Calling Andy Garcia

Some of you here have read stuff that I have been posting from a long long ways back now – and you know, that long before anyone else said Osama bin Laden (or whatever the real name of this identity was...) was in Pakistan, you know that I said it.

You know it.

And sooner or later you knew that I would be pointing out something once again that more or less was er, ahead of the publicly-known information.

1.Andy Garcia - celebrity, good man, Ocean's Eleven actor. 2. Don't know...

Drifting in and out of some of my conversations here have been my occasional references to gambling, and to social clubs involving wealthy people inside of which data was being mined surreptitiously from members, and also certain networks of medical practitioners – in particular in the IVF field – that quite possibly contained scandalously criminal elements.

You may or may not recall that I have spoken of these things in the past.

Ah well, my friends in the Australian Federal Police and the various State Major Crime investigative bodies could do well to go back into their files concerning statements I had made to them not so very long ago.

Of course, in recent times the Australian Intelligence entities and the Australia Police have had fairly marginal success even with understanding simple things like Mossad stealing Australian ID's and passports and using them for launching assassinations here and there. Frankly, I'm not critiquing Mossad here – rather the spineless, gutless, under-funded and of course rather stupid Australians. They seem to have this unhappy knack of 'not knowing' anything.

James Packer

Like how it was possible for one of the world's richest men, James Packer, to be ripped off by a high roller cardplayer in one of his casinos to the tune of at least 32 million dollars. The local press is characterising it as a real life Ocean's Eleven incident.

But let me make it perfectly clear – Australia contains commercially-oriented private social clubs which are in fact organised and run by rogue elements of the British Foreign Service, in league with wealthy playboys and well-connected personages from Singapore and Indonesia, and these places are vipers' dens where conversations are bugged, brief cases are rifled through and documents copied, and covert financial scams are run against the unsuspecting.

Far be it from me to point to idiotic affairs like Rowan Gunaratne from Singapore giving advice on Tamil Terrorism to the fools in Canberra, or the fiasco about the stolen Aussie passports, or the HIH Insurance share float scam that was 'cleverly' blamed on Rodney Adler, or the crash float of now recently-bankrupted Nathan Tinkler that was run by other, more, 'clever' people in Noble Group from Hong Kong, or the stunning 'cleverness' of some young Parsee youth associated with Cisco Systems who took the ASX for a multi-million dollar ride with their simply amazing HFT programs...

No indeed.

Typical British private club items - not clues, really!

Apparently no one can see these things coming ahead, not even Alex Allen, the head of a UK Intelligence body who SOMEHOW MANAGED TO BE WORKING AS A PAID CONSULTANT TO THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN STATE GOVERNMENT, and living here while he was also the top Intelligence Officer in the United Kingdom. Apparently no one has told the Western Australian government that it is no longer part of the United Kingdom. Oh no, but these are of course all honourable men. The fact that six or seven people have dropped dead after being in this private club is apparently of little significance to the absolutely stunningly amazingly idiotic fools who run the Australian Security Intelligence agencies and the Federal Police. And these sudden deaths including, dare I say it, one particular Adam Rankin-Wilson, the relatively young and I do know, on the surface quite fit, personal lawyer of James Packer here in Western Australia.

But of course, these are all coincidences. Just like when I suggested bin Laden was almost certainly in Pakistan. Not to mention that he had also been in and out of England without anyone stopping him. Although admittedly, I use alien intelligence from UFO's and thus may have an advantage...

All the same, boys and girls of Caper Cops, let's face it, there is an old saying in Chicago – according to Ian Fleming – once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.

I personally think the situation is already out of hand, but you know what, let's just keep waiting around until something REALLY BAD happens out of this private social club that Andy Garcia from the Ocean's series of casino scam movies has never been to as far as I know – but has his photograph displayed in.

