New lanes under construction at Sydney's Iron Cove Bridge :

ANZAC Day in a Sydney nursing home :

The Australian Piles On The Lawyers To Hide Its Secrets

Amazing :

...the federal government anti-corruption agency, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity....cut a deal with The Australian in which ACLEI agreed not to publish any of the information obtained about the newspaper during the investigation. ACLEI has also agreed to allow The Australian to review any future report it writes that refers to the paper or its employees.

A federal government anti-corruption agency has to allow a newspaper to review reports which discuss, or refer, to possible corruption at that newspaper. All of this results from a story The Australian ran on its front page about a anti-terrorism squad raid, a story they ran before the raid actually took place.

Your Right To Know?

Not in this case.

No wonder News Limited despises Crikey so much, they're just about the only news media company in Australia willing to report on how News Limited fights so hard to keep its secrets. And successfully so.

Actor Simon Pegg sums up the mocking outrage today in Britain towards ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch, as the owner of 40% of Britain's newspapers is repeatedly exposed for desperately trying to control, yet again, who will be elected prime minister :




An ad from the UK Independent, getting widespread exposure through non-Murdoch media, blogs and Twitter :



Murdoch's The Sun Accused Of Hiding Poll Results That Show Third Party Candidate Nick Clegg Could Become Prime Minister

James Murdoch Storms Into Office Of Rival Newspaper Editor Shouting, "You're A Fucking Fuckwit!"

Desperate Days As Murdoch's Anti-Democratic Behaviour Lights Up Internet

SpinMasters On Murdoch's Sky News "Like Watching The Live Abortion Of Democracy"

This beautiful image of Tasmania's Franklin River, by Peter Dumbrovskis, has been chosen as one of the best nature photographs ever taken :



A couple of Australian images made the list.

Slaughterhouse photo by Tommaso Ausili

More Winners Of The Sony World Photography Awards 2010

Reader Steve S. came across this piece of oh so honest news categorisation by Google this morning :


(click to enlarge)

"Good Headline, Boss!"

News Limited boss John Hartigan on what is being termed The Biggest Fraud In Australia's Professional Sporting History, involving the Melbourne Storm, the rugby league team News Limited owns :

"This club has had a couple of rats in its ranks...."

It was a line Hartigan ran out for an interviews on A Current Affair, ABC News and every other encounter he had with news media yesterday.

News Limited's The Herald Sun complies on its online front page :





John Hartigan must be feeling particularly rattled by this scandal, not only for the millions News Limited will lose now its team is facing a massive plunge in merch revenue and sponsorship dollars for the rest of the season, but also because News Limited's "exclusive" coverage of all things Melbourne Storm was said to be one of the key selling points of the 'premium' paywall packages the corporation is now putting together for a launch only a few weeks away.

News Limited no longer has the Melbourne Storm as a viable attraction to entice rugby league junkies to pay to read The Herald Sun or The Daily Telegraph online.

That's gonna hurt.

The First Rule Of Elderly Ex-Prime Minister Fight Club Is....

This video story from Lateline explains what's going on behind this excellent photo from an AAP photographer, which appears to show former Australian prime ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard on the verge of exchanging blows....or Hawke beating Howard in a particularly aggressive game of Rock, Paper, Scissors :

This isn't going to help the Rudd government unload its massive stockpile of quickly expiring influenza vaccinations into the arms of Australians :

....45 children have been taken to hospital suffering high temperatures and febrile convulsions after receiving the vaccination.

That's 45 children under the age of five, in West Australia alone.

The flu vaccination program in WA has been suspended.

More images from Australia's media history in this ABC News photo archive :

Fielding : 1 In 2 Australians Afraid To Go Out At Night, Terrified Of Drunk Women Vomiting On Themselves

I had no idea the Blink Drinking culture in Australia was so completely out of hand. Senator Steve Fielding brings us up to date :

Australia has become a nation held to ransom by binge drinking with one in two Australians too frightened to go out on the streets at night.

