The Orstrahyun

2011-12-24T12:27:00.006+11:00

Best. Christmas. Ever

A Short Story By Darryl Mason

"Is he okay?"

He waited for her to answer.

He couldn't tell her what happened while she was away...

"He's not getting better, if that's what you mean."

How could he tell her, right now? She had more than enough on her mind already.

"I know your dad's not getting better. I meant...does he understand what you say to him? Can you talk to him?"

Down the hall, he could hear his son's sobbing quickly winding down as something in his bedroom grabbed his attention. When his mother had told their son she had to stay in Brisbane tonight, Christmas eve, he'd let out a little shriek, then a plume of tears. He didn't blame his son for crying, he knew he'd have burst into tears as well if he'd been told, at six years of age, that his mother wasn't going to be there when he woke up on Christmas Day.

"I talk to dad," she said, "but...he's off somewhere else. Most of the time, his face is just blank."

He struggled to catch all of what his wife was saying. It was like he was trying to talk to her across a room, while a titanic hailstorm attacking the tin roof above. The static on the line made it seem like wife was even further away than she actually was, sitting next to her father, drifting out his last days in a nursing home that hummed steady silence, punctuated by screams and crying. He knew his wife hated that place, and that she wanted to be home with him and her son on Christmas eve, wrapping presents.

But there were no presents to wrap.

"Are you still there?" she said, her voice grating with frustration. "Hello?"

"I'm here, the...line is terrible," he went to swallow, and couldn't it. His tongue, his mouth, throat, were dry, he needed water. Or bourbon. A decade ago, when he was 24, he would have dealt with the misery of the ruined day he had just endured, and what was still to come tonight, with three double Wild Turkeys and Coke, and then a few more straight from the bottle.

But he didn't Do That Anymore.

Even if he wanted to obliterate himself with bourbon tonight, he couldn't afford it, and he couldn't drive to get it. The car went two weeks ago.

"I know where I'd rather be tonight..." she said, and he could feel her smile.

"I wish you were here, too."

"We've never been apart at Christmas, have we?"

"No. First time..."

He could delay the inevitable confrontation with his wife until tomorrow afternoon, maybe even early evening, it would take her most of the day to drive back down the coast.

Or he could tell her now. Be honest, and tell her that he left everything to the last moment and that he had well and truly fucked up, that he'd been so absolutely sure there was another couple of hundred left on their final active credit card, but he'd been wrong.

He could tell her how it felt to stand there at the cashier's with a video game for his son in his hand and have his credit card rejected, twice, and to have someone there in the line behind him whisper, with disgust, "fucking loser," and to know that it was ultimately nobody's fault but his own.

He could tell her all that, but it would make her night even more miserable, worrying then not only about her father, and whether he would live to the New Year, but also about her son, who was now going to wake up in less than seven or eight hours to discover that Santa had left him no presents.

The splatter of static faded from their phones.

"No, we've never spent Christmas apart," she said, and he could see the memory movies he knew she was thinking about. "We even saw each other on a few Christmas days before we started going out. When you were still seeing...Sonja."

"You know I only went to all those parties with Sonja because I knew you were going to be there, looking wicked," he said. These were old lines, they both knew the routine and enjoyed it.

His wife laughed, a real laugh, deep and loud. "How do you come up with such bullshit?"

"That's why you love me," he said. She'd needed to laugh, to get that release, and he'd done it. He'd made her feel better.

"It's not the only reason I love you, but it's in the top three."

How could he tell his wife that when their son woke up he'll think Santa is a liar? And that their son would probably be waving the letter she'd written a month before, on Santa's Workshop letterhead, from the desk of Santa Claus himself, that promised the boy, if he behaved himself, the one present he most absolutely desired, as he'd told his father, "in this whole wide, world wide world."

It was a video game, for PC (a new Xbox system was one third of a monthly mortgage payment they could never afford to miss), a game that put the player in command of the stars and moons of our galaxy.

Before work finished for the year eight weeks ago, he'd watched a couple of previews of the game his son wanted from Santa on YouTube. The game had caught his imagination as well. One of the key missions of the game was to move moons into the orbits of watery worlds to pull life out of the oceans, or to position a star into a rumble of asteroids and dead planets to make a new solar system, where life would eventually flourish if you could protect the planets from massive asteroid and comet strikes. He wanted to play the game, too, with his son. And earlier today, when he'd been walking to the cashier's at the W, he'd imagined an afternoon of connection and absolute joy with his son as they played the game together on Christmas Day.

Tomorrow.

"Are you still there?" she asked.

"Yeah. Are you staying at the nursing home tonight?"

"I have to. The storm's gone crazy. I'm going to drag in a more comfortable chair from the day room when everyone's gone to bed. I think it's only me and the nurses, here, who actually know it's Christmas Eve..."

"That's really sad. They don't even know it's Christmas.."

"I know. Anyway, I'm going to go."

"Okay. Do you want to talk him again? He's still awake, I can hear him ripping up paper in his room."

"Why's he still doing that? No, I'll call him in the morning. Make sure he's up by seven."

"He'll be up by five, waking me up."

"That's true...."

A long pause. He knew that she knew, in the way she always knew.

"So," she said, with a sigh. "Did you get everything?"

He had to end this conversation now. It was time to bail.

"It's all taken care of," he said, quickly. "Everything's cool. I love you. Kiss your dad for me. Merry Christmas. I'll talk to you in the morning."

He hung up, snapping the phone shut. He tossed it on the bed like it had scorched his hand.

He stood there for a moment, waiting to see if it would ring again, then headed for the bathroom and drank water from the tap. Being a deceptive bastard was thirsty work.

"Jamie? What are you doing?" he shouted through the house, from the bathroom.

"Nothing dad!" his son shouted back, from his bedroom. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going downstairs to see what's on TV! You hungry?"

"No!"

"Okay! I'll be back up to tuck you in!"

"Yeah, okay."

He had to get this done, before his son went to sleep. He had to go and tell him the bad news about Santa. And he'd do it, he told himself, in a few minutes, fully aware food and TV were just ways to delay the inevitable.

He walked down the stairs, the rest of the house below, dark, quiet, still. The only noise in the whole house was the steady sound of his son slowly tearing long strips of paper.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw it wasn't completely dark in the lounge room. Pink, yellow, blue and green lights glowed across the street, spilling through the curtains. It was the neon-drenched Christmas display that covered most of his neighbour's house. A remarkably detailed Christmas display that had drawn a steady stream of family-packed cars every night for two weeks. Most had stopped to admire his handiwork for a few minutes, but there were many who'd parked their cars and walked into his yard to explore his Christmas creation, to wander amongst those lights, to see what all the little mechanized figures of snowmen and elves and reindeer were going to do.

He knew his neighbour wouldn't be able to pay the astonishing electricity bill for this year's festival of Christmas lights, when it thudded into his mailbox in February, because he knew his neighbour wouldn't be there to get it. His neighbour had already packed up the larger pieces of furniture and valuables and moved them elsewhere, so when the bailiffs turned up and let themselves in some time after New Year's to tally up the assets, they'd find nothing of any real value, all of it long gone.

There'd be no Christmas miracles for his neighbour, and his family, he knew that. There was no government bailout for them. They only owed hundreds of thousands, instead of billions.

And so another family will leave this street, he thought, another set of familiar faces, some friends, who'd lived and shopped and taken their kids to the park and daycare centre in this neighbourhood for six or seven years, would be gone. Another abandoned house would join the twenty or more he'd already found within a few minutes walk. Some were occupied by squatting students who couldn't afford to live in the city anymore, others housed the suddenly homeless who had fled other suburbs, in other states.

His son didn't seem much bothered by the disappearance of his friends from up or down the street.

He didn't understand this at all. When he was five, his best friend's family had packed up and left the street where he'd spent his childhood, and the experience had traumatized him for months.

But his son just shrugged when he asked him if he missed the kids he used to play with. By his fifth birthday, his son had said goodbye to nine of the kids who were born to families in the street the same year their family had moved in, their son only a newborn. All his original friends were gone, moved on, leaving behind abandoned mortgages and abandoned homes that few wanted to buy.

For the past three years, the street had seemed like the perfect place to raise a child, surrounded as they were by other young families, people like him and his wife, working families. Everything here had felt familiar, everything had felt right. It had been a safe place, safe enough for the kids to get together in the park after school to kick around a ball, without a fleet of parents watching over them.

But the kids hadn't gone to the park much at all, at least, not as much as he and his friends would have, and did, when they were the same age.

His son, and his friends, were more interested in video games, and teaching their grandparents how to use a computer and get socially networked, than slamming each other into pebble-studded fields of mud in mad pursuit of a ball.

He stood at the bay window, and noticed for the first time, of the many nights he'd stood there, beyond midnight, staring at the lights, just how much the softly-blinding illumination lit up the surrounding houses, his own house, his front lawn. It was something of rare beauty, and he wished he'd spent more time enjoying it, rather than resenting it, because his own home Christmas decoration attempts seemed so futile in comparison.

The thousands of dollars of lights and waving, smiling dioramas and glowing reindeer had cleaned out his neighbour's credit cards over three afternoons of madness in late October. Making something beautiful, if only for a few weeks, had become an obsession for him, as his family came to grips with their financial ruin, as they poised on the brink of fleeing the neighbourhood.

It was only now, tonight, that he realized his neighbour hadn't gone mad. He'd lost everything anyway, but in a final tribute to the neighbourhood, or Christmas, or both, he'd given the people of this devastated street something beautiful, a flood of light, a place to stand and be awed in the night by the dazzling colours. This was his gift to the friends and neighbours that remained, and something free and wonderful for families no better off than them to come and see, experience, share.

When other fathers who visited asked how much it cost to bring their families into the yard, his neighbour grinned and declared, "Nothing!"

His neighbour had nothing left, so he had nothing left to lose.

He wondered, briefly, how long it would be before his family joined the exodus from the neighbourhood. Another month or two, maybe less. He'd lived with this coming reality for so many months already, it no longer made him feel like he vomiting.

From upstairs, the sound of ripping paper ceased. His son would soon be asleep.

From down the street, from one of the abandoned houses now occupied by homeless youth, drifted familiar singing. "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?" A John Lennon song, he remembered most of the words, a choir singing 'War is over, if you want it." The stereo the kids were blasting it from was up loud enough for him to sing along, but he got stuck on the words, "and what have you done?" The words repeated, a broken, taunting record in his mind.

What have you done?

He wasn't hungry anymore. He didn't care what was on TV. He had to get this over with. He walked to the stairs, and started climbing. He had to tell his son the truth.

"Are you awake?'

"Yes. I can't sleep."

"I know. When I was your age, I couldn't sleep either. I kept thinking I could hear Santa coming."

You idiot, why did you say that?

His son nodded slowly, then looked at his father.

"I don't think Santa's coming...."

"How did you know?" The words jumped out of his mouth before he could stop them. His son sat bolt upright in bed, and even in the low illumination thrown off by the Snoopy nightlight, the same Snoopy nightlight that had kept the monsters of the dark at bay when he was a child, he could see his son was already close to exploding into tears again.

"Santa's not coming? Why isn't Santa coming?"

His son had almost shrieked those last words. It was too much for him, he could see that, havin his mother away for Christmas and now, no Santa.

"Santa's not coming because...." he paused. His son was already dealing with the fact that there would be no visit from Santa. Now he had to explain to his son why.

Was it too early to beat his son's friends at school to the belief-rattling truth that Santa doesn't really exist? That the Santa his son already knew so much about, and dearly loved, was mostly dreamed up by Coca-Cola and cigarette advertising executives back in the first few decades of the last century?

It would blow his child's mind. He had to do this delicately.

I need to keep lying, he told himself, just for tonight, I can destroy the reality of Santa Claus for the boy in the New Year.

"Santa's not coming because...." he took a long, deep breath. There was nothing, his mind was blank. But then it wasn't. He had the story.

"Well, all over the world, in really poor places, poor families, you see, they can't afford any presents at all this year, none, and so Santa has to do a lot of extra...running around...flying around, in his sleigh, he has to fly a lot more trips to make sure the really poor kids get at least something this Christmas....outside of what he was going to give them anyway...before he found out their parents had...couldn't afford to get other presents....as well."

That was a terrible explanation. He knew it. This was going to be a long night. The kid wasn't going to go to sleep again, for hours. He could almost hear that sharp little brain churning through The Explanation for why Santa would not be visiting this year, dissecting it, comparing it to reality as he'd already come to know it.

He sat down on his son's bed, and waited for the boy to speak. His son's expression already revealed that heavy doubt was tearing The Explanation apart. Some more foundation work for the lie was needed, but he had nothing else.

"That's why...Santa can't come here this year, you see? He's extra busy with the really poor kids."

His son nodded slowly.

"Are we really poor, dad?"

"No...I mean....we're not, really poor."

"Are we just poor?"

"No...well, maybe a little."

"If Santa doesn't give me presents, will poor kids in other places get my presents?"

"I don't know how it all works," he said. "Ease up on the questions for a minute."

So his son did, but he had nothing to say. They sat in silence, the night sky above the back yard glowing and filling the window, alive with stars and flashing satellites and the faint dust of the Milky Way galaxy.

He had an idea. He knew from his own childhood that on a clear night, you can see a couple or more shooting stars every half hour, if you stood outside with your head craned back you paid attention. When he'd had a minor obsession with basic astronomy, before high school and girls and rock music pulled his eyes away from the heavens, he'd spent plenty of clear summer nights out in the yard with his telescope sweeping across the sky, and he'd seen plenty of shooting stars.

Had he told his boy much at all about the night sky yet? Not really. Not outside of basic explanations for what The Moon was, and why some stars seemed to twinkle, and others pulsed red, or blue.

His son, like himself at six years old, was showing a keen interest in science fiction TV shows, and, in particular, science fiction video games, but while he loved to blast through deep space on his father's laptop annihilating enemy transports and their escorts to micro-dust, the boy had never spent an evening in the back yard examining the endless light show in the sky.

The idea, the new lie, that popped into his head to further delay the day when his son learned that Santa Claus was only myth, a triumph of marketing, surprised him in its cunning, and potential for drama.

"Listen," he said to the boy, "there won't be any presents, but Santa has promised that every kid who misses out this year will get something extra special, instead of toys or...games."

That perked up his son's ears, widened his eyes.

"Something special? What is it?"

"We have to go downstairs, and out into the yard," he said and stood up. "So grab your shoes and put them on."

"Why do we have to go outside?"

He pointed out the window, to the sprawl of stars, fighting to shine their light against the orange glow of the city in the distance, bleeding neon up from the horizon, diluting their brilliance.

"You won't be able to see it properly from inside," he said, and held out his hand. His son was out of and then off the bed, rustling underneath it for a pair of shoes. He found them, quickly slipped them on.

"Is the something special from Santa something that flies?"

"No more questions," he said.

"But I want to know now," the boy tried to cry, but he had forgotten he was supposed to be upset and couldn't find the immediate tears.

He picked up his son and carried him from the bedroom.

"Don't cry, okay? Okay, what Santa did was...Santa made a promise to every kid that misses out on presents that he will send them their own special shooting star. That's why we have to get downstairs now. The shooting star Santa sent for you should be flying overhead any minute."

The boy liked this news. His legs started moving like he was running. "Hurry up! We have to go and see it!"

He felt a little guilty at how easy such an absolute lie, and the story he conjured up around it, was to create and explain. Now his son wasn't expecting a video game he couldn't afford. He was waiting for a shooting star, which he didn't know would be a meteorite or maybe even a chunk of old satellite, hitting the atmosphere, breaking up, burning up, flaring out.

I promised my son a shooting star, he thought as he carried the happily struggling boy down the stairs. What happens if we don't see one?

What then?

This seems so familiar....

It was a beautiful night. He'd kept his son busy counting stars for a minute or so, but he was already getting bored. The counting was punctuated by sighs that grew louder, as the promised shooting star from Santa failed to appear.

"Thirty two, thirty three, thirty four....when's it coming?"

"Soon. Very soon."

"Thirty...six."

"Thirty five."

"Thirty five, thirty six, thirty seven..."

He listened to his son counting stars. and remembered how he'd learned in his late teens to delay the moment when the emotional impact of something terrible actually hit him, and consumed him. Delay The Inevitable had been his life matra for most of his 20s. When his father had died, he hadn't shed a single tear for four months, then everything had come at once, a wave of sadness, grief and regret that all but crippled him. Booze had helped, but then the booze had become the problem, instead of the fact that his father had died and he hadn't said goodbye, or even seen him in those last painful months of his life. He hadn't let himself learn to deal with it.

