CliC eyewear/glasses

I've been wearing Clic glasses (the ones with magnetic closing at the front) for about 8 years now and they have been very good.
They seem to last longer than most spectacles and I can always find them, and although the style of them doesn't really change much, the usefulness and practicality of them is very very good.

the Wang-Fitzpatricks in Australia

DPRK/North Korea

The fascinating thing about Western Commentary and Intelligent Insight into the Hermit Kingdom is that pretty well every expert is convinced that it is teetering on the brink of extinction and is the cause of great Instability in North Asia...the only place on Earth where a World War could actually happen.
The experts have been thinking this pretty well everyday for over 60 years now and every day the Regime of the North has demonstrated its stability, growing power and longevity as it is.
True, it is a horrible government, for sure, and indeed most likely the worst government on Earth, as indeed the Chinese call it, but it is also extremely stable and resilient and will abide, with the Un clan at its helm far longer than you or me on the Earth.
We can indeed make up our own opinions, but we can't manufacture our own facts.
DPRK is here to stay, pretty much as is, or better. Nothing will change that. Certainly not the rhetoric of ageing 'foreign devils'. 

40,000 hits, and a statement

This Turtle House blog has had about 40,000 hits so far, which is something, I guess, with me not actually too sure of what a blog or a hit is, or means, but I'm sure it means something a fraction more than nothing.

The ads that appear on this blog, everything from prostatic health, to anti-smoking campaigns, to Bookbinders in Gordonvale, to buying Phillipine prostitutes to bring home really has nothing to do with me at all.

Even though I am Australian born, I do not agree with the Australian Government on just about everything they do that fucks up peoples lives.

Unlike most Australians, I support refugee arrivals & I have no territorial or resource acquisition ambitions in Arabia at all.

I am fortunate to be an Australian, due to the wealth that comes out of the earth, though I dont own that wealth, nor will I be responsible when it runs out...I am not proud of what this place does or represents at all, especially in the rampant destruction of its youth via the massive power of the alcohol barons, a power unaddressed by every government. Unfortunately, we can choose our friends and our own ideas, but we can't choose our own Nation to begin with. That one takes a lifetime. Australia has some good points, as does Croatia. I'm not proud that Croatia actually exists as it is, nor that Australia actually exists as it is, but I do note that both do exist.

CROUCHING WRITER, HIDDEN FLAGON

The first of my 4 major manuscripts (the first I am editing to Reader level) is The Orange Gate Ghost which is the adult story of a Children's Fiction Writer who doesn't particularly like children at all. It is a humorous book dealing with the Meaning of Life. My first task is to change it from First Person narration to Third Person story, and to increase it's size by about 10,000 words. It is still a slim healthy sized book this way. I don't like thick books.
Changing the narration from "I" to "He" is a bit of a challenge as the tale is dear to my heart. I may in fact change it from "I" to "She" so as to make the editing more of a form of self-learning as well.


The other Big 3 manuscripts are Red Pack Bang...currently 100,000 words, which is to big for my memory to keep recalling where I am in the re-writing of it, so I will change it into 3 small books, although under the one title/cover.


The next would be My Life in a Hospice which is a non-fiction looking back at 30 years of work in palliative care nursing and strategic planning, including my own particular moral view at the end.


The next is To Kong Rai, a pretty readable junior novel as it is...an adventure story set in the Golden Triangle with the main characters being an Australian girl and a Chinese boy. It is being written in both English and Mandarin and so will take some long lead-time.


They are my main works on the desk now. I have some others...experiments in what you can actually do with a story.


Another not-yet-fully-baked manuscript is Brother Tamada...the story of a semi-superhero nuclear irradiated Japanese Christian Brother trying to convert China. His first problem, and one that he never realises, is that his name, Tamada, in Mandarin, means 'Mother fucker'.


My Final Work, as I see it, will be a Chinese-English long poetic piece called Wo Ai Ni Park, which I am writing under the name of Wang YuHan rather than John Fitzpatrick. It is the poetic story of my love for my wife.

Az for Freemasonry

I was a Freemason for about 2 months many years back and I kind of liked it...the rituals, the way of standing, the way of greeting, the words to use, the inclusiveness etc.. the mystic East and West of it all, the Majic of it...the history and, indeed the Wonder... az it is.
The thing that annoyed me was that we all had to swear an allegiance to the Queen of England and that's eventually why I really had to leave. No one with any decent respect of the trials of Eire can ever really do that for long and still call themselves a decent human being of Celtic heritage.
We can kneel to a Roman Pope but not to the Slag that is the English Queen or King.


Az for the Religions, I'm still looking for one that doesn't want or accept my money. God doesn't need money. God needs me.
As a young man of about 17 I made a pact with my personal Catholic Jesus that if he let me lead the kind of life I chose to, whatever it was, whatever it meant, wherever it went, then, when I died, well, he could have me in his Kingdom. I'm sticking to that agreement.

The Importance of Fiction in Palliative Care and in Government

We cannot underestimate the importance and power of fiction in creating reality. I was employed for a long time by the Queensland Government to write the Strategic Plan for Palliative Care Services in the 11 health divisions in the North of Queensland and I did so successfully, and am responsible for the development and implementation, and the ongoing substantial funding for the Palliative Care service at Gordonvale Hospital...and ,although I did these things as a member of the Health Professions, and as a somewhat Faceless Bureaucrat at the time,  the skills I used were those I had employed as a successful children's fiction writer. Thus, the world, in North Queensland, is a somewhat better place than it would have been otherwise.