now.

Children are very anxious about the future. A world without water and food , but permanent engulfing “bonfires” does not fuel much optimism. Responsible elders not looking after our only common home make the decisions to heat it up unbearable for all, make the sea rise and melt the ice. Daily, many members of this common household have to go forever. The land, waterways and air are used as rubbish tips and all loose their health. Degraded land and toxic landscapes are part of the inheritance. This 'house of horrors' might well be less inhabitable than what their parents inherited and squandered. The disruptive nature of economic and ecological inter generational equity is creepy. Apart from these many “natural disasters” of a turbulent future, children go through horror scenarios of neglect and child abuse in Australia. Irresponsible use of cars, guns and dogs also sacrifices many young lives. Haunted human relationships propagate in a spooky Zombie culture. It is bewitched how young people are denied independence and maybe a future too.

Till then, put on the big magical denial party and celebrate...
Images: 1. Children at Manly Beach, 2 & 3 Street art Berlin

Plastic foods, cheap thrills & sensory deprivation

Stuck in the congested poodle-pram-parade at Manly Beach beach today. Double and triple decker prams, often with dogs in harness and undivided attention to their mobile.

Should the unmanageable brood get noticed, then their mouths get stuffed with highly processed and packaged food, or anything out of plastic. Drink and food come out of plastics for baby or toddler. The sugar and preservative rich diet makes the kids crazy and unmanageable, if the sheer number of kids per person is not manageable in the first place. Tantrum toddlers can all be put back in place in their restraining vehicles and pushed (ideally) away from oneself.

This highly nutritious life-sustaining diet is usually cooked up by many caring cooks. It is the processing and not even the cost of transport, that leaves a huge footprint on the environment. The impoverished and degraded Earth will later bestow a hot and life-less future on these offspring.

Should there still be any (hyper)-activity, then plastic toys or sedatives might do the trick. At lunch carers feast in eateries, while the kid is still restrained in its baby 4x4 isolation chamber. Keeping the 'kid busy' might be done by other restaurant patrons.

The food provided later on at school time is found to be “disgraceful” by an food expert. Government sponsored educational campaigns to get parents not to feed them 'fizzy drinks and bags of chips' failed. Mums defied the program and are supplying junk food to (their) school children, it developed into a flourishing business to subvert that "low fat rubbish".

“...Reports of child abuse in Australia have doubled in the last five years ... That translates to one new case every two minutes.” Restraining the development of motor skills, the age appropriate development of the CNS, language development and inappropriate foods would have to qualify as a form of abuse too.

Young babies can use visual clues to pick up on the community of language users if they are given a chance of face to face interaction. The jogging parent on their wearable, checking out the pack of dogs, is usually pushing the pram away from their gaze. The child/ren at the bottom of the double deckers has a very limited impression of the world. The ones seeing nothing but a black plastic gauze for the first bit of their life, might be 'in the dark' for some time.

Well, at the end of the day it is time to hose the many plastic toys down, give the dog a spin on the beach, pack the pram, plastic bikes, dogs etc into the 4WD and drive into a hot turbulent future.
Life in a pram with a fit mum
Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land
Dyspraxia

Investing in public art and young people in Manly

The trend in Manly's CBD 'to paint buildings in an asphalt colour to merge in with the car parks and roads' was mentioned before. Some local councils invest between $50,000 to $126,000 a year in “removing graffiti from public infrastructure.” In the sprawl-and-mall age, young people seek spaces away from bland sub-urbs.The apparent public space under constant surveillance becomes contested by youth wanting to make a mark. Many hundreds of years ago, it was a common practice here. Now, so it seems only the one that pays can speak and leave their mark in the minds of many. They call it advertisement. This is today's mechanism for inclusion and exclusion of public voice.
Yes, often the graffiti lacks social capital, but one could decide to invest the $126,000 in the education and training of the young 'vandals' and turn out muralists, artists and end up with a unique city. In times the young artists might even bless their place with a contemporary urban interface design.
On Banksy
Mexican Muralist
Northern Irish murals
Convert a digital photo to a multiple layered stencil
Image: 1. Manly CBD, 2. mural in Europe

Life in a pram with a fit mum

The birth of twins, triplets and other multiples appears to be the norm at the moment. This seems to be due to an artificial boosting of the birth-rates. Parents arriving in their hummers at the beach, unpack their 4WD-like prams, usually while the motor is running. Manly Beach parade lacks pram lanes wide enough where kids are lined up in threes or more. From dawn to dusk all lanes are taken up with mums jogging, one hand on the kid-mobile, the other on the mobile and/or dog. Pramwalking wards off depression and obesity it is said. But for the infant, toddler and/or pre-schooler the double/triple decker prams often turn to isolation chambers and physical restraints. Many of the older children could easily walk and explore their environment or cycle along, but that would interfere with mum's jogging speed. Some are allowed to develop their motor competence on dysfunctional Chinese throw-away-bikes, girls push pink mini-prams (of course). The point is that children are often too old to be in a convenient pram. Additionally, the overtaxed parent offers junk-food and sugar-rich drinks, or worse medication to create silence. This is obesity in the making, but most of all hinders the age-appropriate development of the childrens' muscles and coordination system.
Cafes have even resorted to putting up 'pram rules' to allow access for non pram wielding customers. The primary caregivers tend to seek interaction with anyone, but their off-spring. The revenge turns the venue into a sound-scape of a crèche without care.

Cartoon: "This is our most practical model. It comes with a 21-year warranty."
Beware of fat kids in strollers - they hurt, SMH
Dyspraxia

Updates:
- hild Development: Lack Of Time On Tummy Shown To Hinder Achievement. American Physical Therapy Association (2008, August 7). >How to to get infants out of devices that constrain mobility and learn how to carry, hold and play with a baby (pdf)
- How best to walk your baby, The Independent, 211108
- Dr Suzanne Zeedyk, Dundee's School of Psychology
- The ability to engage in joint attention is crucial for language development. Joint attention is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. (Jogging and communicating on the mobile while the infants scream their heart out in a covered plastic capsule (pram) on Manly beach's Poodle-Pram-Parade. Shelly beach to Queenscliff with a cafe stop in between.) Eye-gazing, word learning & developmental disorders 042012

80 per cent of brain development occurs before a child is three years old. abc 052012

Want a child who is "emotionally secure, self-confident, curious, and autonomous"? Ditch the pram and carry them upright, tribal-style. Jared Diamond on child-rearing techniques used in indigenous societies 012013


Babies' brains may be tuned to language before birth Nature 0213

'Why do people like the sound of cars more than koels?'

The Koels (Eudynamys scolopacea) are back in their breeding place. After the long journey from New Guinea, the strong "coo-ee" or "ko-el" can be heard at night especially. Up to 46 cm they are a stately and beautiful bird. They will put their eggs into the nest of the local birds. (Red Wattlebird, Figbirds etc).
The depicted image is on exhibition at the Manly Library at the moment. Wonderful to see, that kids are raised with an awaress of their local habitat. Still switched on to ask questions like: "Why do people like the sound of cars more than koels? " Meanwhile adults complain about the sounds of frogs and birds, but not traffic, 'air-conditioners', building noises etc etc
I did not get the name of the budding artist, but promise I'll look it up next time....
Update: The name of the artist of the above picture is: Helena Todd. She is 10 years old. Also forgot to mention that there are many more nice pictures in the 'Art and Nature' Competition.