Haven’t we all had enough of drunken yobbos taunting people walking by, of young women lying sprawled on the street with vomit down their party dresses and groups of grog-fuelled men wandering our streets looking for a fight? many Australians enjoy a drink responsibly for too many having a drink means getting blink drunk.

Our drinking to get drunk culture is destorying this country."

The destoryuction must be stopped.

(via @ScottBridges)

Sky News accuses ABC News of corporate espionage :

In a statement to The Australian, Sky News chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos labelled the actions of the ABC both "unethical" and "unprofessional".

"The Sky News content used by the ABC was not intended by either Sky or the Prime Minister to be broadcast," Mr Frangopoulos said. "It indicates that the ABC has tapped into the Sky News bureau feed and has used the footage without our permission.

The fallout should be interesting.

Before children stared at TVs, they stared at radios, in almost the exact same utterly transfixed way :



More Excellent Images From ABC's News Photo Archive On FlickR


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"I Don't Care"

Documentary maker Errol Morris (The Fog Of War) calls this "the best commercial ever made". It's definitely the best no-budget commerical ever made.



The challenge has been laid down. Australian zero-budget local commerical makers, beat that.

Extras : How the commercial was made -Two Guys, One Camera

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It's Not Movie Piracy When Hollywood Does It

So if you've got a couple of minutes, watch these two movie trailers and spot the similarities. It's not too hard. First, an Australian movie called Freedom Deep :



And next, one of Warner Bros. mega-budget box office monoliths (or so they hoped), The Book Of Eli :



Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?

So how does an Australian movie get away with blatantly ripping off a big budget American flick?

Well they don't. Because they didn't.

Freedom Deep was made in 1995. The Book Of Eli was made in 2009-2010.

Think about that the next time you hear Warner Bros. executives whinning about movie piracy and how it's "destroying the movie business".

More from Encore Magazine :

(Australian writer/director Aaron) Stevenson claims The Book of Eli is “virtually identical” to his film Freedom Deep.

“It’s not just the premise of the prophet getting the book back to the remnants of civilisation; that plot point is the same, but there are lots of visual references as well,” said Stevenson. “The last 10 minutes make it a little different, but up to that point, it’s pretty much the same.”

“We’re independent and we don’t have the money to go to the US and start a legal case. It’s a David and Goliath story and we need the publicity first. We’re looking at the possibility at the moment,” said Stevenson.

It will be a long and ugly and expensive fight, unfortunately. Hollywood studios don't give in easily to such lawsuits, even when it's obvious blatant plagiarism has occurred.

The Full Story Is Here

One of the latest contributions to the There's NothingLikeAustralia.net tourism website :




More Here

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Nick Barker, from back in 1994 :



Nick Barker, in 2010 :



I should mention that Nick Barker is rumoured to be reforming his awesome rock band from the late 1980s/early 1990s - Nick Barker & The Reptiles. I'll write some more about them when I confirm the rumour as true.


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Political Career Tweets Itself To Death

By Darryl Mason

The future of the Young Liberal National Party doesn't look so bright when they've got vile racists like Nick Sowden representing them.

Some of Sowden's recent contributions to Twitter, after watching the Kerry O'Brien interview with US President Barack Obama on the 7.30 Report :

@nicksowden I'm not sure why they paid Kerry to fly to the US, if they wanted an interview with a monkey surely a Ferry to Taronga would have sufficed.

But one revolting outburst wasn't enough. He had to post another :

@nicksowden If i wanted to see a monkey on TV id watch Wildlife Rescue.

He then revelled in the outraged comments reacting to his racism :

"nothing like a little bit of hating to make you feel that little bit better!"

Then Nick Sowden deleted his Twitter account.

He's obviously a deep thinker :

When I equated (Tony) Abbott's comments to a general feeling of the community I meant to show that if Abbott's comments were homophobic, then Australia is also a homophobic country. This is about as true as saying that Australia is a racist country. Whilst those on the left will push this portrayal of Australian society, the rest of us know differently.

Oh yeah, we know.

Sowden's friend @PeterBlackQUT, an academic, claims he only did it "to shock and offend" :

as i know @nicksowden i know he was joking and i'm not going to condemn him for it

More Sowden presumed attempts at "joking" :

(On NSW premier Kristina Keneally) "stupid bitch, youre not in the kitchen anymore!"