"Thirty seven, thirty eight, forty..." his son continued.

"Thirty nine," he croaked, convinced that he was about to burst into a wracking sob louder than anything his son had unleashed during what had been an altogether utterly shitty Christmas Eve.

"Thirty nine, forty, forty one..."

He remembered then, a Christmas from his own childhood, the memories came rushing back, a wave of images soaked with emotion. He had to fight to stop himself from crying. He remembered now why this moment in the backyard with his son seemed so familiar. His father had done the same thing with him, on a Christmas eve when he was five years old, taken him into the backyard, promising shooting stars instead of presents, there were no presents, his father had drunk the money his mother was going to use to buy them. It had been his father's Christmas ritual.

His father had kept drinking as they stood in the back yard that night, the crumbling, neglected old house a tilting heap behind them. He'd waited and waited for his shooting stars, and as he waited, he'd felt himself pulled into the deep, black curtain of the night sky. He could leave this place behind by going up there, one day. His five year old self had promised his future would be up there, amongst the stars. That night, his father had eventually sat down on the grass, then flopped back into a snoring pile. But he'd stayed right there, rooted to the spot, his eyes sweeping across the great, immortal dome of stars.

He didn't see a shooting star that night, and the disappointment had been devastating. But he went back out there the next night, and the night after that, and every night for weeks, staring into the sky, and he'd watched hundreds of shooting stars blaze their fiery arcs, or simply flare out in a second or two. An elderly neighbour finally asked him what the hell he was doing in the back yard every night, and when he explained, the old man had given him a small telescope, on a tripod, from the ruin of junk and detritus piled high in his garage.

His love of astronomy, of knowing everything he could about the stars, the planets, the universe, then began, and consumed him. Until girls distracted him, and then rock music, and drinking. And then his knowledge of the night skies had faded, more once important information relegated to the rarely visited memory archives of his childhood.

"Dad? I'm bored. Can we go inside?"

He faked a sneeze so he could wipe the tears from his eyes, without his son seeing how upset he was.

"Two more minutes," he said. "Santa promised you a shooting star and he will deliver. Two more minutes, just count the seconds..."

A loud, long sigh preceded his son's new count. "One, two, three, four, five, six..."

He hated himself and hated his life. What a fuckup he'd become. Christmas Eve and not enough money in his pocket to buy his kid a video game, or even the cheapest piece of shit toy.

In four weeks, no longer than eight weeks, his family would lose their home. He still didn't know if his boss was even going to reopen the doors of his offices in the New Year, let alone ask him to come back to work. Not that it mattered, he wouldn't earn enough to get his family out of their debt problems.

What's going to happen to us now?

"Twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty," his son sighed again. He knew his boy was only out here now in the yard to make his father happy. He was doing this for his dad, no other reason.

"Thirty one, thirty two, thirty four...."

"Thirty three," he whispered.

"Thirty three, thirty four, thirty five...it's not coming."

"It's coming," he said through gritted teeth, his sadness had departed, anger had arrived.

I need bourbon...

"Thirty six, thirty seven, thirty eight...."

Come on God, you bastard, just give me this one thing. Please. I'm not asking for a miracle, I'm not praying for you to let us win the lottery. I'm not praying for you to save this house, or protect my family, I'll do both, I'll find a way to get through this, but you have to give me this one thing, tonight. Just one little shooting fucking star. You've got billions of them. Just give me one, right now, so my son can see it. Is that too much to ask for?

"Fifty one, fifty two, fifty three....can we go inside, please?"

"No!"

"Fifty four, fifty five, fifty six...."

I did everything I was supposed to do to be a good man, a good father, didn't I? I stopped drinking, I worked every day in a job I hated because the money was good and it was close enough to work so I could pick my son up from day care, every day, so my wife didn't have to leave her work early. I cleaned up my life, I got the job, we made a family, we brought a house, we paid my bills on time, I didn't sleep around on my wife, and I never hit her, or my son. What else do you want from me? What the fuck else do I have to do to get just this one single fucking break here?

"Dad? Is Santa really real?"

Great. Now this.

"Yes."

"Santa's not really real is he? He's made up, like cartoons..."

Just one tiny shooting star. Let the kid believe in this, this little bit of fantasy, for a little bit longer.

"Santa can't make shooting stars, dad. He just makes toys and stuff."

He searched the skies, but the stars were all still. There wasn't even a blinking satellite to distract his son with.

So that's it, then. I prayed to you for help when I was a kid, and you did nothing. I prayed to you for help during all those years of violence at home and at school, and you did nothing. I've never asked you for riches, I've never asked you to kill somebody I hated, I've never asked you to do anything but make bad things into good. Make this bad night into a good one. Please.

"He just gives toys...he can't make shooting stars...."

His son turned and walked back to the house.

"Wait a second..." he said, searching the skies as frantically as he had that night so many years ago with his own father. "Wait..."

"I want to talk to mummy," his son said, almost at the back door. His voice quavered, quivered, the tears were not far away.

"Wait..."

If you won't do this for me, if you won't give me this one thing, one little shooting star, then I'll do it, I'll make it happen.

"Wait..."

His son stopped at the door, the big sigh came again.

"It's coming...."

"Dad. I want to talk to mummy!"

"It's coming!"

One tiny dot of light blinked, and then grew brighter, and began to streak across the sky.

"Look! Look!" His voice shrieked, and his son stopped pushing open the back door and looked into the sky, following his dad's pointing, trembling finger.

"Wow!" His son ran the few steps to get back to his side. He grabbed his hand, and squeezed it. "Wow! Dad! Wow!"

The shooting star burned brightl as it churned through the black, becoming the brightest object in the near moonless sky.

"Count it!" he shouted to his son. "Count it!"

"One! Two! Three! Four!"

The shooting star shuddered in its path, and then burst into even brighter light, dazzling, almost blinding in its intensity. Chunks of it peeled away, dozens more tiny shooting stars.

"Five! Six! Seven!"

His son's voice grew louder, more excited, with every number he shouted. He squeezed his father's hand tight. "Eight! Nine!"

The shooting star had arced across half the sky in its frenzied flight. In all his childhood years of staring into the sky through the telescope, he'd never seen a shooting star burn so bright for so long. He had no idea what it was. But his son was screaming with excitement.

As instantly as it had appeared, the shooting star finally burned away. For another couple of seconds, they watched as the light trail left behind faded, a glittering path through the heavens, already lost amongst those millions of stars, and the blinking red and blue of local planets.

"Wow!" his son said, trembling with excitement, "Wow! Wow!"

"Yeah," he said, "Wow."

It was an incredible coincidence, he knew that, it was nothing but coincidence. A massive and incredibly rare extra big chunk of old planet or asteroid had hit the atmosphere and burned up and they'd been fortunate enough to witness it. The kind of shooting star that appeared once or twice a year, maybe less, a spectacle that was impossible to make plans to witness.

It's just a coincidence, he told himself, again, nothing more. Nothing more than that.

Well, he thought, maybe something more.

"Wow!" his son was still yelling. "Wow! Was that shooting star for me, dad?"

"Yes. It was."

"Can I tell everyone that was my shooting star, dad?"

He laughed. "Yes, of course you can."

"THAT WAS MY SHOOTING STAR!" his son suddenly yelled to the neighbourhood.

He thought his son meant he wanted to tell 'everyone', meaning the last few kids who lived in the street, his teacher, and his mother, when she returned home, but no, his son meant everyone. Everyone still left in the town, within hearing distance of his magnificent yell

"That Was My Shooting Star! Santa Sent That Shooting Star For Me!"

"Yes," he lied, agreeing with his son. "He did. That one was for you."

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Best Christmas ever."

"It's not Christmas yet."

"I know..."But dad?"

"Yeah?"

"It's still the best Christmas ever."

"Yeah," he said. "It is."

The End

2011-12-22T18:27:00.001+11:00

Luna Park, November 2011:

2011-11-10T12:08:00.006+11:00

Old News Is Today's News

Occasionally, a digital glitch means old stories reappear on the front pages of news sites. Sometimes this can be funny, most times just plain confusing.

But today's fuckup of multiple republished stories on the Sydney Morning Herald website is shocking, jarring, particularly if you hadn't seen or heard the news for a day or so, and smh.com.au was the first website you visited. No-one would blame you if you thought for a few sickening moments you'd missed another horrifying bushfire holocaust :

Oops.

But when the mistake was corrected, this graphic on the alleged nuclear weapons threat from Iran appeared instead :

It, too, is old news. In this case, long discredited news, but the casual reader would assume that Iran already has nuclear weapons (it doesn't) and that it has threatened other countries with nuclear annihilation (it hasn't).

Just remember when Fairfax columnists start complaining about Murdoch journos campaigning for War On Iran that the Sydney Morning Herald was there creating a reality for war from Day One.

2011-10-20T07:57:00.002+11:00

The Music Of Occupy Sydney

I've been lucky enough to catch live performances of beautiful music on both my visits to #OccupySydney in Martin Place. Worth stopping by, but I wish they could make some funnier signs. A line of interesting, fact-dashed but funny, signs can ground a passing crowd to a halt. Make them laugh, then they might stop, then they might look around.

Day One :

Day Four :

I donated two rare copies of my 1996 novel Max & Murray to the Ocuppy Sydney library.

A friend saw the M&Ms there later and said someone had helpfully noted inside the cover on what page the rants against pokies, affordable housing shortages and political corruption can be found.

I always knew I should have included an Index Of Rants in that book.

Then again, it is mostly rants.

2011-10-18T08:22:00.004+11:00

“This Isn't A Political Thing, It's An Equality Thing. I Just Want People To Be Happy. If People Were Happy That Would Be Sick!"

#Occupy Australia Vows Solidarity With #Occupy Movements Worldwide

How exactly did they manage to pull this off?

In just the four years to 2009-10, the number of households in the top 1 per cent bracket of wealth (i.e. $5 million-plus) rocketed 60 per cent from 55,000 to 88,000. And that was in the post-global financial crisis period when wealth was supposed to be flattened among the executive class."

Alan Kohler explains the basics of the #OccupyWallStreet movement :

My 80 second report on #OccupySydney Day One :

Below, #OccupyBrisbane begins with just a few dozen people, but they've voted to stay and, like #OccupySydney and #OccupyMelbourne, continue the protest in solidarity with #OccupyWallStreet :

This is an image of a board drawn up during the 1st #OccupySydney general assembly. Nothing too radical here, and plenty that progressives and conservatives can find equal ground on :

Glenda Kwek visits #OccupySydney :

"We are getting by. When it starts raining, it gets less comfortable," said Ben Peterson, 22, a protester at Sydney's Martin Place camp, which has been in place since Saturday afternoon.
Mr Peterson and his fellow organisers have been busy putting together workshops to educate campers, including talks on public speaking, logistics, consumerism, alternative media and the political and economic issues of the day, such as coal seam gas.
Sydney protest organisers say they have been inundated with food since putting out an appeal for donations on Saturday.
"We've had overwhelming donations of food," Mr Peterson said, adding that someone brought "delicious cupcakes" for the 50 or so protesters this morning.
Some campers came with portable stoves so they could heat up their meals, while other bought pizzas and other takeaway foods from nearby restaurants.
A yoga school has donated bottles of water, while members of two unions - the CFMEU and the Maritime Union of Australia - raised $2000 for the Sydney protesters so they could buy basic supplies.
Mr Lees said protesters slept under tarpaulins and in sleeping bags and on cardboard sheets after police removed their tents.
The yoga group that donated water also chipped in with a stack of yoga mats.
As the Sydney protesters are being watched at all times by the police, Mr Peterson said safety was last thing participants worried about.
"With the police here, it's the safest place to the city," he said.

"But it's also because we are just interested in looking after each other [and not be violent]. We want this space to continue and be inspiring for people."

Full Story And Photos From Glenda Kwek Here

The #OccupyBrisbane movement finds a star, and GroupThink celebrates :

“The vibes are so good here that I havent smoked drugs for three days”

“People are not sleeping in Africa”

“We went to like round up some homeless people to give them food, it was rad”

“I don’t think this is a political thing, it’s an equality thing, i just want people to be happy. If people were happy that would be sick!”

Totally.

2011-10-18T02:08:00.004+11:00

Phil Staley has the full image of beautiful rock art at Croc Station, but here are two details from his photo :

2011-10-03T03:52:00.005+11:00

Seriously, What A Fuckwit

By Darryl Mason

A headline on the front page of the Herald Sun online invites you to read Andrew Bolt's latest column :

Except the link doesn't take you to Andrew Bolt's latest column, it takes you to this Herald Sun news story :

Minister rejects call to alter race laws

by Staff Writer

Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor has rejected Coalition calls to alter racial discrimination laws after the Andrew Bolt case.

Last week shadow attorney-general George Brandis said the laws were flawed and should be altered because they could impinge on freedom of expression.
He made the comments after Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act in two columns about light-skinned Aborigines.
Mr O'Connor told the ABC's Insiders program he had a different interpretation to Mr Brandis.
"I think the conclusion that one would draw from reading the judgment is that this was an issue about ... omitting quite relevant facts," Mr O'Connor said.

Maybe Herald Sun editors have finally had enough of Bolt's bullshit as well.

Or perhaps not.

The full O'Conner quote the last paragraph of the story was drawn from :

But I think the judgment should be read by people and read properly, because I think we don't want to see people racially vilified and I think the conclusion that one would draw from reading the judgment is that this was an issue about not sticking to some facts, or in fact omitting quite relevant facts, which I think led the respondent to be in some difficulty with the articles that he wrote.

More from O'Connor :

There's no doubt that if you're going to attribute improper motives about someone, you should get your facts right. And in terms of any chilling effect that's supposed to have happened as a result of the decision, I've seen more of Andrew Bolt since the decision on the front pages of the largest circulated papers, even during footy week.

That's no exaggeration. Via Pure Poison :

Imagine being a Herald Sun journalist and having your front page story bumped to make way for that heaping pile of absolute absurdity? This is why there is much grumbling amongst Murdoch journalists and editors at their city papers right now. They find Andrew Bolt to be an embarrassment and a growing stain on their craft and their credibility.

It's very simple. Andrew Bolt knew claiming people raised as Aboriginals were pretending to be Aborigines for profit and personal gain would probably lead to legal action. He wanted this lawsuit. He wanted to be a martyr. And, apparently, Herald Sun lawyers didn't mind either. How else to explain why they let him publish two columns filled with flat-out lies, not merely deceptive language, nearly all of it unreliably sourced?

The Age explains the facts under this headline :

The question mark is superfluous :

Andrew Bolt conceded he made errors in two columns found to be unlawful under the Racial Discrimination Act last week but claimed that ''none seemed to me to be of consequence''. Justice Mordecai Bromberg disagreed, finding Bolt's writings were ''grossly incorrect'', and contained ''significant distortion of the facts''. This was critical to why his defence failed. Here is a sample:
BOLT: ''For many of these fair Aborigines, the choice to be Aboriginal can be considered almost arbitrary and intensely political, given how many of their ancestors are in fact Caucasian.''

BROMBERG: ''In relation to most of the individuals concerned, the assertion in the newspaper articles that the people dealt with chose to identify as Aboriginal have been substantially proven to be untrue. Nine of the 18 named … gave evidence. Each of them had been raised to identify as Aboriginal and had identified as such since childhood. None of them made a conscious or deliberate choice to identify as Aboriginal.''

BOLT: ''[Associate Professor Anita] Heiss … won plum jobs reserved for Aborigines at Koori Radio, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board and Macquarie University's Warawara Department of Indigenous Studies.''
BROMBERG: ''Each of those assertions was erroneous. Mr Bolt accepted that they were wrong because they were exaggerated. One of the positions that Mr Bolt claimed Ms Heiss had won as a 'plum job' was a voluntary unpaid position. The other two positions were not reserved for Aboriginal people but were positions for which Aboriginal people were encouraged to apply.''

BOLT: ''[Ms] Eatock only started to identify as Aboriginal when she was 19, after attending a political rally.''
BROMBERG: ''This statement is untrue. Ms Eatock recognised herself to be an Aboriginal person from when she was eight years old whilst still at school and did not do so for political reasons.''

BOLT: ''Acclaimed St Kilda artist Bindi Cole… was raised by her English-Jewish mother yet calls herself 'Aboriginal but white'.''