Johnny Can't Dance



Tango dancers in a London show

“Every Saturday night when the sun goes down

Poor li'l Johnny goes down to the town

Well he can't dance, no he can't dance;

Poor Little Johnny he just can't dance.”

My mother was a professional dancer... But I don't dance at all. I may look like the great Pablo Veron if a stylist went to work, but hey, I definitely just can't dance!

A thing looks like something, but then, sometimes, it isn't what it kinda looks like it might be.

I'm the same age as Madonna. And I can fence.

Die Another Day

The song above is a New Orleans song about Jean Lafitte the pirate – the point is, he can dance; he's just not allowed to go into town as who he really is and dance in his identifiable way and get found out.

I'm doing – have been - doing my best to steer away from some of the depressing stories unfolding all around us. Shane Todd's death in Singapore is something that is very disappointing to me. But it is something about which I have decided to leave to the Financial Times and a small handful of decent reporters to cover and they have been doing a tremendous job. I mean, let's face it, if governments want to bury stuff and hide stuff, even Jean Lafitte would have a hard time dancing - that is to say, if he didn't feel he could dance to the miserable tune being forced upon him.

Myself, I am independent and I have gold hidden down in the bayou, but today, I'm not celebrating with any of it. I don't feel like dancing.

But then too, I remind myself of the film short called 'Milonga' in which a patient old man conspires with an Italian waiter to assist – I'm not too sure – either himself at a younger age, or his daughter, to get with the future love of their life in some apocryphal tango salon somewhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=P6JYeEcxnUU#t=53s

The reason there is a strong connection between wine and the gods is because good wine gets better over a long time – and some wine, over the longer the better.

Madge and Tony Ward and Debbie

Johnny (can't dance) Ward

But those of you who have been here watching for a long time now, will realise that if Johnny says get off the dance floor it's probably time to prepare to duck for the flying bullets as well.

The truly great Pablo Veron

Miracles Of Life

Okay there's Danica Patrick. And there's now also Lauren Stojackovic. She's the 30 year-old female (very 'mature age' for an apprentice!) apprentice jockey who just won the million-dollar Blue Diamond Stakes which is the richest Australian race for Two-Year Old Race Horses. And it was an outstanding, and a clever ride, notwithstanding the horse is a champion.

I have to admit I've been 'riding' this horse for several months now and I always believed that it could, and would, win the Blue Diamond.

Stojackovic on Miracles Of Life

Perhaps you are someone who cares neither about diamonds nor race horses but if you have an open mind let me explain very briefly a few things:

There are horse and then there are HORSES! Same goes for diamonds too. Today there are too many tricks and simulants and fakes and there are also drugged athletes and (there is) cheating at sports. All that kind of thing frankly takes away the inherent thrill and excitement in rare and unique performances. A diamond - a cut diamond - is a performance; the way the edges throw fire and the way the crystal ricochets light is how the diamond 'performs' after it has been through an artist's and an engineer's hands.

There were tears aplenty at the race track today. The rider's father was on course and he couldn't stop himself as his daughter flew across the line in front. The trainer was a battling virtual unknown against some of the world's best international trainers.

A natural, mined blue diamond;
can't get this out of a test-tube

And the horse is rather small...

And that's about the only diminutive thing I can say about this thoroughbred. One thing you should know about all race horses is that they get their speed from the mother's side (what's called the dam's side) and this particular animal's mother was by one of Australia's greatest ever speedsters - Rory's Jester. Rory's Jester is one of the top three or four all-time greatest sprinters in Australian racing history. It was a brutally efficient, undefeatable hulk, although a show-pony style of reddish blonde-coloured thing.

And this modern version 'Miracles Of Life' looks visually similar and destroyed her rivals today in the same contemptuous manner, racing up to the leaders authoritatively at the final bend and muscling ahead and then blasting away into the pages of illustrious history. This is a great horse. The jockey is reported to have whispered to the horse just before the start that there was about a minute for them now between being a really good horse and a truly great horse.