(On shadow minister for education, Christopher Pyne) " it's hard to describe Pyne without sounding misogynistic and homophobic. Fuck it, he's such a camp whiny bitch."

"Fuck you UN - i'll give you 'overt racism' you retards. #leftyfucktards"

"its not the obama administration, its the obama disaster and it is an affront to freedom and the history of the WHITE house."

"We need to see another film with a minority in it. there has to be a film with a gay darky in it"

"technically (refugees from the Middle East) aren't people, is there something from the UN on animal rights?"

A political career ends before it begins.

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Sydney from the International Space Station.


(click to enlarge)

Photo by Astro_Soichi

Why Are Australian Soldiers Training To Sniper Fleeing Unarmed 'People'?

In a fake West Australian town, robots riding Segways are being used as targets for 'urban warfare' live fire sniper training :



For now, the Segway riding robots are not shooting back. Or planting IEDs. Or running at sniper positions wearing bomb vests.

They're just playing the role of civilians, rolling around their town, getting picked off at a safe distance with high-powered sniper rifles.

I wonder if they've tried this out with the automated sniper/sentry bots already in use in Iraq and Afghanistan? A bit of robot killing robot action?

And those who think today's youth are the cause of all crime and misery and street violence will be pleased to note that some of the robots are wearing hoodies!


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The Greens Are Now Bigger Than The Nationals, Even In The Bush

It won't be the Labor Party or the Liberal Party who see startling swings towards them at Federal Election 2010. It will be The Greens, as Lenore Taylor explains in National Times :

In 2010 the Greens want to be seen as a mainstream party, not a protest movement in political disguise. They base the claim on their polling and on how they have used the power they have already got.

In the latest quarterly breakdown of Newspoll the Greens are polling 11 per cent, 3 percentage points ahead of their 2007 vote. Even taking into account the tendency for opinion polls to slightly overestimate the Greens' vote, it's a strong position. The Greens now outpoll the National Party in both the cities and in the bush.

And ever since 2007, when they found themselves the largest party on the Senate crossbenches with five senators, after the demise of the Democrats, they deliberately set about proving they could be "responsible" holders of the balance of power.

They negotiated the passage of many critical bills including the government's second stimulus package, which Malcolm Turnbull's Coalition opposed. The Greens also negotiated through bills like the youth allowance and the Medicare levy surcharge. The claim to be mainstream could have a significant impact on this year's poll.

In the Senate the Greens will be pitching to the centre - with a message that a vote for them is a vote for stability because they can negotiate a way through legislative deadlocks.

"We're the ones that made the stimulus package better and then voted it through. Without us there wouldn't have been a stimulus package and we are not going to let that be forgotten," (said leader Bob Brown)

The Greens vote in the recent Tasmanian elections was a whopping 21%. Their best result yet. And this makes the gatekeepers of the traditional Two Party State System very, very nervous indeed.

It's going to be a strange election. You'll see Labor hammering The Greens wherever they can, while the Liberals will stay quietish. An unofficial Greens-Liberals coalition may become reality sooner than most political pundits think.

The Full Story Is Here

Pity The Wife

I don't want to have to keep pointing this out to international readers of The Orstrahyun, but we are not weird and scary people.....mostly :



(Via @prawn_gravies)

"Print Is Dead"

Rupert Murdoch should have listened to Egon, who made this prediction about the future of printed works back in 1984 :

Immeasurable Hurt DeHurted

According to Daily Telegraph associate editor, Tim Blair, the "Graceless & Weird" defamation suit he lodged against Crikey publisher Eric Beecher is now "Case Closed."