BROMBERG: ''That statement is factually inaccurate because Ms Cole's Aboriginal grandmother also raised Ms Cole and was highly influential in Ms Cole's identification as an Aboriginal.''
BOLT: ''The very pale Professor Larissa Behrendt, who may have been raised by her white mother but today, as a professional Aborigine, is chairman of our biggest taxpayer-funded Aboriginal television service.''
BROMBERG: ''The factual assertions made were erroneous. Professor Behrendt's Aboriginal father did not separate from her mother until Professor Behrendt was about 15 years old. Her father was always part of the family during her upbringing, even after that separation.''

BOLT: ''Larissa Behrendt has also worked as a professional Aborigine ever since leaving Harvard Law School, despite looking almost as German as her father … But which people are 'yours', exactly, mein liebchen? And isn't it bizarre to demand laws to give you more rights as a white Aborigine than your own white dad?''

BROMBERG: ''To her knowledge, there is no German descent on either her father or mother's side of the family although she assumes that because of her father's Germanic surname, there may have been some German descent.

Her paternal grandfather came to Australia from England. Mr Bolt also referred to her father as being white. Her father had dark skin.''

BOLT: ''Take the most prominent Yorta Yorta leaders - Melbourne University academic Wayne Atkinson and Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group co-chair Graham Atkinson. Both are Aboriginal because their Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman.

''How can Graham Atkinson be co-chair of the Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group when his right to call himself Aboriginal rests on little more than the fact that his Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman?''

BROMBERG: ''The facts given by Mr Bolt and the comment made upon them are grossly incorrect. The Atkinsons' parents are both Aboriginal as are all four of their grandparents and all of their great grandparents other than one who is the Indian great-grandfather that Mr Bolt referred to in the article.''

I used to call Andrew Bolt The Professional Idiot. But he isn't. His almost 100% negative columns and blog posts about Aborigines and his obsession with demanding people embrace 'white culture' and for them to give thanks for what he believes is a European improvement on 60,000 plus years of successful survival is much worse than mere idiocy. What he did was calculated and conniving.

And just plain sick.

It's a stain on Australian journalism, and an unfortunate fallout for all journalists and editors at News Limited, many of whom now find themselves shuddering whenever their friends say the name "Andrew Bolt" in their company.

You'd be surprised at just how many Murdoch journalists and editors there are that feel that way.

Andrew Bolt's Reality Meltdown Over Fukushima

2011-09-26T13:45:00.004+10:00

A Long, Long Way From Home

A Spotted Cuscus, occasionally found in Northern Queensland but most common in Papua New Guinea, has turned up at a zoo in Eastern China, sparking a Daily Mail 'Mystery Creature No-One Can Identify!' story, claiming zookeepers are absolutely mystified as to what kind of freakish rodent it is.

It took only a few minutes for DM readers to identify the "Mystery Creature!" in comments. It would have taken even less to get an ID on Twitter. But that's not a story, or a clickbait headline.

Someone needs to send this cuscus back to a PNG jungle.

Great photo here of a Spotted Cuscus ripping into a star fruit.

2011-09-25T02:41:00.003+10:00

How Murdoch's news.com.au defined Abbott's People in 2009 :

Global Warming conspiracy theory

This theory claims the science behind current environmental changes - as popularised by Al Gore in the film An Inconvenient Truth - was created for financial gain.

Some believe that governments are using the global warming "myth" to raise taxes and restrict competitive US businesses in Europe - or that it is a United Nations ploy to create a one-world government.

It's like reading the How To opinion manual for The Australian

2011-09-25T02:25:00.001+10:00

To the slightly vague memories of 1995 :

2011-09-10T00:25:00.004+10:00

Numerous Australians have shared their 9/11 Stories with ABC News Online, but Penny's stood out, for its vivid detail and images of the unimaginable horrors witnessed by so many survivors that day, from all over the world. One of Penny's photos, taken from her hotel room, close to the World Trade Centre complex on the morning of September 11, 2001, shows the aftermath of a man who jumped from the burning skyscrapers :

"There is a dead man about the middle of (this shot of the courtyard below my hotel).

"He's wearing a pink shirt and white pants. I've often wondered if I could somehow track down his family, who would likely know what their husband/father was wearing and whether it would give them any comfort to know exactly what happened to him and that he didn't die alone because I watched and prayed and cried as he died."

The reflections falling across the WTC plaza, in Penny's photo, are from the windows of the World Trade Centre 1 and 2 towers. Within 40 minutes of the photo being taken, both towers will have collapsed, consuming, swallowing up the remains of this unknown man and some 200 more people believed to have leapt or fallen to their deaths.

The fall from the upper floors of the WTC towers would have lasted 9 to 10 seconds.

2011-09-04T13:36:00.003+10:00

Department Of Defence Only Public Statement On UFOs, 1977 : 10% Of Australian Sightings Can't Be Explained

The 1977 documentary UFOs Are Here screened on Channel 9, in prime time from memory, and had a monumental impact amongst Australian kids who'd been fed a steady diet of UFOmania by popular culture for most of their childhoods. The doco wasn't only discussed amongst kids in the playground the next day, teachers were bombarded with questions from students about it, t00.

As a doco, looking back at it now, UFOs Are Here! is a strange, scattershot 'They're Lying To Us! treatise, with some curious claims that the American Pine Gap base near Alice Springs isn't just a surveillance station but an advanced flight technology workshop, and the existence of a scientific 'Cosmic Conspiracy'.

However, the doco also covered some interesting Australian history, and has a bunch of great interviews with computer geeks, eccentrics, director Steven Spielberg, flogging the film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and everyday people who saw something strange in the sky and can't find explanations for what they witnessed.

A rare public statement on UFOs by the Australian Department of Defence :

The most likely explanation for nearly all "officially unexplained" UFO sightings, at least in Australia, was and still is test flights by classified military aircraft, which makes the official statement, above, by the DoD a wry invitation for witnesses to keep speculating about extraterrestrial, instead of local war industry, origins for the strange things they'd seen in the skies.

2011-09-02T09:39:00.002+10:00

I never thought I'd be posting a clip from X-Factor here, but what a voice, and what an attitude to life after being born and abandoned in the chemical weapons soaked aftermath of the 199o-91 War On Iraq :

2011-08-31T00:57:00.005+10:00

(oh, and thanks Wikileaks)

From the Daily Telegraph, where it's all but company policy to refer to the Wikileaks US Embassies' Cable Collection as mere "low grade documents", comes this headling blasting story :

US terrorist agencies were told to place 23 Australians on a "no-fly" or "selectee" security list requiring them to be detained at US airports because of suspected links to a Yemeni terrorist group.

Acting on the advice of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the names were forwarded from the US Embassy in Canberra in January 2010 to the US State Department in Washington.

That's quite a story. And it's running across the Murdoch media empire. How could it not? Dozens of Muslims living in suburban Australia deemed dangerous enough to go on the US War On Terror's no-fly list....there must have been fucking balloons falling from the ceiling of News Limited's HQ when those cables were publicly leaked by....

Oh, here it is. Wikileaks. They get credited in paragraph six. But only once in the whole story. And the embedded link on the word 'Wikileaks' doesn't lead you to the Wikileaks website, or a place where the cited cables are published in full, which is part of the deal of using Wiileaks released cables for stories like this one, you link to where the cables are published in full so that the reader can check for themselves that the information used in the story is accurate.

It's about the only Wikileaks rule there is, and it costs the publisher nothing.

Even when people like Julian Assange provide free and easy opportunities for the mainstream news media to undergo such basic reforms as linking to source documents, they refuse to do it.

It's their way of saying, "Oh, Julian? Thanks for that great story, but Fuck You."

2011-08-29T02:12:00.005+10:00

Dog Escapes Fire : The Headline Is In The Photo

This is the news photo of the year. Why? Because photographer Phil Hillyard managed to capture fire in the shape of an escaping dog for a story about two men and a dog escaping from a fire. True.

Well, that's what it looks like to me.

Phil Hillyard is also one hell of a sports photographer :

2011-08-23T23:59:00.003+10:00

Wearable solar panels, producing up to 140 watts, that weigh almost nothing and can be rolled up when not needed, for the Australian soldier of tomorrow :

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Australia was a world leader in solar technology. In 2011, the Australian Defence Force has to get these trial sheets made in Idaho.

2011-08-23T17:18:00.000+10:00

Has The Oldest Trace Of Life On Earth Been Found In Australia?

The findings and claims are under dispute, but it's an intruiging idea that the oldest fossil evidence of Earth's earliest life forms, 3.4 billion years old, have been found on the land mass now known as Australia :

The ancient remains are remarkably well preserved and provide clues about the kind of primitive life that could be found on Mars.

The Earth was a very hot, violent place with very little oxygen when the microbes - thought to have been sulphur-eating bacteria - lived.
Volcanoes dominated the planet, the skies were cloudy and grey, and the oceans were the temperature of a hot bath.

An Australian and British team unearthed the fossils, which look like tiny cells and tubes, in 3.4 billion-year-old rocks at Strelley Pool, in a remote region of the Pilbara, about 60 kilometres west of Marble Bar

More Here

2011-08-21T01:58:00.005+10:00

The Angels Announce Australian Tour

After a raptuously recieved, sold-out, live show at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney on June 30 and the Norwood Hotel in Adelaide on July 1, and the recording of a new EP, The Angels, with Screaming Jets lead singer Dave Gleeson out front, are hitting the road in November and December.

This is going to be something special. The show will no doubt deliver Angels classics like Marseilles, Mr Damage, I Ain't The One and Long Line, but will also include a couple of the new songs they recorded at Alberts Studios - Waiting For The Sun and Wounded Healer - along with some Angels live rarities they haven't played in decades.

You won't see a better live rock show this year, and that's no bullshit line. Anyone who saw the gigs at the Annandale or the Norwood Hotel already know The Angels haven't sounded this good, or blasted this much power, in years. If there's an Australian rock band around right now who can blow these guys offstage, I'd like to see them try.

I've got some video interviews I recorded with rhythm guitarist John Brewster and Dave Gleeson coming soon, but in the meantime here are the dates. Grab your tickets from the venues.

November

9 - Fly By Night, Fremantle WA
10 - Charles Hotel, Perth WA
11 - Endeavour Tavern WA
12 - Ravenswood Hotel, Ravenswood WA
19 - Governor Hindmarsh, Adelaide SA
23 - The Juniors, Kingsford NSW
24 - Davistown RSL NSW
25 - Canberra Sthn Cross Club, Canberra ACT
26 - Belmont 16Ft Sailing Club, Newcastle NSW

December

1 - Commercial Hotel, South Morang VIC
2 - Ferntree Gully Hotel, Ferntree Gully VIC
3 - Chelsea Heights Hotel, Chelsea Heights VIC
4 - Macs Hotel, Melton VIC
8 - Marlin Hotel, Ulladulla NSW
9 - Penrith Panthers, Penrith NSW
10 - Dee Why RSL, Dee Why NSW
15 - Redland Nulti Sports Club, Brisbane QLD
16 - Norths Leagues Club, Brisbane QLD
17 - Twin Towers Services Club, Gold Coast QLD

Below is a video I cut together from mostly cell phone footage I shot of The Angels recording their new single Waiting For The Sun at Alberts Studios. It's not the official clip, just something I did for fun. There's a proper clip for the song coming soon, and it's a ripper.

2011-08-18T09:46:00.003+10:00

Murdoch trollumist Miranda Devine enters her second week of blaming the UK riots on children being raised without fathers, like the headline below says. To reinforce her point, a nice big photo of Penny Wong and her pregnant partner is included in her latest blurge :

Classy.

2011-08-15T10:05:00.004+10:00

More than eight years after then prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer promised Australians our involvement in the War On Iraq would be short and sweet, the last of our troops on the ground there are finally heading home :

2011-08-10T10:24:00.002+10:00

Tom Switzer, whoever he is, on the good old days :

[JOHN Howard] was called a “fool” (Michael Leunig), an “unflushable turd” (Mungo MacCallum), a “scheming, mendacious little man” (Alan Ramsey), who silenced dissent (Clive Hamilton), corrupted the public debate (David Marr) and used right-wing religious activists to indoctrinate the nation (Marion Maddox). He was also “far and away the worst prime minister in living memory” (Phillip Adams) who had a “pre-fascist fetish to attack minorities” (Margo Kingston). Under his government, Australia headed towards an “increasingly authoritarian trajectory of the political culture” (Robert Manne), became “a backwater, a racist and inward-looking country” (Greg Barns) and was “condemned at the court of world opinion as callous and inhumane” (Sun-Herald, Sydney).

Nearly all true.

Switzer somehow forgets John Howard was called a "rodent" and even a "lying rodent" by senior members of his own government, though presumably never to his face.

2011-08-03T11:32:00.008+10:00

Weird Scenes Inside The Murdoch News Mines

By Darryl Mason

News Limited executive editor (does that mean he just gets a nicer chair?) Alan Howes explains how the Murdoch tabloids act as "the watchdog" of modern politics (Headline : Taking A Rude Joy In Kicking The Watchdog) in this lovely piece of corporate propaganda, distributed widely, of course, across the Digital Rupert media landscape :

NEWSPAPERS easily make friends and enemies.
The friends are mostly readers, and mostly voiceless, but for the role a newspaper can play in representing their interests. The enemies are almost always powerful.
A key function of a thinking newspaper, like ours, is to snap at the heels of our elected governments and their appointed officials.

Yeah, woof woof, we get it.

That puts you onside with readers - whose only chance of directly expressing an opinion might come every election.

Unless they can write letters, protest, stage boycotts, type in comments on a multitude of news blogs and 'comment now' news stories, make phone calls to radio stations begging for talkbackers to call in, attend local political events where politicians are present, or use Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. Just how many housebound, illiterate readers with no access to modern communications or electricity do Murdoch tabloids have?

Alan Howe is one of those believers in The Right To Know. Except when it comes to knowing too much about the Murdoch media.

More than a few of them have been calling for an inquiry into Australia's media. If that threat sounds familiar, it should: We had the Norris Inquiry in 1981, a Working Party into Print Media Ownership in 1990 and, later, the Print Media Inquiry that spanned two years.

There's only been three inquiries into the Australian media in three decades? Only three? Is that all?

Perhaps Alan Howe is quietly terrified that many of his newspapers' readers would like to see the 2012 media inquiry televised, like the WaterGate hearings, particularly if a string of Australian celebrities and former politicians are willing to speak out on how their privacy was violated.

And to prove that the biggest bitches in the media have, in fact, always been male tabloid newspaper editors, Alan Howe takes on his critics :

Victorian Labor backbencher Steve Gibbons (who is he?)...
...dangerously thoughtless Greens Senator Christine Milne...

We should all be concerned about thoughtless dangerousness, too.

... NSW Labor MP John Murphy (doesn't ring a bell)

Oh, snap Alan. You nasty.

And of former Murdoch-league media mogul and competitor Conrad Black, News Limited executive editor Alan Howe has this to say :

Ironically, sodomy is no doubt often on the menu at Florida's Coleman Correctional Complex, where (Conrad Black) returns next month to serve out the rest of his sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Prison rape is what Murdoch critics deserve, apparently.

Anyway, watchdogs.

Two of Australia's keenest Murdoch tabloid watchdogs gleefully discuss the new hairstyle of the former NSW premier :

Andrew Bolt :

Letting her hair down in Opposition. Well, letting someone’s hair down.

As they say, me-ow.

Just form a knitting circle or something.

2011-07-30T00:34:00.003+10:00

Dave Gleeson, singer with The Screaming Jets and Rick Brewster's Angels, author of upcoming poetry collection 'Maintain The Rage', amateur pole dancer, May 2011 :

2011-07-29T10:01:00.001+10:00

A crocodile emerges from a drain in the city of Cairns, much to the delight of locals and tourists, and the unease of those missioned to capture it :

2011-07-26T13:22:00.003+10:00

How Rupert Murdoch Conned British MPs By Playing The Sad, Pathetic Old Man Card

By Darryl Mason

Rupert Murdoch, at first, refused to appear before British MPs to answer questions about News International's involvement in phone hacking, spying, blackmail and police corruption. But so furious was the reaction of the British public he quickly caved and announced he would appear.

And so he did.

MPs, like Tom Watson, who had been pursuing Murdoch to come clean for years about the cruel criminality of his News Of The World, were wired as the clock ticked down to Rupert Murdoch's appearance, alongside his son James. Tens of millions tuned in around the world, this was it, the Sun King was on the ropes, he was going to get it in the face with both barrels.

But then Rupert pulled off an extraordinary piece of acting. He shambled into the room, head down, slouched gingerly into his chair and struggled to answer questions, or even hear them

His first words to MPs :

Within seconds, the mood of the entire room changed. This wasn't a monster, this was a very old man, sad and sorry, apparently perhaps even a sick old man, as harmless and innocent as their own granpas. How could these MPs beat up on someone so old, so sad, so "humble", so helpless?