If you know anything about horse racing then you know that race horses think, and feel, and have a warrior spirit and enormous courage and incredible will to run fast and a generous pride in winning which they share with everyone who cares about them.

Okay you might not have the same sentiment about horse racing and the animals and all of that racing folklore - not everyone is into this game... But you can't know about life unless you know things that are somewhat similar - peculiar, almost unscientific, sentimental things that seem to defy logic. Except they never ever do. People just don't want to believe reality, however; they are so hell bent on defining the world in some way they think will be able to be put in a test tube no matter what.

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

That Colourless Stone

Someone walks into a big empty shop – there's nothing on the walls, very limited furniture, smooth neat bare stone floor, a little bit of light coming through a single not-too-large window pane.

In the centre of the room is a four foot high plinth with a small square of cream-coloured ceramic tile set in it like a kind of a built-in serving plate.

In the middle of this serving plate square of plain, cream-coloured ceramic tile, sits a single rather small colourless chunk of crystal much like a little translucent rock.

What are the feelings, the ranges of emotion, that rush or flow through the visitor?

Most likely absolutely none!

Cynics say that diamonds are all about the marketing. Which can also be a way of saying that in the absence of other things that connect with the crystal to render its meaningfulness to the observer, and in the absence of specific context, the thing itself has little or no intrinisic function, and otherwise might even have little or no intrinsic value either.

And I think Western jewellery shops make that kind of mistake – they tend to have this austere, almost brutalist and stark style about them, which is to do with contemporary ideas about architecture; but I feel this does not serve the expression of what diamonds are about too well at all.

Inside the Chow Tai Fook store, HK

However in Asia, particularly in Far East Asia and also specifically in Hong Kong and modern China too, the whole style of diamond vending shops is characteristically very different to the style that obtains in diamond shops of the West. And personally I find I can only buy a diamond in a Chinese diamond store or one which is similarly arranged. Even in South Africa where I spend time regularly and know one or two authentic diamondaires, the feel of the diamond galleries tends a little toward the Western style. Let me describe to you the difference between the two:

You walk into a Chinese jeweller and you are greeted by rows and rows of glass cabinets at waist-height stocked with rings and bangles and necklaces and loose stones too - though mainly just rings – all winking out and reflecting light from the powerful downlights and cabinet lights that are simply everywhere. The whole place is hot and bright. And from here you are swept away into the Aladdin story, really, because it consists of first noticing one fantastic, bright and enchanting stone, only to be thrown into confusion upon next seeing another, even as much as five times more attractive than that first. And on and on it goes and eventually you find yourself being taken up into the heights of glittering expense and even to a kind of selfish, ego-driven Luciferian grandeur. If money is no object to you, there is almost no limit to the hubris which you can indulge in by simply paying for it. But that is really about the moral dubiousness of money itself though.

Well, I can't tell you that there is an absolute rule that you must only ever buy a 1 carat or greater D IF with an exceptionally-good aesthetic cut quality...

I can tell you whatever personal scheming reason you have for buying a diamond is in fact the only truly significant thing you should think about as you make a purchase: sitting with a very well-groomed woman in a slightly darkened dinner room in which there are other rich and self-important people, it will benefit you to have a diamond on your friend somewhere visible that possesses a lot of scintillation and grabs the squinting eyes of the big-headed. If that's what you want to do. Nowadays of course diamonds are worn in all sorts of places; not necessarily only those visible ones...

Ultra wealthy people in history have bought or acquired enormous and otherwise fairly stupid stones all of which carry some folkloric aspect with them wherever they go – and mostly they went underground somewhere along the line among very very very private people. I have a piece of the old Sancy but therein hangs a tale and I certainly wouldn't admit to such a thing publicly, so here, I am telling you a lie of course...