Here's the April 2, 2009, apology on the Pure Poison blog at Crikey that was deemed not satisfactory enough :

In a post last night titled “Sockpuppet Worn” it was suggested that enthusiastic Pure Poison critic “WB"....had been making comments from Tim Blair’s private IP adress. The post, now removed from the Crikey site, included speculation on the identity of WB, concluding that it was Blair. Tim denies this flatly, and notes that people in the same house would share an IP. Commenters to the original deleted post had also made that point. We don’t know any more than that WB comments from the same private IP. Our criticisms are reserved for whoever “WB” turns out to be. We unreservedly withdraw any allegation that Tim has been using the “WB” identity, that he had personally used this identity to artificially boost his “hits”, and apologise for any offence caused by the above.

That apology, for an incorrect story that was online for all of a couple of hours, did not soothe the immeasurable hurt caused, apparently, so twelve months later Crikey publishes another apology, this time written (or at least guided) by Blair's lawyers.

The April 12, 2010, apology on the Pure Poison blog at Crikey :

On 1 March 2009, an article entitled “Sockpuppet Worn” was published on this blog about Mr Tim Blair that was incorrect. The article wrongly suggested that Mr Blair publishes comments under a pseudonym on his blog and various other blogs to make them appear as if they were independent reader comments.

It also falsely suggested that Mr Blair is dishonest in that, by publishing comments under a pseudonym on his own blog, he artificially boosts his blog readership and visit numbers, and that Mr Blair is unprofessional in his conduct as a journalist.

Crikey and the authors of this blog acknowledge that each of these suggestions are false and that there is no basis for any of them. We withdraw them unreservedly and acknowledge that Mr Blair has acted properly at all times. We apologise to Mr Blair for the hurt and distress caused.

The assumption is that a cash settlement was part of the ap0logy. But it's hard to know for sure, because tabloid journalists, despite often writing articles that blow up to headlines the most insignificant details of peoples' private lives, don't like to talk or give quotes when they become part of a story. They don't even want others to comment or discuss such stories :



Blair's lawyer friend WB - Wogblogger - cracks the champagne :



(click to enlarge)

And gloats about the settlement on any number of blogs :

....he’s sued a superrich publisher. Epic fail on the hypocrisy argument and no points for trying.

And the ‘glass jaw’ argument......is just historical revisionism at its finest. Blair has taken more abuse than most over the years. I think you’ll find Tim Blair’s reputation is as the guy who cracked Crikey’s deep pockets (that’s Private Media = worth >$6m), which in journalistic circles makes him some sort of a God.

Some sort of a God....

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"Cool And Weird At The Same Time"

They have their own personal dressmaker. Of course they do. You can't just get duck clothing of this quality off the rack.



Even the dog looks a little humiliated on their behalf.

Video Is Here (if the ahove Sky News clip doesn't play for you)


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The Australian newspaper has an anti-ABC agenda? You must be some kind of crazed, paranoid Leftist. Obviously, this is the most important lead national news of the day :

If he wasn't religious before, he probably will be now :

A freak wave saved a man's life after he plunged off The Gap at Watsons Bay (Sydney) last night.

The 45-year-old man who fell 200m was washed back on to dry land unharmed shortly after 9pm.

He was found by emergency rescue crews with only minor injuries and suffering from chest pains.

Stories I've Been Reading :

Forget The Bullshit From Murdoch Gatekeepers, US Soldiers Detail How Rules Of Engagement In Iraq Included Purposeful Shooting, Killing, Of Civilians

This Isn't The First Time US Military Has Killed Journalists In Iraq - In 2003, A US Tank Opened Fire On A Baghdad Hotel Filled With Journos

Nigeria, China & India Are Supposed To Havens For Movie Piracy, So Why Are Their Movie Industries More Successful, More Profitable Than Hollywood?

The Incredible, Life-Saving Legacy Of Henrietta Lacks

Matt Taibbi : "Most Of The Work In This World Completely Sucks Balls And The Only Reward Most People Get For Their Work Is Barely Enough Money To Survive"

Carl Sagan On How Cannabis Taught Him How To Appreciate, Enjoy Fine Art, Music, Food & Sex

South East Asia Drought : "We Will Have A War, A Water War. When They Need
Water To Drink They Will Fight For Everything"

Have You Ever Heard A Carrot Scream? The Feelings, Rights And Dignity Of Plants

Apes Have Theory Of Mind, Just Like Humans

The Iraq & Afghanistan Civilian Slaughter Cover-Ups That Exploded In The Petagon's Face

"How Do You Trust An Ally That Steals British And Australian Citizens' Identities For An Assassination?"