They couldn't, and they didn't.

But once Rupert knew he'd conned the room, he was somehow able to to recover all his faculties and defiant verve, and finished the appearance by reading out a statement written by one of the world's leading public relations companies. He might as well have simply said, "Fuck You Very Much."

So how do we know Rupert Murdoch was faking the I'm A Sad Old Man, Don't Be Mean To Me persona?

Because barely a few weeks earlier, he'd given a lively interview with his wife Wendi on how they'd met and fallen in love :

It's like a decade had passed between the above interview and his Struggling To Answer Questions performance in London. It wasn't even 3 weeks.

Within two days of his 'answers' to British MPs, Rupert Murdoch was private-jetting back to New York City, while thousands of British victims of crime waited for phone calls from police to learn if they, too, had had their grief and privacy, their most intimate moments, violated by Murdoch's goons.

Well played, you old bastard. Well played.

2011-07-21T16:23:00.002+10:00

"It's Only Fear Under Another Name"

Great song, 22 years old now, that seems to be picking up radio play again for some reason :

Lyrics :

You are born into this world
Looking down the barrel of a gun
And those who hold the gun
Want you to work fast and die young
And if you don't work
If you don't obey
They'll make you live in fear till your dying day
Those who govern hold the gun to your head
With religions, corporations, proud of blood
They've shed

Whether it's God or the bomb
It's just the same
It's only fear under another name

And the corporate snakes coming in to feed
On that pathetic fact known as human greed
Skin and bone being raked over those hot coals
This dump never seems to give time for human soul
And all those things that we have learnt
No time for questions, you'll just get burnt
You'll just get burnt

And those words crush you flat
Like your skull's under a brick
And the fear's so damnned strong
That it makes you sick
And you can see right through those eyes
That make you fear, that make you lie
And you're taught to hold high
Yet you wonder why
Dumb values forced upon you by the
Living lie

2011-07-13T12:14:00.006+10:00

Murdoch's Criminal Spying Scandal Will Soon Break Here

How Many Australian Celebrities And Crime Victims Did Murdoch Journos Or Their Private Investigators Hack?

By Darryl Mason

The Murdoch Spying Scandal is now so massive, so obscene the near total Australian Murdoch media blackout can no longer be maintained. From today's The Australian :

The AFP story :

A key US senator called for a probe into whether alleged hacking by Rupert Murdoch's media empire had extended to US citizens and warned of "severe" consequences if that proved the case.
"I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated," senate commerce committee chairman Jay Rockefeller said.
"I am concerned that the admitted phone hacking in London by the News Corp may have extended to 9/11 victims or other Americans. If they did, the consequences will be severe," said Rockefeller, a Democrat.
His comments came as Murdoch faced an onslaught from British MPs as the government backed calls for him to drop his bid for pay TV giant BSkyB and a committee summoned him to answer questions on phone hacking.

It may be only a matter of weeks before one of Australia's most famous actors decides it's time to go public with their own stories and evidence of having been hacked and spied on, either by journalists employed by News Limited, or private investigators hired by them.

At a guess, I think the actor will come forward shortly before a parliamentary investigation into Murdoch's business practices in Australia is announced.

We won't have to wait long.

2011-07-05T10:37:00.003+10:00

DIY Accidents Fill Hospitals With More Victims Than Illegal Drugs

In 2010, more than 3400 Australians fell from ladders while cleaning gutters, fixing roofs and attempting to complete other DIY tasks, injuring themselves so severely they needed hospitalisation.

But they were not alone. Adults trying to imitate what they see professionals doing on home renovation TV shows are a bigger drain on Australia's health budget than overdosing junkies or Kronic-afflicted miners.

The rest of the stats from story are mind-boggling :

- 25,000 hospitalised last year from ladder falls, nailgun mishaps, lawnmower accidents and power tool problems

- Sydney Hospital's hand unit sees at least one "serious injury" a week from angle grinders and circular saws

- 1711 were hospitalised with injuries from attempting to use non-powered hand tools - hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, hand saws etc..

- 2803 were hospitalised after injuring themselves with power tools

- More than 5000 Australia were sent to hospital after "contact with machinery."

- 11,000 Australians visited hospital after absorbing "foreign bodies" through their skins or getting them in their eyes.

Are Australians really this accident prone or are ladders and hand tools deliberately attacking and trying to disable humans as part of the first, revolutionary wave of the War On Humans By Robots?

After having been attacked by various drills, grinders and hammers during recent renovation work, I'm going with the second of the above.

There's no way, ahem, I could be so clumsy and accident prone. The contents of my toolbox are clearly plotting against me.

2011-07-04T13:54:00.003+10:00

Rick Brewster's Angels, with Dave Gleeson, Annandale Hotel, June 30 :

Great gig. It's been a long time since I've seen so many smiles on so many faces of people leaving a rock show.

More shows to come, I'm told, and probably an album as well.

2011-07-04T12:51:00.005+10:00

When The Sydney Morning Herald Says 'Sydney', They Mean The Snowy Mountains

It's almost 1pm, I'm sitting about 10km from the centre of Sydney, the sun is shining, clothes are drying on the line, it's warm enough for some to get about in t-shirts. Then I see this on the Sydney Morning Herald website :

What in all fuck?

The actual warning from the Bureau of Meteorology :

Damaging winds averaging 65 km/h with peak gusts around 100 km/h are forecast for the Metropolitan, Illawarra, Southern Tablelands, Australian Capital Territory, South Coast, Snowy Mountains, Central Tablelands and Hunter forecast districts on Tuesday.
Blizzard conditions are forecast for parts of the Australian Capital Territory and Snowy Mountains forecast districts.

Yeah, that's not really a warning, or an alert, for a blizzard hitting Sydney, is it?

Still, for hundreds of thousands New South Wales residents it sounds like the next few days has the potential to be pretty damn nasty.

2011-06-29T08:45:00.004+10:00

My First Zero Budget Music Video

By Darryl Mason

Below is the 'in studio' video clip I shot and edited for Rick Brewster's Angels, the teaming up of Australia's rock legends The Angels and Dave Gleeson from The Screaming Jets. Most of the footage was shot on cell phones over a couple of hours and took about 30 hours to edit on AVS. I wasn't planning to try and cut a clip (I was at the Alberts Studios recordings to get footage for a documentary), so it was very interesting trying to match up guitar solos and Gleeso's vocals to the footage I had.

BTW This isn't the offiical video for Waiting For The Sun, this is just something I put together for fun and to see how hard it is to edit one of those 'in the studio' music clips (pretty fucking hard it turns out). The band liked this enough for me the release it on my YouTube channel. I go into more detail here.

I think I might be doing more of these video clips, it's already generated some interesting e-mails about future work.

Rick Brewster's Angels, featuring Dave Gleeson, play Sydney's Annandale Hotel this Thursday night, June 30, and Adelaide's Norwood Hotel on July 1. I saw the set list for the shows this morning, it's absolutely fucking killer.

.

2011-06-25T15:54:00.007+10:00

Ha Ha Ha!....Wait, I Don't Get It

Scientists have found Australia's funniest joke? Don't make me laugh :

The LaughLab experiment conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, attracted more than 40,000 jokes and almost two million ratings.

Researchers found significant differences between nations in the types of jokes they found funny.

Apparently, Australians, like Brits, the Irish and New Zealanders, prefer jokes involving word play. Here's the winner :

PATIENT: "Doctor, I've got a strawberry stuck up my bum."

DOCTOR: "I've got some cream for that."

That's a bit of a granddad joke, isn't it?

Other results from the survey showed :

- Of the countries rating the highest number of jokes, Germans, perhaps surprisingly, laughed the most. Canadians laughed least.
- If you want to tell a funny animal joke, make it a duck.

- The most frequently submitted joke, at 300 times, was: "What's brown and sticky? A stick."

Scientists should know better than to be messing around trying to find the world's funniest joke. As the BBC news show Monty Python accurately reported in the late 60s, maximum mirth can not only be dangerous to your health, it can be very, very deadly indeed :

Note : Look, I know this story is from 2002, but I only just found it via @Tzarimas on Twitter, I'd already written most of the story, found the Monty Python video, embedded it, before I realised how old it was, and I'm not going to toss away a perfectly good piece of Saturday afternoon nonsense just because it's nine years old.

2011-06-24T03:40:00.007+10:00

They Didn't Know The White Man Was Real, Then They Thought He Was Covered In Ash

This video has been called "the most beautiful video on the internet". It surely, at the very least, is exactly that. And more.

If the music annoys you, turn it off, it's even more extraordinary in silence :

They are the Toulambi. From the film-maker Jean Pierre Dutilleux's site :

For centuries the hill tribes of the Owen Ranmge in Papua, New Guinea have lived in isolation to avoid war. In a landscape of dense tropical rainforests each tribe stays within a well established territory. This explains why some of them have survived into the new millennium without any contact with the outside world.
They are hunters and gatherers. The entire tribe moves in uncanny silence for fear of alerting the game. They know the migration trails of animals and the best time of year to find fish, the growing cycles of the palms, bamboo, wild fruits and the roots they rely on. Always on the move. The rhythm of their lives is that of the jungle. It gives them no time to create complex art, to develop science or conceive profound metaphysical philosophies.

The Toulambi are among the very last witnesses of our distant past. When the last tribe is contacted and moved from the Stone Age into the modern world, from being free and masters of their own destiny to being poor and at the lowest level of our western society, it is a part of ourselves that will vanish forever.

When I worked at the Australians At War Film Archive, I heard the stories of some young Australians who volunteered for World War 2 and found themselves marching through the mountain jungles of New Guinea, only a few weeks after they were working on a building site or in an office in Sydney or Melbourne, who had similar encounters with tribes who had never seen white men before. Amongst all the horrors and madness of their jungle fighting days in New Guinea, it was meetings like this, sometimes only an exchange of stares from a distance, that remained amongst the most vivid in some veterans memories well into old age, and could still light their faces with wonder thinking back.

Many have fought in wars, but how many have had such an experience? The rarest few.

Here's what David Attenborough had to say after his own meeting with a New Guinea tribe who only knew of white men from the legends of other tribes :

"... nobody knows what are in these valleys; it may be that there's gold here. It may be - like a valley less than a hundred miles away - it is rich with copper. If it is, and if the West - European Man - moves in here with all his technology the fate of these people is likely to be very unhappy.
"All we know in the past of people - like this - who come face-to-face with Western technology leads us to suppose that it's very difficult for them to survive that clash.

"And so the only chance of bringing these people to terms with the world outside is a gradual process over years - over tens of years - in which they get to know what happens in the outside world, gradually they get to believe that people like ourselves are their friends and not their enemies. Gradually they have enough confidence in us to allow us to give them medical help, and educational help."

Attenborough quotes from the documentary A Blank On The Map

Via Reddit

2011-06-21T23:33:00.004+10:00

A century ago, wild populations of animals like the White Cheeked Gibbon were threatened by public and private zoo collectors, amongst the many who came to their forests and often killed whole families to retrieve one or two babies. Today, with their natural habitats in countries like Laos all but gone, the White Cheeked Gibbon would probably not exist at all without the help of zoos.

The Perth Zoo is one of the world's most successful breeders of these now so very rare gibbons :

More Here

2011-06-20T11:36:00.002+10:00

I think I just found the front cover image for my book on Andrew Bolt :

2011-06-16T01:58:00.003+10:00

Shocking Police Non-Violence In Queensland

Been in Brisbane. Saw this in the Queen Street mall :

All that work making the police car look pretty didn't help the Queenslanders much in the 2nd State of Origin for 2011.

2011-06-09T09:45:00.003+10:00

Former Screaming Jets lead singer Dave Gleeson rips through AC/DC's Riff Raff at the Long Live Bon Scott concert at the Enmore Theatre last weekend :

Gleeson has joined a new line-up of legendary Australian rock band The Angels, now known as Rick Brewster's Angels.

Gleeson has already recorded five songs with RBA at Alberts Studios and the first release from those sessions, Waiting For The Sun, is all over MMMFM right now.

Rick Brewster's Angels will be doing two special pub shows to debut the new line-up : The Annandale Hotel in Sydney on June 30 and the Norwood Hotel in Adelaide on July 1.

These shows are going to absolutely fucking rock. Pub gig of the year. Don't miss out.

2011-06-09T00:40:00.003+10:00

Some people hate the ultra-slow motion that so often features in today's movies, video games and TV shows and ads. I'm not one of those people, and this is probably the greatest Australian beer ad since the 1970s :

2011-06-06T22:46:00.004+10:00

This is a post for those who've seen the name Austen Tayshus in Twitter's trending topics after tonight's Q & A on ABC and are wondering who the hell he is.

This is who Austen Tayshus is :

This is Austen Tayshus' massive 1983 spoken word hit single, Australiana, specially decoded for the tourists :

Putting shit on Americans, in America :

Slightly closer to the real Sandy Gutman, the man behind Austen Tayshus :

Mr Denmore on Twitter sums up :

Austen Tayshus reminds me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas; a malevolent bully who demands you laugh at his jokes & dictates the borders of humour

2011-06-06T02:36:00.003+10:00

Vivid 2011, Circular Quay, Sydney :

2011-06-05T01:21:00.007+10:00

Angry Anderson, in silhouette, prepares to take the stage at the Long Live Bon Scott concert, Enmore Theatre, June 4 :

2011-06-01T14:51:00.006+10:00

Screaming Angels

Dave Gleeson with Chris Bailey and John and Rick Brewster from The Angels, at Alberts Studios, May, 2011 :

Former Screaming Jets singer Dave Gleeson is now confirmed to join The Angels for live shows in Sydney and Adelaide, in late June and early July, and a charity concert in Japan. More details soon.

2011-05-31T01:51:00.001+10:00

In case you missed it yesterday, spectacular water spout 'tornadoes' off Sydney :

2011-05-28T23:51:00.010+10:00

Bon Scott On AC/DC : "The Beatles, The Rolling Stones....We're Better. Who Needs Them? They're Last Year's Model"

By Darryl Mason

The 'Long Live Bon Scott' concert hitting Sydney this week - Panthers on June 3, Enmore Theatre on June 4, reminded me of a bunch of Bon videos and recordings from YouTube I've had bookmarked.

So here's a quick history of Bon Scott through two decades. and a few different looks.

1965 : Bon Scott singing Gloria with the Spektors

1968, with The Valentines :

1971, with Fraternity :

1975, TV debut of Bon Scott with ADC/DC

Late 1975 :

July, 1976 : Great clip of Bon Scott and Angus Young being interviewed in a London street, where Bon declares AC/DC better than The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

1977 :

1978 :

These interviews with Bon Scott, from the soon to be re-released AC/DC Let There Be Rock live concert film, were recorded a few months before his February, 1980 death from acute alcohol poisoning. "I'm a special drunkard. I drink too much."

Ten days before Bon Scott's death, AC/DC mimed Highway To Hell for a German TV show. Bon Scott stands nearly motionless, in deep shadow, away from the rest of the band, who appear in many shots to have aready lost their lead singer.

A few days before his death Bon Scott jammed a version of Ride On in London with the band Trust. This was the voice Bon Scott was taking into the recording studio for the new AC/DC album sessions, scheduled to begin in the last week of February, 1980.

Angus Young on the death of Bon Scott.

2011-05-28T08:57:00.003+10:00

Australia Has Been Hit By More Than 50 Tsunamis

August 15, 1868 :

High tide had been at 5am that day, and by 8am sea levels in Sydney Harbour were dropping. Suddenly, "the waters, as if impelled by some extraordinary influence, returned up the harbour with great force", The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Further down the coast, at Jervis Bay, the ocean was surging into Currambene Creek. "It raced back in a similar manner, sweeping away a large portion of sand that impeded navigation," the paper noted.

The tsunami that struck the New South Wales coast that day was caused by a massive earthquake strike in Chile.

In total, some 37 tsunamis have been reported along the NSW coastline over the past 150 years.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

A Macquarie University researcher, Dale Dominey-Howes, said Australia had a reputation as a region where few tsunami hit, but there have been at least 57 reported. "Relatively speaking, this is a much higher rate of occurrence than many other regions of the globe," he said.

He was surprised to find the Australian tsunami record went back 3.5 billion years, to when an asteroid hit waters in what is now central Australian desert. Rocks and debris it ripped up from the shallow sea have been identified by Australian geologists.