But I like to go to Chinese shops to buy diamonds. I like to see just what an amazing diversity of mindsets there can be, and I like to use the diversity of the small colourless stones as symbols of the myriad biases and prejudices that can almost insanely grip the minds of individuals and force them even to part with significant money as responses to mere folklore, nonsense, and otherwise virtual nothingness imbued with 'brilliance dispersion and scintillation' through manufactured human complication.

The new Faberge Campaign by Mario Testino

My own fantastical biases and prejudices are not particularly odd: I imagine it is true what they say that diamonds are the only stones that reproduce sexually! To me diamonds are about money power and sex. These are things that are rarely found to be completely understood by humans anywhere, but are in fact exercised almost everywhere and rather indescriminately too by all people, and who almost universally each individually also assume they are at very minimum, the world's ultimate leading expert on these matters, and if only someone else noticed it, or if only they had but an extra ten million dollars to lord over everyone else, then no doubt the clarity of the situation would also be observed by others!

Oh boy. Only a certain sense of humour saves the human spirit from being as direly unbearable as it might often be. I don't have those 'set' jokes that go with demonstrating a sense of humour, but I sure do laugh ironically when I think about paying big money for decent diamonds – it isn't that I couldn't do it or haven't done it; it's the fact that the surrounding context and all the other stuff that goes with the scintillations in the darkened restaurant are all the rest of the necessary personal expenses to me that the salesperson isn't thinking about when they give me the steep price on the stone I'm looking at!

A Marvelous Sky

Last weekend I played once again in a band just for one gig.

And only one song.

It's a real simple basic tune that I took on – The Long Winters' 'Sky Is Open.'

You can hear their original version on YouTube.

No one over here knows this song; it's never been played on the radio here.

What I like about the tune and the way The Long Winters perform it is the clear vocals and the fairly standard English diction of the singer in spite of a touch of Canadian accent in there.

I've more or less lost most of my Ultra-British accent that I grew up with, having lived in Australasia for quite a few years now. I think I'll have to remedy that though, as modern Australian/Australasian is a peculiar, clipped, slack-dictioned, sorry thing... Well I think so.

New PRS Guitar

The guitar part in the song is also extremely easy to play. Now I can manage a pretty difficult range of techniques on this instrument – in fact my Dad called me Paganini all the way up from a small child and I think he thought that like him (that is, my old man, not Paganini!) I might one day take up the violin properly. But I never did. I think though at some point he may have thought I really was Paganini too. Who knows, I may have been in a former life. But I am not now and I don't play publicly anymore although at one time I played in ski resorts all over Austria with fairly big-time professional session and side musos who ski-ed off-tour and played in the nightclubs apres ski.

I'll tell you how good I was – I played joint lead guitar in a jazz band whose drummer, Glenn Walsh, went on to hit the skins on tour for Stevie Wonder in Sydney. There ya go.

Anyhow... 'The Sky Is Open,' is a song currently being considered as the theme for a potential Hollywood big budget flick featuring Marvel's Ms. Marvel. I don't think it'll ever get made though. They've even slated the tremendous New Zealand director Mike Takahori or whatever his name is (he directed the last of the good Bond movies Die Another Day). Ms. Marvel is riddled with complications as far as sexuality and a dark comic book history that won't go away no matter how much spinning goes down the marketing tunnel here.

Me, I'm happy to lust over a new Pernambuco-necked, Maple-topped, PRS guitar, play tunes just for my own self-indulgence, and think about whether it would be fun getting a Sunbeam Alpine or Tiger from somewhere and fully restoring it. This was the first car James Bond ever drove in the movies by the way. But you already know that.

Charlize Theron CANNOT play Ms. M.

Madonna... Could. You mightn't think so but if you go back to her being directed by Traktor Films in the video clip of the song Die Another Day you realize just how amazingly good at action pieces she really is.

Hollywood will likely screw up this job just like it has everything else recently. Even Julia Roberts could do this role. But not, NOT Charlize Theron.

All these people getting too old? No, I don't think so. Hollywood can halt time. Shame it just can't go back to when there were real producers there though.