Fall Of Newspapers : Ad Revenues Decline 43% In 3 Years For American Print Media

Peter Hartcher On How President Obama Used Reasonableness To Expose Republican Opponents As Extremists

American Conservative Media Seem Very Nervous About Using The Words "Christian Terrorists"

86 Out Of 88 Cities In China's Drought Zone Running Short Of Drinking Water, Affecting At Least 17 Million People

How To Repossess The Executive Jets Of Drug Dealers & Dictators Without Getting Your Head Blown Off

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Sydney's Daily Telegraph runs a story about a bar of soap allegedly made from the fat of Holocaust victims :

Historians have dismissed reports that the Nazis mass-produced soap from the remains of Holocaust victims during World War II....

True enough. But WTF is going on with the DT's 'related coverage'?



It'll get worse, the more the Murdoch media outsource their newsrooms.

"It's Terribly Flabbergasting"

Smiley

Andrew Bolt, a regular guest of ABC's Insiders :

Islam, after all, is a faith that preaches rejection and subjugation of non-believers...

...doesn't sound like he's been to a mosque recently.

....and is thus likely, at least in theory, to inhibit assimilation and a sense of communal responsibility towards other Australians.

You get the feeling sometimes he's incredibly disappointed Muslim youth haven't tried to suicide bomb our trains or buses. If they had, just once, he wouldn't have to spend so much time clinging desperately to so many self-constructed straw men.

Powderfinger, before all the fucking ballads :






Awesome. Haven't seen this before :




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"That Water Was Cold, Ladies. Real Cold"

Tony Abbott, another victim of Unnecessary Censorship :



More victims of UC.



It's not them, it's your dirty mind.

The 'NothingLikeAustralia.net' tourism campaign keeps coming up with reader-submitted Gold :

More Here

"It's The Worst Insult You Can Give A Man!"

They're A Weird Mob

Wombats Listed By Australian Zoos As Only Slightly Less Dangerous Than Lions And Bears

Oh yeah, they're cute, they look cuddly, but given the chance to do so, adult wombats will seriously fuck you up :

A wombat will hoist an intrusive dingo on its back and crush it against the roof of its burrow.

It can skittle a fully grown man as if a 120-litre barrel had bowled him over.

Bruce Kringle fought off a wombat for 20 minutes, suffering numerous bites, before a neighbour killed it with a blow from an axe.

"I Thought I Was A Goner"

Turnbull : Hatred Does More Damage To The Hater Than To The Hated

Former leader of the Australian Liberal Party Malcolm Turnbull announces his resignation as the Federal Member for Wentworth, and posts a poignant farewell to Canberran politics. Excerpts :

The last 5 ½ years have been a wild ride, filled with achievements and disappointments. Losing the leadership was heartbreaking....

I will miss enormously my work as a local MP. Whether it was visiting a school or a play group, a surf club or a church or synagogue, being the local member has always been fun.

My wife, Lucy, and I have always lived in Wentworth and look forward to remaining involved with our community, and to again pursuing new business opportunities, especially with early-stage businesses and new technologies. One of our greatest passions is supporting and promoting Australian technology. For a highly educated developed nation, we derive far too little of our gross domestic product from our own intellectual property.

The dispute about climate change policy and the loss of the leadership was traumatic but I am resolved to leave Parliament without bitterness or resentment. Politics can be a tough and brutal business. We politicians treat each other harshly and the media treats all of us - no doubt deservedly - even more so. It is a rough game and if you lose a battle, as I have done, then you will get hurt. But you don't have to get bitter.So many people in politics find themselves nursing resentments and hatreds for years. Often they may have justification in doing so, but far better to let it go. Hatred does more damage to the hater than to the hated.

Turnbull wanted to, and doggedly tried to, drag the Liberal Party and conservative politics into the 21st century. Obviously they're not ready for all that, just yet. And it will cost the Liberal Party dearly at the 2010 federal election.