The Full Story Is Here

2011-05-28T04:08:00.002+10:00

For those who missed it, this was what happened the day Greens leader Bob Brown dared to criticise a handful of Canberra press gallery journalists for their endless negativity on anything and everything the Greens have to say.

Note the only hysterical voice in this clip is that of a journalist :

2011-05-21T23:17:00.002+10:00

Bill Hunter, 1940 - 2011

Bill Hunter acted in more than 70 movies, and hundreds of hours of definitive Australian TV cop shows like Division Four and Homicide.

Legend.

If you're compelled to watch a Bill Hunter movie today, you can't go past CrackerJack, one of his happiest and most beautiful roles.

2011-05-19T09:00:00.007+10:00

"The Media Can't Be Trusted To Tell The Truth"

(I'm re-posting this August 2009 post because it seems even more accurate today than when originally posted)

By Darryl Mason

Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes, in a debate, lists a series of recent debacles from the mainstream news media :

On July 21, four days after the Jakarta hotel bombings, Seven News reported: ‘‘Another bomb has exploded in Jakarta. The device went off just moments ago at a building near the Australian embassy.’’ No, it didn’t. No bomb, no unexploded bomb, no suspicious package. Nothing but a couple of hoax phone calls.
On June 20, the first edition of The Daily Telegraph and other News Ltd papers read: ‘‘Revealed: Email that could topple a Government.’’ That email may yet topple an opposition leader. But it won’t do any harm to the journalist who ‘‘revealed’’ its content, or the editors who decided to publish it, even though it turned out to be a fake.
Then there’s page one of The Sunday Telegraph on March 15: ‘‘PAULINE BETRAYED. Provocative: A young Pauline Hanson pouts for the camera in racy lingerie … ’’

The Sunday Telegraph editor promised to quit if the nipple revealing 'Hanson' photos turned out to be fake. They were fake, the editor didn't quit.

Holmes is just scratching the surface. He argues one of the biggest problems gouging away at the credibility of mainstream media today is not solely a lack of journalists, or highly skilled journalists, but the Deadline Now! atmosphere of 24 hour breaking news on TV, on radio, and online.

Fewer and fewer people are under pressure to produce more and more. That means less time to research, less time to write, less time to check, fewer subeditors to knock copy into shape.
Which is why the media, arguably, can be trusted less than ever to tell the truth.

Holmes posits a greater problem, however, about what modern journalism in mainstream media actually means :

"The media are not in the business of telling us the truth. The media are in the business of telling us stories.
"That simple little word dominates any professional conversation between journalists. I’m working on a story. It’s a good story, a great story, a balltearer of a yarn. Or, it’s a dud story, it’s a non-story, there’s no story.
"The idea of the story, of course, dates back to the time when people made little distinction between fact and fiction. Was Homer telling us the truth about the Trojan Wars? Did the Cyclops really have one eye, or Perseus winged feet? Does it matter? They’re great stories.
"They’re about love, and fear, and rage, and jealousy, and courage in adversity – the same emotions that 2500 years later sell copies of the Tele, or attract viewers to A Current Affair.
"But the media, of course, are supposed to tell us true stories."

How 20th century of you, Mr Holmes. This is the age of manufactured news realities. The story is everything. Does it matter if it doesn't turn out to be true? It's fun for a few days, and if the truth is, eventually, published it usually turns out to be nowhere near as exciting.

The reality a series of stories builds up, even if they are only brushed lightly with the truth, in the media over days, or weeks, or years, becomes for some all the truth they need to know. Or want to know.

Why shatter the manufactured reality with too many distracting facts?

Today, if you want to live in a reality where the future of the planet faces "dire consequences" resulting from our addiction to old energy sources and only the wisdom of carbon tax profiteers like Al Gore and Rupert Murdoch can save us all, you can follow certain columnists, haunt certain news sites and blog sites, all of which will mostly continue to enforce that reality. And add to it.

Or you can believe the climate crisis is one big fat conspiracy created by those who stand to most benefit from the implementation of a global carbon tax.

You can, depending on the radio shows you listen to and the newspapers and bloggers you read, live in Sydney and truly believe that you are under constant direct threat from Al Qaeda (via Somalia/Lebanon/Pakistan/Iran) linked Islamist terrorists.

You can easily find enough material on a handful of mainstream news sites to reinforce that dangerous reality most days, and ignore anything that tells you otherwise, that threatens to bite away at the manufactured reality of a looming threat which you find curiously comforting.

Whatever your choice of fear, it's easy to find a selection of news media and online screeds to feed it and sustain it. You can get Google to send you news alerts every time a story or blog post involving your favourite fear is published online.

Personally, I live in perpetual fear of both UFO invasions and surviving into the post-apocalyptic aftermath of a massive meteor impact. Fortunately, my double fear is countered by supreme confidence that the world-crushing meteor will arrive just as the UFO invasion begins and destroy them all, resulting in the meteor being obliterated into harmless but beautiful fiery dust in our night skies.

You'd be amazed at how many stories find their way online from across the world every month about looming UFO invasions and planet-killing meteor strikes.

Then again, you may already know. You probably read the mainstream media as well.

The rest of the Jonathan Holmes piece is here.

(slightly edited before reposting)

2011-05-18T01:08:00.002+10:00

A beautiful King Parrot killed by the beak-destroying Psittacine disease.

The parrot was seen flying only 3 days before its death. Its beak had rotted, and broken, meaning it could no longer crack the seeds that made up most of its protein intake. Two days before its death it was walking around the base of a favoured tree, looking up at the branches. Other birds, not parrots, were with it that day, and appeared to be trying to feed it by cracking seeds and attempting to put them in its mouth.

2011-05-16T23:36:00.003+10:00

The legendary Rob Younger, frontman for Radio Birdman and The New Christs at the Great Bands Of 1970s New York City tribute, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown, May 13 :

Photos By Darryl Mason

2011-05-16T23:31:00.003+10:00

Maybe it's just me, but the endangered Montana Merkle bears an uncanny resemblance to the Australian kookaburra, even down to its distinctive mating call

Bird Hunted To Near Extinction Due To Infuriating 'Fuck You' Call :

2011-05-16T12:10:00.002+10:00

Now Here's A Shock, Cannabis Users Not Motivated To 'Get Clean'

NSW Auditor-General Wants Cannabis User Registered, Monitored As Criminals

By Darryl Mason

Can the Murdoch media's coverage of cannabis get any more cliched?

For tabloid media so obsessed with celebrities, it seems curious indeed they wouldn't use this opportunity to run a photo of a celebrity cannabis user, rather than a random 'cannabis enthusiast' that reinforces decades old cliches.

Here's just a small sample of celebrities they could have included a photo of as a 'cannabis enthusiast' :

Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, Harrison Ford, Pink, Carl Sagan, US President Barack Obama, US President Abraham Lincoln, US President George Washington, Queen Victoria, Stephen King, Sting, Nobel Prize Winner Francis Crick, Bill Gates, Bill Murray, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Guy Pearce, Jennifer Aniston....

So why no celebrity 'cannabis enthusiasts' to detail a story such as this? Particularly in this all important clickbait age of tabloid media?

Because as a tabloid newspaper editor you must never, never, never associate successful, famous, accomplished people with cannabis use. That's just the way it is.

From the Daily Telegraph :

Dope smokers are making a mockery of lenient cannabis laws in NSW by refusing to undertake drug counselling when caught using marijuana.
The system - where police officers can formally caution people found with 15 grams or less of cannabis - has become so useless, according to the NSW Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat, that police should be harder on users.

Despite issuing 39,000 cautions in 10 years, Mr Achterstraat said "more needs to be done to increase the number of cannabis offenders getting help for their drug use".

Not only should police crack down on dope smokers, but the Auditor-General says the Health department should set up a register of users to help identify addicts and help them get cleaned up.
"The results are better for people cautioned a second time, with almost 38 per cent calling the helpline for the mandatory education session."

I wonder if the "mandatory education session" includes lessons on how cannabis can reduce the growth of lung cancer tumors by 50%?

Probably not.

2011-05-15T01:34:00.009+10:00

Great Minds Think Alike, On Wanking

When Daily Telegraph journalist Tim Blair isn't too busy thrillingly pointing out basic typos in independent media (with a fraction of the editorial staff of his own newspaper), he apparently borrows headlines from the New York Post, without credit.

Tim Blair, May 14. 4pm :

Osama’s bin wankin’. The Taliban tugman probably feasted upon delicious forbidden infidel food, too.

The New York Post, at least 10 hours earlier* :

Probably just a coincidence.

*corrected

UPDATE : A few hours after the above was posted, Blair acknowledges this remarkable coincidence : "Not for the first time, me and (NY Post editor) Col Allan are on the same wavelength."

So Blair, according to his own post, checked the reaction of New York Times to the alleged discovery of a Bin Laden hideout 'porn stash' but didn't bother to see what his mate, and fellow Murdoch employee, Col Allan, had come up with on such a dream Osama tabloid story? That sounds realistic.

2011-05-13T15:31:00.001+10:00

More Australian mushrooms and funghi found near Old Brush Studio, Brunkerville, April 2011 :

More Photos Of Australian Mushrooms And Funghi Here

2011-05-12T12:04:00.002+10:00

Australian author Mathew Reilly's stunning collection of science fiction & fantasy film memorabilia :

2011-05-12T11:25:00.000+10:00

Some quality Osama Bin Laden-related journalism from the Channel 7 News website. Or Headline ClickBait as it's more commonly known :

Paragraph three of the 'story' :

"The notebook was not a diary and did not include personal or emotional details, the official said."

The Sydney Morning Herald couldn't resist either. Now it's 'diaries' :

2011-05-11T15:50:00.001+10:00

Autumn leaves, Lower Hunter Valley, New South Wales, late April :

2011-05-11T12:53:00.012+10:00

"...the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended"

By Darryl Mason

I had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing & hearing actor Jack Thompson read the poetry of Australia's legendary bush and city balladeers Banjo Paterson & Henry Lawson at the Gearin Hotel, Katoomba, last Sunday. Sorry, photos & vid were banned, unfortunately.

But the gig was filmed for a DVD release, and I have a feeling the performance will also show up on ABC1 or ABC2 on a Sunday afternoon not too far away.

I was lucky enough to have had a teacher in primary school who made sure he read to us a Lawson or Paterson piece at least once a week. But while I got the excitement of The Man From Snowy River and The Loaded Dog, the words and images of Paterson's Clancy Of The Overflow didn't really sink in, having not, back then, seen much of the real Australian bush, or the Big City, I couldn't compare two in my mind.

But hearing Jack Thompson do Clancy last Sunday was a revelation. I finally got it. Paterson dreamed of dumping the gritty city life to become a sun-drenched cattleman, but he knew in his heart it was just a romantic idea, a daydream. Droving cattle would have been broken Paterson as easily as an office life would have shattered his legendary Clancy. But it's the imagery projected by those words that really leaps out at me now. Here's the full poem, published in The Bulletin in 1889 :

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan years ago;
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow."

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar);
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
"Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are."

In my wild erratic fancy, visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plain extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city,
Through the open window floating, spreads it foulness over all.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street;
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me,and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal
But I doubt he's suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.

You can pick up CDs of Jack Thomspon's beautiful readings of the words of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson from Fine Poets here.

Here's Jack Thompson recording Clancy :

UPDATE : Didn't know this, but 'Clancy Of The Overflow', in retirement, penned a sardonic reply to Paterson's romantic view of his droving lifestyle, eight years after The Bulletin published the poem.

Thomas Gerald Clancy made sure readers understood the harsh reality of his world, back then :

Neath the star-spangled dome
Of my Austral home,
When watching by the camp fire's ruddy glow,
Oft in the flickering blaze
Is presented to my gaze
The sun-drenched kindly faces
Of the men of Overflow.
Now, though years have passed forever
Since I used, with best endeavour
Clip the fleeces of the jumbucks
Down the Lachlan years ago,
Still in memory linger traces
Of many cheerful faces,
And the well-remembered visage
Of the Bulletin's "Banjo".
Tired of life upon the stations,
With their wretched, scanty rations,
I took a sudden notion
That a droving I would go;
Then a roving fancy took me,
Which has never since forsook me,
And decided me to travel,
And leave the Overflow.
So with maiden ewes from Tubbo,
I passed en route to Dubbo,
And across the Lig'num country
'where the Barwon waters flow;
Thence onward o'er the Narran,
By scrubby belts of Yarran,
To where the landscape changes
And the cotton bushes grow.
And my path I've often wended
Over drought-scourged plains extended,
where phantom lakes and forests
Forever come and go;
And the stock in hundreds dying,
Along the road are lying,
To count among the 'pleasures"
That townsfolk never know.
Over arid plains extended
My route has often tended,
Droving cattle to the Darling,
Or along the Warrego;
Oft with nightly rest impeded,
when the cattle had stampeded,
Save I sworn that droving pleasures
For the future I'd forego.
So of drinking liquid mire
I eventually did tire,
And gave droving up forever
As a life that was too slow.
Now, gold digging, in a measure,
Affords much greater pleasure
To your obedient servant,
"Clancy of the Overflow".

2011-05-11T12:44:00.002+10:00

Australian climate scientists fight back. A rap was probably a better choice than interpretative dance :

2011-05-09T15:38:00.003+10:00

That's A Big Storm

More than $60 million will be spent in the next few months building 10 new storm shelters to protect 5000 Queenslanders from Category 5 cyclones. But just how strong does the Queensland government, and generous United Arab Emirates donors, think future cyclones are going to be?

From Cairns.com.au :

The United Arab Emirates's gift of $30 million is being matched by the Queensland Government.
“Far North Queensland is right in the firing line during cyclone season and this generous gift from Abu Dhabi is a catalyst for new shelters in the region,’’ Ms Bligh said.

The shelters will be designed and constructed to Category 5 standard and to provide protection to more than 500 people each from winds up to 3000km/h, windborne debris and storm tide inundation.

“We will build these shelters as quickly as we can and I want as many as possible to open progressively during 2012,’’ Ms Bligh said.

The fastest wind speed ever recorded on Planet Earth was on Australia's Barrow Island, during Cyclone Olivia in 1996. The anemometer recorded 408kmh.

Either the quoted wind speed in the Cairns Post story is a mistake (obviously) or Queensland is expected to encounter Neptune-strength cyclones.

There is a strong belief in Far North Queensland, in government, local councils and disaster management, that the area truly dodged a bullet, and escaped an horrific death toll, when the eye of the 500km wide Cyclone Yasi unexpectedly collapsed shortly after coming ashore. The event exposed a shocking lack of available shelters built to withstand Category 5 cyclones. Townsville, for instance, had no cyclone shelters at all.

Feb 2, 2011 - The Night Of The SuperStorm

2011-05-09T02:01:00.003+10:00

What do you get when you combine Australian Julian Assange and the soft porn titan who sold his Australian citizenship to get rich in the United States?

You get this - RupertJulian :

Via BoingBoing

2011-05-06T19:42:00.008+10:00

Mushrooms & funghi at the Old Brush Studio, Brunkerville, NSW, late April 2011 :

Photos by Darryl Mason

2011-05-05T22:33:00.003+10:00

Something terrible is about to happen to this group of happy people. Can you guess what it is?

LOOK OUT! BEHIND YOU!

2011-05-05T18:06:00.005+10:00

Australian Citizenship Test Website Includes 'No Lebs' As "Australian Values"

Screengrab from Australian Citizenship Test website

By Darryl Mason

As noted by Tammois on Twitter, the Australian Citizenship Test website uses a photo from the very unAustralian Cronulla Riots of 2005 to illustrate a story about the importance of Australian values. How the photo appears on the website :

Some of the text that runs with the photo clearly showing a man with 'No Lebs' scrawled across the back of his t-shirt, next to people wearing the Australian flag as capes :

Australia is a land that represents different things to different people; to some, the land down under is a distant and mysterious place punctuated with visions of kangaroos and coral reefs, while to others, the expansive outback and sharply contrasting city skylines stand out. For those who are truly close to Australia, however, there are scores of ways to think about the country, and the nation’s collective values often make up one of the most important. When newcomers venture to Australia for the first time, they may find national values strange and very different, or fairly familiar, depending on their place of origin. With a strong love of democratic government, a dedication to preserving the country’s unique customs, and a pioneering spirit that has helped to make Australia stand out among even the most populous and powerful countries in the world, Aussies aren’t especially quiet about their values, and immigrants may find the social and moral landscapes daunting at first.

Wow.

UPDATE : 'Dan' Lewis from the RWDB blog read the above post and dreamed up distortions and lies :

"There should have been a few subtle hints that this wasn't an 'official' website."

Where above do I claim that photo was posted on an 'official' site? Nowhere. I called it the Australian Citizenship Test website, which is what it calls itself. Next :

The URL - Australiantest.com and the Wordpress website which follows, don't exactly scream "Australian Government".

Where did I say those websites screamed Australian government? Nowhere. Dan Lewis is hallucinating, hopelessly. If I intended the post to be a criticism of the Australian government, or official immigration policy, I would have tagged the post as such. I tagged it 'online racism' because that's what the post is about. Next :

How could any sensible person reach the conclusion that Mason did?

How could any person with half a brain read the above post and conclude I was blaming the Australian government for that appalling website?

Keep lying, keep trying, Dan.

And better luck next time.

Darryl Mason is the author of the free, online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

2011-05-05T15:21:00.005+10:00

This is what a coal seam, in NSW's Upper Hunter, looks like before the bulldozers and miners move in. So fragile, you can snap off pieces and throw them straight into your fire.

Photos By Darryl Mason

2011-05-04T13:40:00.005+10:00

Wallaby, Brunkerville, New South Wales, April 2011

Wallaby joey, about 14 months old :

2011-05-02T05:45:00.003+10:00

As Australian As Ostrahyun

Photo By Darryl Mason

Some of these 'You Know You're An Australian When....' lines from this Reddit thread are as old as faxed office joke sheets, some are more current, but many seem echoes of an Australian era already fading in our cultural rear view mirror :

You believe that stubbies can be either drunk or worn.
You've made a bong out of your garden hose rather than use it for something illegal such as watering the garden.
You're liable to burst out laughing whenever you hear of Americans "rooting" for something.
You pronounce Melbourne as 'Mel-bn'.
You pronounce Penrith as 'Pen-riff'.
You can translate: 'Dazza and Shazza played Acca Dacca on the way to Maccas.'
You believe it makes perfect sense for a nation to decorate its highways with large fibreglass bananas, prawns and sheep.
You call your best friend 'a total bastard' but someone you really, truly despise is just 'a bit of a bastard'.
You're secretly proud of our killer wildlife.
You believe all famous Kiwis are actually Australian, until they stuff up, at which point they again become Kiwis.
Hamburger with Beetroot? Of course!
You know that certain words must, by law, be shouted out during any rendition of The Angels song 'Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again'.
You believe that the confectionery known as the Wagon Wheel has become smaller with every passing year.
You believe that every important discovery in the world was made by an Australian but then sold off to the Yanks for a pittance.
You believe that the more you shorten someones name the more you like them.
You understand that 'excuse me' can sound rude, while 'scuse me' is always polite.
You know it's not summer until the steering wheel is too hot to handle and a seat belt buckle becomes a pretty good branding iron.
Your biggest family argument over the summer concerned the rules for beach cricket.
You believe the phrase 'smart casual' refers to a pair of black tracky-daks, suitably laundered.
You know how to abbreviate every word, all of which usually end in O: arvo, combo, garbo, kero, lezzo, metho, milko, muso, rego, servo, smoko, speedo, righto etc.
You know that the barbeque is a political arena; the person holding the tongs is always the boss and usually a man. And the women make the salad.
You say 'no worries' quite often, whether you realise it or not.
You know that roo meat tastes pretty good, but not as good as barra. Or a meat pie.
You 'rock up' for meetings.
You know what the word "girt" means.
Where you live is technically still in a drought but your house is underwater from a flood.

More Here

2011-04-30T03:40:00.005+10:00

The Chaser Vs The Royals : We Are Definitely Not Amused

The office of Prince Charles and Prince William forced the ABC to pull a planned live commentary TV broadcast of the 2011 Royal Wedding last night

This is one of the clips that saw an unprecedented act of censorship by representatives of the future king of Australia. Note, all Prince Phillip quotes used are based on things he has actually said :

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

Clarence House, the almost 200-year-old London royal residence which doubles as an office for the Prince of Wales and his son, Prince William, demanded the ABC cancel plans to use the controversial comedy group, the Chaser, as royal wedding commentators.
They then contacted broadcast suppliers, including the host BBC, Associated Press Television News (APTN), Sky and ITN, to ensure the ABC would have no access to footage if it ignored the request.

Faced with the prospect of airing static for almost four hours tomorrow night, the ABC had no choice but to capitulate.

This is a letter The Chaser sent to The Queen :

Dear Australian Head of State,

We would like to place ourselves at your mercy and request a stay of execution for our television program, The Chaser's Royal Wedding Commentary.

We, like Kate, are commoners, and were looking forward to celebrating her wedding to your exalted grandson with a few affectionate observations.

To ensure that our coverage was respectful, we were only planning to use jokes that Prince Phillip has previously made in public, or at least the ones that don't violate racial vilification laws. We've also filmed a joke about hunting grouse which we think you might enjoy.

We Australians are a simple people who don't often get to watch that kind of pomp. The last big wedding we had here was Scott and Charlene on Neighbours. We've asked around, and there are at least six people in this outpost of your empire who would quite like to watch our commentary.
Please consider our plea.

We have the honour to be, Madam, Your Majesty's humble and obedient servants,
Cheers,
The Chaser
PS: How serious are you about treason laws?

Yes, The Royal Family wields absolutely no power at all over what happens in Australia.

Well, except for using blackmail to censor live TV mockery.

A few more pre-filmed clips from the canceled royal wedding special The Chaser are now only allowed to air on YouTube :

More Banned By Royal Decree Chaser Clips Here

Darryl Mason is the author of the free, online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

2011-04-24T03:20:00.003+10:00

From a wall in the Chauvet Cave in France, a hand stencil believed to be more than 30,000 years old :

From a wall in a cave in Western Australia, a hand stencil believed to be more than 10,000 years old :

2011-04-21T01:18:00.007+10:00

Heath Ledger Was Right About The War On Iraq

"It's Not A Fight For Humanity, It's A Fight For Oil"

By Darryl Mason

Heath Ledger, like the million other Australians who marched against the War On Iraq, was right, as Paul Bignell details in the UK Independent (excerpts) :

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.
The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.
The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq's reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

Lady Symons, 59, later took up an advisory post with a UK merchant bank that cashed in on post-war Iraq reconstruction contracts.

Rupert 'Always Wrong On Iraq' Murdoch knew all about the deal making on Iraq's oil future, and could barely keep his trap shut, boasting a month before the war :

"The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be US$20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."

A bit later, after publicly giving his full and solid backing to the war, Rupert Murdoch explained why, in his deluded old man fantasy world, the War On Iraq was likely to fuel economic recovery :

"We're keeping our heads down, managing the businesses, keeping our profits up. Who knows what the future holds? I have a pretty optimistic medium and long-term view but things are going to be pretty sticky until we get Iraq behind us. But once it's behind us, the whole world will benefit from cheaper oil which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else..."

People actually believed that. They really, really did.

At least, until the truth about Australia's ongoing involvement in the War On Iraq became a little clearer in 2007 :

Amusingly, it was Rupert Murdoch's own Australian media empire that spread this bit of truth far and wide. At least they did for a few hours, until Don't Make Rupert Angry censorship survival instinct kicked in and they tried to make their own headlines disappear and went delete crazy on one of the biggest stories of the past decade.

From The Orstrahyun, July 6, 2007 :

The phone calls from John Howard's office to the head office of Rupert Murdoch's News Limited in Sydney yesterday were less than pleasant.

The News.com.au website, the main portal for Murdoch's network of Australian newspaper websites, reaching some more than 1.5 million Australian readers per day, ran a number of headlines claiming John Howard had said that oil was now a key reason to stay in Iraq. Some of the headlines said the Iraq War was a war for oil. Just like all those protesters back in early 2003 claimed it would be.

By the time Howard moved to deny he said anything such thing, it was too late. The story was out, columns and articles had been written and sent to the printers for today's news racks, and there was no going back.

John Howard's office knew there was little point trying to get Fairfax newspapers to retract their stories, in print or online. Howard Admits War For Iraq's Oil was the story many journos for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had been waiting more than four years to write.

But Howard knew the Murdoch media were likely to play ball. If not in print, then at least online, where news.com.au now reaches more Australians than the same company's newspapers do, in print.

But even until the early afternoon today, almost 24 hours later, some of the Murdoch websites were still carrying 'Howard Says Iraq War For Oil' headlines and stories, even though the main news.com.au site had rewritten headlines and stories, inside its own archive, and published the following correction....oh sorry, clarification :
An earlier version of this story from the Australian Associated Press incorrectly reported the Prime Minister as saying oil was a reason for Australia's continued military presence in Iraq.
He said "energy", but as we all know, "energy" is "oil" when it comes to the Middle East, unless Howard is thinking about cutting natural gas deals with Iran sometime soon.

The phone calls from Howard's office to News Limited HQ clearly worked.

News.com.au chose to blame Australian Associated Press for supplying the wire news story that claimed Howard had admitted to a war for oil in Iraq.

Here's the pre-furious phone calls from Howard's office Uncorrected Version as it appeared online yesterday :

And here's the spiffy new Corrected Version :

Note that the sub headlines now put the words relating to 'Iraq War For Oil' squarely in the mouth of defence minister Brendan Nelson, when it was also Howard who publicly talked of needing to "secure" energy resources in Iraq and the Middle East.

The sub headlines were also edited to remove the dead giveaway line 'Another Reason Is To Uphold Prestige Of US, UK', to be replaced with the far more Freedom And Democracy Agenda-friendly 'We'll Stay Until Iraq No Longer Needs Us, Says PM'.

But perhaps more importantly, note that on both the 'corrected' and 'uncorrected' stories above, the byline clearly reads "By Staff Writers And Wires".

AAP may have supplied a story that claimed Howard said Australia had an interest in staying in Iraq to secure future oil supplies, which is, of course, exactly what he said, but unless the byline is a total lie, more than one journo rewrote or added to the text and headline and sub headlines before it went online. Hence "by staff writers and wires".

But to Howard's utter horror, that correction, sorry clarification, only made it onto the story on the main news.com.au site.

The calls for clarifications to the story must not have gotten through to other city newspaper editors and staff in Murdoch's network. Unless, of course, they chose to ignore the clarifications because the story didn't need any clarifying at all. It was true.

And if that was the case, then good on them for not following directions from head office, via the Howard office.

The below pages were all still online through the Murdoch online stable at 10-11am today, and later.

From the Adelaide Advertiser :

Australia's biggest selling daily newspaper, The Herald Sun, ran the following editorial today, hitting the presses before it could be pulled, and staying online, unchanged, well into the late morning :

The Tasmania Mercury still had this up on their site at midday :

And the Murdoch site in Perth still had this posted after midday today :

Even though the story of Howard's Iraq Oil Slick was running up hundreds of comments an hour on websites around Australia, any mention of it was gone from the news.com.au front page by 10.30am this morning.

Over at Murdoch's flagship 'The Australian' newspaper website, at least three key columnists weighed in supporting Howard's claim that he didn't say what he said, and it really didn't matter even if the prime minister and the defence minister did say what they said. Which they did.

Just to jog your memory, here's a reminder of what John Howard had to say about claims that the, then, still coming War On Iraq was about something other than WMDs and deposing Saddam Hussein back in February, 2003 :

"No criticism is more outrageous than the claim that US behaviour is driven by a wish to take control of Iraq's oil reserves."

And here's what the Murdoch media's favourite political whipping post, Greens Leader Bob Brown had to say in that same week, in 2003 :

This is not Australia's war. This is an oil war. This is the US recognising that, as the economic empire of the age, it needs oil to maintain its pre-eminence.

Back then, 76 percent of Australians were opposed to a War On Iraq.

By midday today, the Australia In Iraq For The Oil scandal was making international news, in a big way.

And the hundreds of headlines from around the world were immune to Howard's attempt to reframe his own comments, and those of his defence minister. They went in hard, using Howard as the first leader of a Coalition Of The Drilling country to finally admit the truth about a war so blackened and poisoned with so many lies :

Herald Sun, Melbourne : PM's war for oil

Daily Times, Pakistan - Oil key motive for Iraq involvement: Australia

The Scotsman, Scotland - Oil keeps Australia in Iraq

The Independent, UK : Australian troops 'in Iraq because of oil'

RTE, Ireland : Mideast oil priority for Australia

The BBC : Australians 'are in Iraq for oil'

Turkish Press, Middle East : Oil a factor in Australian role in Iraq: minister

Voice Of America : Australia Says Oil Key Motive for Involvement in Iraq

The Guardian, UK : Oil a factor in Iraq conflict, says Australian MP

Xinhau, China : PM: Australian troops to stay in Iraq for oil

Aljazeera : Australia admits Iraq war about oil

Forbes : Australia says securing oil supply means no Iraq withdrawal

Press TV, Iran : Aussies in Iraq for Oil

Gulf News, United Arab Emirates : Oil 'key factor for Australia's role in Iraq'

Stratfor (key military intel site) : Australia: Oil A Reason For Iraq Presence

Alsumaria, Iraq : Oil supply is an essential factor

Zee Tv, India : Mid-east oil crucial to our future: Australian PM

Alalalam News Network, Iran : Australia: Oil Means no Iraq Pullout

Some of those same news sites ran Howard's attempts to deny that he said what he said, but his retraction was given mostly backwater coverage. Those international editors knew, like some editors of Murdoch's Australian newspapers knew, that Howard was trying to scam them.

Like he tried to scam the entire nation back in late 2002 when he said he hadn't decided whether or not he would send troops to Iraq, when they were already in the Gulf. And in early March, 2003, when Howard said he hadn't decided yet whether or not commit troops to the coming war, when some of those already deployed troops had already written letters to their children in case they died during the fighting.

Read The Full July 6, 2007 Post Here

------------------------------

So when are we going to have an investigation into the real reasons why Australia became involved in the War On Iraq?

When are we going to have an investigation into Howard government foreign minister Alexander Downer's meetings with some of the world's biggest oil companies in 2002-2004?

When are we going to have an investigation into the false intelligence circulated so enthusiastically by the Howard government and the Murdoch media back in 2002 and early 2003?

Taxpayers who were swindled of almost $20 billion over eight years for the War On Iraq deserve the truth.

The thousands of Australian soldiers who served in Iraq, the hundreds physically & psychologically wounded, those who committed suicide after they got back, the families ruined, deserve nothing less than the truth.

2011-04-15T21:24:00.002+10:00

Will Making The Hobbit Mean Peter Jackson Won't Get To Shoot His Long-Dreamed Of ANZACs Epic?

By Darryl Mason

New Zealand director Peter Jackson has begun shooting his two-part 3D adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, and this set visit video is more interesting, more entertaining, than most of the movies released in cinemas so far this :

The Hobbit is expected to keep Peter Jackson busy until 2014 at least, which raises an important question, for me anyway.

Does this mean Peter Jackson's deeply personal and long dreamed of movie about the ANZACs has now been confined to the dustbin of 'Movies That Almost Were'?

Following is a repost from last year about Peter Jackson's ANZACs project, and why it is so personal to him.

As the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli draws closer, Jackson finds himself thinking about his grandfather, who fought there and won a distinguished service medal, and the numerous cinematically untold stories of Australians and New Zealand teenagers fighting together so far away, on the other side of the world.

Here's Peter Jackson on The 7.30 Report :

"I went to Gallipoli in 1990 for the 75th anniversary. That was the amazing year where 50 diggers were taken along, 50 of the original diggers were there. And so, you know, watching the dawn parade with 50 of these old men - the youngest was 92, the oldest was 103 and they were all sitting in these chairs as light came up....

"As the sun rose or the sky started to get light...thee old guys...they weren't interested in the speeches, they were all turning round looking at the hills. And it was an amazing experience to see them all looking at this landscape that most of them hadn't seen since 1915, hadn't seen it for 75 years.

"And I was standing right beside them as they were all turning around and looking behind and up at the sphinx and all the ridges....

"....to me (Gallipoli has) been a remarkable part of our history. And Peter Weir obviously made a great movie, but Peter's movie was set around events of August 7th, August 8th, 1915. I mean, you know, the Gallipoli was a seven or eight-month-long campaign. And that story is yet to be told on film. So I'd like to do that."

You Can Watch The Interview With Peter Jackson Here

The following is rare footage restored by Peter Jackson & WETA colleagues of the ANZACS fighting at Gallipoli :

And if you're wondering what a Peter Jackson World War I movie might look like, here's the captivating trailer for a short film by Jackson and Neill Blomkamp called Crossing The Line. It was shot on March 30 and 31, 2009, as a test for the Red digital camera system.

And no, I have no idea where you can see the full version of that short movie. If you manage to find it online, please let me know on Twitter.

Peter

2011-04-15T12:36:00.009+10:00

HitlerHitlerHitlerHitlerHitlerHitler

By Darryl Mason

Apparently if Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspapers don't run at least one story a week mentioning "Hitler" and/or "Nazis" the entire media organisation will wither and die.

What other explanation can there be for such a relentless obsession?

The latest :

First, the smear. Then the beat-up :

Wilkie dealt with the allegations at a press conference earlier today :

"Let me start by saying I can't remember anything about that specific allegation, but I have never made any secret of the fact that I was one of the many cadets involved in the bastardisation scandal at the Royal Military college Duntroon in 1983.

"In fact I was disciplined for misconduct at the time.

"I am obviously regretful of my behaviour of almost 30 years ago when I was a cadet at Duntroon in my early 20s.
"I think that sort of behaviour at the time was wrong and I regret I was in any way involved in that sort of behaviour.
"I've obviously grown up a lot in the last 30 years and what at the time seemed appropriate, I have learned is clearly inappropriate and nor is it necessary in a place like Duntroon or in the Defence Force Academy.
"If there is anyone in this country who feels aggrieved in any way by anything I've ever said or done to them then I apologise unreservedly."

Wilkie is, rightly, suspicious of why this near 30 year old incident, if it happened at all, is suddenly headline news, in the midst of his campaign for badly needed reforms of the multi-billion dollar Australian poker machines industry :

"There is clearly a campaign that is being waged against me on account of the fact I am the only thing standing between the poker machine industry and the $5 billion that is lost by problem gamblers in this country on poker machines each year.
"I will not be intimidated by that campaign against me, I will not be cowed in any way."

Nor should he. The Hitler card has been played. What's next?

2011-04-13T18:04:00.003+10:00

The Man In Blue

The following, recently released video from the March 11 Japan tsunami, showing the utter destruction of the beautiful fishing town of Minami-Sanriku, should come with something of a warning.

I've seen dozens of videos of the Japan tsunami destroying villages, towns and cities, but nothing like this. You may think you're prepared, but you're not.

You will see people driving, unknowingly, into the path of the tsunami, people running for their lives being caught up and swept away and the horrified screams and cries of the townspeople watching their world being destroyed before their eyes is distressing, haunting.

But towards the end, there are moments of incredible heroism, stunning bravery.

At 5:01, a man in dark blue can be glimpsed helping to carry someone to safety. He then returns to try and save the life of another, at 5:08, charging into the rapidly moving wreckage, which then carries him away.

Darryl Mason is the author of the free, online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

2011-04-13T05:02:00.005+10:00

Andrew Bolt's Reality Meltdown

By Darryl Mason

Screengrab from The Australian online front page in the days following the March 11 Japanese earthquake and tsunami

How many times can pro-nuclear wacko and alleged journalist Andrew Bolt show himself to be grotesquely ignorant, wrong and ill-informed in the space of just one week? Five times? Ten times? More?

Following the March 11 earthquake in Japan, a 15 metre high tsunami wave slammed into a nuclear plant in Fukushima. The earthquake and tsunami killed more than 28,000 people.

For obvious reasons there was widespread concern in Japan, and around the world, about how good a job the Japanese government and the nuclear plant's operators were doing in containing radiation leaking from the smashed plant.

As a sign of just how confident the US government was that the Japanese government could contain radiation from the Fukushima plant, they began preparations for the evacuation of thousands of US military families within hours of the US government learning just how huge and potentially deadly the unfolding disaster actually was.

And, not unexpectedly, news media leaped on the 'Nuclear Crisis' story and ran with it hard, voicing arguments both for and against nuclear power.

This gave Andrew Bolt the opportunity to blame The Greens for nuclear "scaremongering" and to attack "the media" (of which he is one of Australia's most prominent and highly paid) for their coverage.

Well, attack some media.

Attack, primarily, the main newspaper competition to the newspapers owned by ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch that publish Andrew Bolt's often incoherent and poorly researched swill.

Bolt began his ill-fated campaign to bludgeon his ideological and political enemies for "fear-mongering" over Fukushima on March 14 :

"...the offensive media fear-mongering..."

"...the media coverage of some papers obsesses instead about trouble at some nuclear reactors..."

This was the only time Bolt linked to Australian newspapers he claimed were over-hyping the radioactive threat posed by the rapidly failing Fukushima nuclear plant. He didn't link to anything published in the newspapers he writes for, of course, because that would have proven what a deceitful idiot he is.

The stories from The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald Bolt did link to were, in fact, mild and quite low on undue hype and "fear-mongering", in stark contrast, that is, to the newspapers Andrew Bolt works for.

Here's the online front pages from the Bolt-publishing Daily Telegraph & Herald Sun the day before those Age & SMH stories were published.

Even more bizarrely, Andrew Bolt ran this headline on his blog...

....the day after his Herald Sun newspaper ran this front page :

Which proves Bolt doesn't even read the front pages of the main newspaper he writes for, because nowhere, in a week of blog postings, did he acknowledge it was the actually the Herald Sun shouting 'Meltdown'.

Here's more excerpts from Andrew Bolt's blogs & columns in the 10 days following the start of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, interspersed with online & print front pages from the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and other Murdoch news media, including The Australian, published during the same period.

Bolt neither linked to nor mentioned any of these in any of his columns or blog posts.

March 15 :

The great green scaremongering gets worse.

March 16 :

No, there won’t be a nuclear explosion, “China syndrome” or “another Chernobyl”. The situation today is better than yesterday, and as each day goes by the chances of a big accident lesson. The nuclear fuel remains contained.

This scaremongering over the crippled Fukushima nuclear complex is extraordinary.

Isn't it though?

March 18 :

We will need to make some people accountable for this monstrous scaremongering once the truth becomes undeniable

March 19 :

The fear of Fukushima is deadlier than the fallout

Utter madness. The journalists who have whipped this up should be ashamed of themselves.

These journalists?

March 20 :

The wild reporting of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear emergency continues, with lurid claims of radioactive plumes, poisoned milk and more. The fact remains, though, that no one has been killed and probably never will.

March 21 :

no one in the towns around the plant is in any danger whatsoever from the radiation.

...the screaming, braying, lying, hyperventilating, fabricating, panicking media coverage is probably likely to kill you first instead.

March 21 :

It’s time to hold the scaremongers to account.

These "scaremongers?"

Andrew Bolt, March 22 :

Why worry only about the reactor that has killed no one?

Yes, why worry about a mostly destroyed, exploding, radioactive water spewing nuclear plant when you can, if you read Murdoch news media, worry instead about whether or not Mother Nature is now purposely trying to kill humans?

Her cruelty, eh?

March 11 wasn't, you see, another one of the hundreds of mega-earthquakes and tsunamis that have rocked, smashed and swept across the fault-line islands we now call Japan in the past few dozen million years.....it was instead a Terror Attack on humans by 'cruel' Mother Nature, at least according to the Gold Coast Bulletin :

None of the above headlines or front pages were criticised, or even mentioned, by Andrew Bolt is his 10 day campaign to blame "fear-mongering" over the deadly serious, ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan on "the greens" and non-Murdoch news media.

Not one.

And since it has been confirmed that explosions at Fukushima did indeed claim lives, that vast farming areas of Japan are so polluted with radiation they can't grow essential crops like rice, perhaps for years, or decades, and that radioactive water gushing into the Pacific Ocean from the nuclear plant has destroyed lifeblood fishing industries and clouds of radiation have even reached milk and food supplies in the United States, what has Andrew Bolt said?

Nothing.

As soon as Andrew Bolt realised facts and reality had proven him wrong, deceitfully wrong, about Fukushima, over and over again, he simply dropped the story.

Completely.

Like a petulant child who, once told he is wrong, runs to his room and slams the door on the reality of his mistakes.

Bolt has said nothing, not even an update or a correction, about the true scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in weeks.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Fukushima disaster has been upgraded to a Level 7 nuclear emergency, the same rating as Chernobyl, the highest rating possible.

Quality journalism indeed.

There Is No Good Outcome For Fukushima Disaster

Your New Reality - Mother Nature : The Ultimate Terrorist

Darryl Mason is the author of the free, online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

.

2011-04-09T03:29:00.003+10:00

This movie, Tree Of Life by Terence Malick, was to have starred Heath Ledger. The movie was in pre-production when he died in January 2008, with shooting scheduled to start in March. After Ledger's death, Brad Pitt stepped in to play the role.

For those not interested in sequels or superhero movies, or superhero movie sequels, Tree Of Life is about as good as cinema's going to get in 2011.

2011-04-06T12:39:00.003+10:00

Trailer for the Snowtown movie :

Presumably the movie will do so, but the trailer doesn't really tell you much about the true horror of the 'Bodies In The Barrels' killings :

2011-04-05T14:20:00.005+10:00

David Flint : Beyond Parody

Australian independence hater David Flint was so very, very pleased to learn the UK Guardian had decided it was time to re-embrace the British monarchy, he excitedly used this editorial to attack those who think Australia is mature enough to now exist without a foreign head of state, like most of the rest of the world :

"It is a knockout blow to the Australian republican movement – a mere shadow of itself compared with the formidable force it once was under the Turnbull-Keating ascendancy – as well as the minuscule United Kingdom, Canadian and New Zealand republican movements.

That respected voice of progressive politics, The Guardian, has returned to the monarchist fold.

Probably the leading English language quality newspaper of the left, The Guardian has renounced the republican agenda it vigorously endorsed in 2000. The newspaper had even challenged the law in relation to the succession.

The Guardian is the leading intellectual media source for Labour and similar parties in the sixteen realms over which The Queen reigns. This decision will have a considerable effect in these parties and beyond.

It will make it acceptable for ALP politicians to admit that they support the existing constitution. After all a large number of the 72% of Australian electorates which voted No in 1999 were held by the Australian Labor Party.

Some republicans hoped this declaration by The Guardian was just an April Fool’s day joke...

Did they, David? Did they?

....but there is no evidence of that.

No evidence....except for the fact the editorial was published on April 1.

What an hilarious old dickhead David Flint is.

He has since scrubbed the above editorial praising the Guardian from his website :

2011-04-04T01:32:00.003+10:00

The Howard Legacy :

Australian's international competitiveness is under threat because up to eight million Australian workers don't have the reading, writing or numeracy skills to undertake training for trade or professional jobs.
The nation's 11 Industry Skills Councils will today call for a new campaign to tackle endemic numbers of workers with poor reading and writing skills, launching a report detailing the problems being faced by industry training bodies.

And :

"International studies have shown that over the past two decades, Australia's literacy and numeracy skill levels have stagnated while those of other countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, have improved.

Mr Taylor said industry had been complaining about the poor quality of literacy and numeracy among school leavers looking to enter the trades for more than 10 years and there had been no improvement.

Prime Minister John Howard left Australia as a nation of coal diggers and fruit pickers, where sports stars are valued more highly than scientists and buying a home is more important than a sound education.

2011-04-02T16:00:00.001+11:00

Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra On Touring Queensland In The Early 1980s :

It's the state that's referred to, in other parts of Australia, in hushed tones, because it's so openly racist and repressive. It's run by a state dictator, a kind of Huey Long, named Joh Bjelke-Petersen. His National Party hardly holds any power anywhere else in Australia because they're considered the right-wing lunatic fringe. But at home he's been able to keep in power by outrageous forms of gerrymandering, and is widely rumored to have rigged every election. He has beefed up the police force, and given them carte0blanche to do what they want to keep people from questioning things.

In Australia, there is no constitution and no laws about search and seizure, so the cops can, and do, kick in your door, and smash up your house, if they want. They've been known to break up conversations on the streets involving three or more people, cause they didn't want any assembly on the street. I met many people in Sydney who had fled Brisbane because they were being pulled over and detained for a holf hour or so every day. I met a lot of very warm people there, very radical in the head, but very afraid to talk. I felt safer walking around on the streets of East Berlin than I did in Brisbane.

Brisbane is also where Darren, our drummer, was picked out of a crowd of about 15 white people, and arrested for drinking in public, even though his can of beer was unopened. When Ray, our guitarist, tried to intervene, he was thrown in another police car and taken away. Also, Bjelke-Petersen's people are trying to take away the Aborigine's right to vote and own land, claiming they "haven't gotten that far up the evolutionary scale." And still, his party is kept in office. Some of his cronies, in fact the head of the Chamber of Commerce, wants to enact forced sterilization laws to kill off the Aborigines.

Summing up Brisbane, all I can say is it was the closest thing to a heavy, heavy, junta-style police state I've ever been in. I was looking over my shoulder a lot!

Biafra also supplies a state by state roundup of the Australian rock and punk music scene in the first half of the 1980s.

2011-04-02T01:43:00.000+11:00

Julian Assange, Reykjavik, 2010 :

2011-03-30T01:23:00.002+11:00

Just 15 years ago, reading the following lines would have meant you were perusing science fiction, not anymore :

...criminals were using online virtual worlds to communicate and transfer funds around the world.
...federal and state police had deployed resources to investigate virtual world money laundering....
...there were "a variety of means of online communication that criminals can engage in and also a variety of methods of laundering funds and ... virtual worlds create opportunities for both of those for criminal groups".

"What identity do you have? A game tag? There are cases of people buying others' online gaming identities..."

Mr Dyson would not comment on whether NSW Police had infiltrated any criminal groups operating in virtual worlds other than to say that NSW Police had an "ongoing presence..."

The Full Story Is Here

2011-03-26T02:28:00.005+11:00

They're Just Giving Aid And Comfort To Global Warming

By Darryl Mason

If you're going to take on a sitting government with protests against that government's most high priority policy, you have to be prepared to cop a whole load of ugly shit from politicians, the media and opinionists. Think of the appalling abuse heaped upon the thousands of World War 2, Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War 1 veterans who joined hundreds of thousands of other Australians to protest the Howard government's War On Iraq in early 2003. They weren't just called extremists by politicians, they told by their own prime minister they were merely a "mob" and were "giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein."

And just like all those veterans, elderly people and young families who attended protests against the War On Iraq, the thousands of Australians who attended the No Carbon Tax Rally in Canberra earlier this week have now discovered what it's like to be uniformly smeared for the actions of the extremist few who also joined their protest.

Unlike 2003, however, there are now numerous ways for protesters to get their message out to wider Australia without having to rely on the mainstream media to speak truthfully of their motives :

The next big No Carbon Tax Rally will be held in Hyde Park, Sydney, on April 2.

2011-03-26T02:06:00.002+11:00

Finally, someone explains the Labor and Liberals parties positions and policies on the greenhouse economy, carbon tax and carbon trading in a way that can be easily understood :

2011-03-22T01:36:00.004+11:00

One month on, a reminder of the devastation unleashed on Christchurch by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake on February 22, killing more than 230 people :

The above video, from the day of the quake, shows many of the buildings where hundreds were trapped, and where many died.

A detail from a larger image of Christchurch shortly after the February 22 quake struck :

Rebuilding continues.

2011-03-18T02:02:00.005+11:00

Below, the Fukushima nuclear plant after the explosions. My Japanese isn't so good, but I'm pretty sure the words "That place is absolutely fucked!" are in there somewhere. Or should be :

2011-03-18T00:55:00.004+11:00

'God' Versus Greens

By Darryl Mason

Cardinal George Pell and some of his lackey bishops aren't happy with The Greens. Now there's a surprise.

Maybe 'aren't happy' isn't an accurate enough description. More like, 'Terrified'.

And, curiously, for an institution that is supposed to avoid getting involved in political campaigning to retain their non-taxpaying status, the Catholic Church is now demanding what remains of Australia's Catholics, at least those who bother to listen to anything Pell has to say, not vote for The Greens in next week's NSW elections.

Leesha McKeeny and Anna Patty in the Sydney Morning Herald (excerpts) :

Catholic bishops have warned the faithful against voting for the Greens in the state election, saying their policies were of ''grave concern''.

A two-page document entitled The Green Agenda is being circulated by Catholic agencies and through schools. It states the party's human rights and social policy areas are in direct conflict ''with the beliefs and values of virtually all religious people, and the beliefs of many other people as well''.

It also warns against voting for candidates who might share similar views, pointing out that some MPs in the main parties had voted for ''bad legislation'' such as same-sex adoption.

The letter outlines eight areas of ''grave concern'', including the Greens' treatment of personal drug use as a health and social issue ''and therefore acceptable'', and its efforts to legalise gay marriage.

But of course, as is usual with Pell's Catholics, it's really all about money.

The Full Story Is Here

2011-03-17T03:01:00.001+11:00

Miranda Devine spellchecks Twitter because....oh, who knows why :

A quick Twitter survey found similar pet pronunciation peeves. "Knowen" instead of "known" was one. "Lyberry" instead of "library" was another, as was "aks" instead of "ask", although that, I think, is beyond the pale.

She gets paid for that.

2011-03-15T02:41:00.008+11:00

This is 'The Ring Of Fire' :

This is The Ring Of Fire lighting up with dozens of huge earthquakes, in just one week :

(click to enlarge)

The Ring Of Fire :

....sweeps in a horseshoe shape up through the Pacific Islands, Indonesia, The Philippines, Japan, across to Hawaii, then to California and down the long coast of Chile.
The clashing of tectonic plates around this ring produces valuable anomalous minerals, including gold. It throws up spectacular mountains...
The Ring of Fire also comprises the most unstable zone in the earth's crust, beneath which pressure constantly builds, causing volcanoes to erupt and earthquakes to roar.
About 90 per cent of the world's earthquakes occur around the ring.

More On The Ring Of Fire And Tectonics at This Dynamic Planet

2011-03-13T02:55:00.011+11:00

Millions Of Americans Will Not Be Killed By Nuclear Fallout In Two Weeks, It's Just A Fake Map

By @DarrylMason

Australian Radiation Services finds itself inadvertently caught up in a fast spreading online hoax, following the unnerving explosion at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, after yesterday's 8.9 earthquake and 10 metre tsunami.

This is the hoax :

The authorative looking logo was stolen from here :

The Nuclear Fallout Map is fake simply because Australian Radiation Services don't issue such maps. It was likely chosen before ARS offices are closed until Monday, as they are most weekends.

This unsourced and likely dodgy chart (nausia?) is being heavily circulated, on social networking sites, forums and email, along with the fake Nuclear Fallout Map :

0-50 rads - No obvious short-term effects

80-120 rads - You have a 10% chance of vomiting and experiencing nausia for a few days

130 -170 rads - You have a 25% chance of vomiting and contracting other symptoms

180-220 rads - You have a 50% chance of vomiting and having other severe physical effects

270-330 rads - 20% chance of death in 6 weeks, or you will recover in a few months.

400-500 rads - 50% chance of death

550-750 rads - Nausia within a few hours ; no survivors

The fake map shows a huge nuclear fallout cloud of 750 rads engulfing millions of Americans by March 22. So, if you were a West Coast living American, the fake map and the above numbers might lead you to believe you and all your family and neighbours will be dying within 6 to 10 days.

But there are some interesting things happening on social networking sites and public online forums about that map.

First off, there are thousands of people on Twitter and Facebook shouting down claims this Nuclear Fallout Map is the real deal and pointing out exposure to 750 rads will not "cause nausia within a few hours; no survivors".

Also, discussion pages, linked in Google search to 'Nuclear Fallout Map, claiming the map is very, very real and The Truth Is Being Suppressed By The Media are disappearing or turning up blank. Google also appears to be jigging their search results so searches for the map will expose users to sites pointing out its utter fakeness.

But at the same time, at least a few dozen Twitter spam accounts (fake accounts pumping exact same tweet & link) are busily flogging the Nuclear Fallout Map, also claiming it's very, very real, and the truth is being suppressed, presumably aiming to spread panic in the United States. Most of these fake accounts only became active shortly after the fake Nuclear Fallout Map started circulating online.

It would seem that someone more powerful than a fukwit photoshopping hoaxer and his friends want the Nuclear Fallout Map to be viewed as a horrifying reality.

Who would want to do this? Who benefits?

Of course, attention and discussion focusing on the Nuclear Fallout Map hoax distracts many from the real truth about the Japan earthquakes, and particularly the quakes that seemed to be closing in on the Fukushima plant, and this real truth needs to be immediately revealed.

Here it is :

Al Gore used his earthquake machine to destroy the Fukushima plant and paranoid up the whole world about nuclear energy so everyone turns to alternative energy instead.

You know it, I know, but most importantly, Al Gore knows it. And now he knows you know!

Anyway, James Bond villianish conspiracy theories aside, the real truth about the March 11 Japan earthquake is this is turning out to be the worst, the most deadly, most devastating, in modern Japanese history.

Cities, towns, tens of thousands of people swept away. A disaster now of a scale beyond the imaginations even of Japanese disaster management specialists, the most earthquake paranoid people on the planet, who seem mostly stunned, broken, dazed, at press conferences. Who can blame them. The massive earthquake and horrifically devastating repeat tsunamis are beyond the worst scenarios ever workshopped or modeled, a surreal nightmare has become their reality.

The death toll may climb to over 30,000 within days, and top 100,000 within a few weeks.

At this moment, there are at least 1300 Australians visiting or living in Japan who are unaccounted for. This number is likely to fall as communications are restored.

Destruction So Vast, So Comprehensive, Your Brain Can Barely Register What You're Seeing As Reality

Recently On The Orstrahyun....

When Australia Had Elephants & Giraffe Camels, Apparently

Global Warming Is The New Hitler

Julian Assange : Nobody's Buying The Smears

Darryl Mason is the author of the free, online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

2011-03-11T18:22:00.015+11:00

Tsunamis Destroy Cities On Japan's Coast

(screengrab via ABCNews)

UPDATE : The first tsunami wave sweeping across Miyagi, Japan. Cities, towns & farmlands gone, cars full of fleeing people swallowed up, those running in the streets disappear in the debris. Hundreds died under this wave. Simply terrifying :

Earlier....

One of the most devastating earthquakes of recent times has hit Japan, a massive 8.9 magnitude. Tsunami waves are killing thousands, destroying entire cities along the coast.

Tsunami waves are now radiating out, and will travel halfway across the planet. No official warnings have.been issued, yet, for Australian coastlines :

To the right of the Miyagi coast in Japan is the massive undersea fault that tore apart earlier today.

2011-03-11T03:14:00.000+11:00

A recent new arrival at Taronga Zoo :

2011-03-09T14:09:00.004+11:00

The Songlist Of Mass Distraction

Prime Minister Julia Gillard gave US President Barack Obama an iPod full of Australian music. The full list is here, but before you go for a scan, know this : The Angels didn't make the cut, neither did Rose Tattoo, or the Radiators, no Nick Barker, no Saints, no Radio Birdman, no Choirboys, no Beasts Of Bourbon, no Screaming Jets, no Cosmic Psychos, no Baby Animals, no Scientists, no Tumbleweed. Outrageous!

But what will Michelle Obama think when she scans through the song titles on her husband's new iPod?

'To Sir With Love'

'Your Love Is Like A Song'

'I've Got You On My Mind'

'Reconsider Me'

'Fall At Your Feet'

'Confide In Me'

'Throw Your Arms Around Me'

'Need U Tonight'

'Into My Arms'

'When You Come'

'Wash Me Clean'

'Never Tear Us Apart'

Or maybe the iPod list is a new way for world leaders to send coded messages to each other?

I've pieced together the following message from Gillard to Obama, using only song titles on Obama's new iPod :

We're Not Finished, Just Yet, but Little By Little, Now We're Getting Somewhere, we're Heading In The Right Direction.

These Days we wonder Which Way To Go, Tomorrow? To The Moon And Back? Will it be All Torn Down In The Midnight Hour?

On Days Like These When The River Runs Dry, we need a Big Jet Plane and A Bullet And A Target. A New Sensation. The Holy Grail.

It's a One Way Road, it's The Hard Road, to Better People in the Streets Of Your Town and The World Where You Live.

Remember, From Little Things Big Things Grow.

As Australia and the United States move into an even closer military relationship now China rises as the true world power of the 21st century, what exactly is Julia Gillard trying to say to Barack Obama?

What does it all mean?

It means I just wasted another 20 minutes.

2011-03-09T01:15:00.005+11:00

Professional idiot Andrew Bolt sees this photo of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and US President Barack Obama having fun in the West Wing...

and smells some kind of conspiracy! Or at the minimum, something suspiciously amiss :

Bolt : What an incredible coincidence, that a photographer was there to witness Julia Gillard kick a footy in the White House with Barack Obama.

Yes, what an incredible coincidence that the official White House photographer Pete Souza happened to be doing his job at the same time the leader of one of the United States' closest allies paid a visit to the White House.

Here's another Souza photo from the official White House photos & video site. It was so hard to find it was the first photo I saw when I visited the page :

Fact-checking, like spell-checking, has never been a priority for Bolt in his rush to get out his latest conspiracy soaked rantings, or yet another frothing demand for whoever happens to be prime minister to quit.

Interesting, though, that in all his daily blatherings about a carbon tax, Bolt doesn't mention that he works in a 'carbon neutral' News Limited workplace, and never discusses how much money his boss Rupert Murdoch is likely to save when carbon tax & trading for Australian businesses become a reality.

As ex-Australian citizen Murdoch's newspaper circulations plummet across the country and his dreams to get people to pay money to read his digital news sites fall apart, the tax benefits of running a carbon neutral corporation in a carbon currency economy will help pay all kinds of bills and keep wealthy non-stop whiners and intolerance spreaders like Bolt in paid employment.

But despite the hypocrisy, and deception, Bolt will keep railing against a carbon tax, knowing all the while that even if the Liberals were in federal power they, too, would be bringing one in, because that's what his readers want, and he has to keep those readers well pleased, and coming back, because Rupert still wants News Limited bloggers like him to convince their readers to hand over cash for iPad & iPhone apps instead of reading for free.

Good luck with that.

2011-03-07T03:47:00.008+11:00

A newly scanned French map of the world from 1546 by Pierre Desceliers includes, curiously, part of Australia :

Desceliers got the outline of the Northern Territory of Australia down in surprising accuracy for the 16th century, particularly when you consider the first official recorded "glimpse" of the west coast of Australia by a European explorer didn't happen until 1606.

Detail :

Desceliers also included Australia on a far more detailed map four years later, in 1550, where he, well let's face it, he went a bit nuts. Or at least, his flight into cartographical fiction was encouraged. Hell, who knows, maybe he was just having fun :

Some of the detail of this map is too good not be given prominence. A selection of screengrabs from the above map follows.

The now rarely seen Australian giraffe camel :

A human sacrifice? Note the figure hanging/suspended from the tree :

Yes, Desceliers even included elephants as Australian land beasts :

Beautiful art, at the very least.

2011-03-05T00:55:00.003+11:00

Robert Manne has a lengthy essay in the March edition of The Monthly on how Wikileaks evolved from the Julian Assange's association with the first famous public act of hacktivisim in 1989 and the 1990s cypherpunks, a hackers information-sharing revolution that fought US government oppression of cryptography technology. The essay also goes into detail on the political philosophies of Julian Assange, which can be best summed up, in Manne's words, as "anti-establishment but genuinely beyond Left and Right."

Assange is often accused of being secretive himself, or vague at best, about what he is trying to achieve by leaking the secrets of both illegitimate and legitimate governments. But Assange has already revealed all on why's he doing this.

The Manne essay includes many excellent quotes from Julian Assange's past essays, interviews and emails, that tell you more about what Assange is trying to achieve with Wikileaks, the revolution he has mounted, his war against the war industry, his repeated calls for an uprising against government secrecy deceit, than ten thousand articles written about him by journalists who are more interested in the sex scandal angle and who've never bothered to go back to see what Assange himself has had to say; the ultimate, world-changing, mission he has so clearly spelled out over the past four years.

Julian Assange :

"The more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in the leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimisation of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive 'secrecy tax') and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold on to power as the environment demands adaptation.
"Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."

"Mankind has successfully adapted changes as monumental as electricity and the engine. It can also adapt to a world where state-sponsored violence against the communications of consenting adults is not only unlawful but physically impossible. As knowledge flows across nations it is time to sum the great freedoms of every nation and not subtract them. It is time for the world as an international collective of communicating peoples to arise and say 'here I am'."

It's not really that complicated. And it's already proving to be an enormously effective way of fermenting & inspiring great change in the world.

But Assange's mission, as outlined in his statements above, has clearly only just begun.

Look at what has already resulted from the release of just over 2% of the CableGate documents. Three months ago, most of the Middle East was regarded by "experts" as moderately stable. There has been a revolution almost every fortnight since, and dictators and self-appointed royal leaders have already fallen from power, or about to lose power, due to mostly non-violent acts of public dissent and street-clogging demands for democracy, freedom and reform.

If Assange makes the US embassies cables available at the current rate of release, it will take until 2017 before all they're all out there.

2011-03-04T00:39:00.006+11:00

Aftershocks are still jarring what's left of Christchurch and after reading the papers & watching the evening news, many who stayed on were jarred further by a widely publicised prediction that another huge earthquake will hit the fractured city on March 20 :

Mr Ring, who lives in Auckland, uses the moon, sun and tidal activity for the basis of his theories, which have been dismissed by scientists.
His warning is clear.
"If I lived in Christchurch, I'd get out for a few days over that time, go camping, visit friends, just get out and keep safe," he said.

"And if you don't live there, stay away."

Mr Ring claims he got it right last time :

On Valentine's Day, he issued a tweet stating that conditions were "potent" for a quake in Christchurch between February 15 and 25.

A 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck on February 22, killing as many as 240 people.

Eerily, he warned people to watch for "special signs", such as silent birds or scared pets, and said "stay away from old cracked buildings".

The day when scientists can accurately predict the eruption of an earthquake below a city will be one of the pinnacles of our understanding of this planet's thin, unstable skin that we base our entire existence upon.

But you do have to wonder, if it was known, say, 10 hours before it hit that a magnitude 7 quake was going to rip apart Los Angeles or Sydney, would a city wide evacuation even be attempted? Could authorities cope with the evacuation of millions of people in half a day?

Will we see a day when city evacuations are rehearsed in anticipation of earthquakes scientifically, accurately, predicted to hit within the next year or two?

For tens of thousands still trying to live in Christchurch, life after February 22 quake has gone back to the 18th century. There is no electricity, water is fetched and carted home, toilets are backyard holes or a long walk to a communal commode.

From the New Zealand Herald :

Blogger Peter Hyde, who lives in the south-east of Christchurch, said he was living in "refugee city".

It was populated by 50,000 to 100,000 people who have been living on broken streets with little access to power, water, gas and other services, he said.

"Their houses may or may not be intact. Their streets may be clear, broken, or full of silt. Or sewage. There are no showers. Or ways to wash clothes. Or to wash dishes. Or to heat the "must boil" water that is available - assuming they can make it to the nearest water truck, day after day. No refrigeration. No working toilets, and precious few portaloos. No face masks to defend against the blown silt.

"They have no internet either, and usually no phones. And their radio batteries are dead or dying."

2011-02-28T23:27:00.006+11:00

This incredible, very real photo taken in 2005 in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia is doing the rounds on Reddit again :

That's an olive python trying to swallow a wallaroo. According to a person who claimed to have snapped this photo, the python spent about an hour trying to drag the marsupial from the water and then gave up.

A closer look :

If you're not familiar with the beautiful Australian olive python, here's a video, but don't hold anything of value in your hands as you watch this :

2011-02-28T23:01:00.004+11:00

Not exactly the kind of story you want to make such a massive headline error on.

News.com.au :

"Glitch" or successful hacking expedition? I can't imagine any financial institution would publicly admit they've been hacked, unless forced to do so. They certainly didn't admit to such things in the 1990s.

2011-02-27T03:18:00.003+11:00

In 2006, the Howard government turned on a show for Al-Saadi Gaddafi, son of the murderous dictator :

A ''colonel'' with the Libyan special forces, Al-Saadi was invited to visit the Swanbourne SAS barracks at the invitation of the former defence minister Robert Hill.
He also met the then foreign minister Alexander Downer for trade talks, and Australian investors from the oil, gas, tourism, agriculture, racing and cattle industries.

A chat with Alex and a tour of a military base. Nice.

2011-02-25T02:08:00.005+11:00

Hackers' Challenge

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary, Dennis Richardson, has laid out an open challenge to hackers who want to try their skills at cracking firewalls the Australian government and intelligence agencies believe represent world class digital security.

ABC News :

The Department of Foreign Affairs has reviewed its computer security systems following the WikiLeaks saga to ensure classified documents are kept safe.

DFAT secretary Dennis Richardson has told a Senate estimates hearing that he is satisfied such a breach would not happen to the Australian Government.
"The breach in the US system - it beggars belief how they even had the arrangement they had," he said.

"In terms of the way our classified systems are set up, it would be very difficult to copy what happened in the WikiLeaks case."

Difficult, but not impossible.

The only truly safe digital file is one stored on a laptop or device that has no internet access and no CD or USB drives. Even then...