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Not a parody.....

Why Rupert Murdoch Loves The iPad

By Darryl Mason

Media readers, like the iPad, will effectively, eventually, shut out the free news competition :

Sweeting says he thinks many of the major media companies would love to see computers discourage people from searching the open Internet for content.

"I think the media companies will leap at this," he says. "It offers them the opportunity to essentially re-create the old business model, wherein they are pushing content to you on their terms rather than you going out and finding content, or a search engine discovering content for you."

Overhead-heavy bloated media corporations, like Murdoch's, who want to "put a tollbooth on the ocean" are betting the house that locked up media readers will save their outdated 20th century business models.

But they seem to be the only ones who believe that there will be enough people willing to pay to make it profitable enough to continue paying corporate media executives like Rupert Murdoch tens of millions of dollars a year.

Media Watch chewed through these issues last night.

Murdoch newspapers like The Australian are already planning to do away with their print versions, at least on a daily basis. It's the only way they can survive. The sums have been done and print must go. Here's The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell :

"When you remove the fixed costs in newspapers, they become much more viable. So if you think of a newspaper without paper and ink and petrol and trucks, you're taking out between 60 and 70 per cent of the cost base....

"But I guess my view is that the core of the business is your ability to dream up ideas to create news - the things that we chase each day. "

"Dream up ideas to create news." What a curious thing to say, or to reveal about how the newsrooms of a corporate news empire actually work.

And you thought their job was to simply report the news.

September 17, 2009 : Rupert Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great!"

October 2009 : The Australian Tries To Rally Support For Murdoch's War On Free News Media

Man Vs Wombat

Nature's brutal War On Humans continues :

A man is recovering in hospital after he was mauled by a wombat at Flowerdale, north-east of Melbourne.

Paramedics say the 60-year-old was attacked by the animal as he stepped out of a caravan early this morning. He was bitten on the arms and legs...

The ABC, of course, joins in with a no doubt pro-nature Lefty infiltrated government department to play down the savagery of this animal insurgency :

Jeff McClure from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) says it is highly unusual for a wombat to attack a person.

Yeah, sure. What is unusual is that yet another unprovoked attack by native fauna has broken through the standard media smokescreen.

"Wombats that are in an advance stage of mange will become very agitated from the suffering and the irritation of the mange," (Mr McClure) said.

He said if they are approached or feel threatened wombats will rush towards someone.

"But it's not known that they will push the attack to where they would physically attack someone."

Stop the lies, Jeff. Tell the truth. The wombats, like the kangaroos, koalas and ring-tailed possums are out to get us. They want to kill us and eat us and suck the marrow from our bones.

There is only one solution. Concrete all the national parks. Do it now. Mother Nature must be taught a devastating lesson.

You're either with us, the humans, or you're with the fluffy and cute, but also heavily fanged razor clawed fauna.

Why do Australian male conservative commentators hate on female politicians when they glam up, but fawn over the perpetually nearly-nude Tony Abbott?

For non-Australian readers, this is Kate Ellis, Federal Minister for Youth & Sport.

The Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt on Ellis : "thick head."

The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair on Ellis : "She looks like an East German gymnast"

Maybe they prefer their politicians in high heels to look like this instead?

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Get Out Of The Way Boomers, It's Time For Generation X Nostalgia

Pollytics on Twitter :

If you can't listen to Radiators "No Tragedy" and not go wow, then you just ain't living

Agreed!

Pollytics also made note of this excellent YouTube comment attached to the above vid :

Early 80s = Paddle Pops, Dennis Lillee retiring, first tongue pash, nobody singing Oz Crawl lyrics confidently, Orchy bottle bongs....then the Rads. Fucking timeless

Here's The Radiators first single, released in 1979 :

More than 3400 live gigs later (no, that's not a typo), The Radiators are still touring.

April 17 - Blacktown RSL Club

April 23 - Wyong Leagues Club

April 24 - Panthers World of Entertainment

May 7 - Moorebank Sports ClubMoorebank

May 14 - Edgeworth Bowling Club

May 21 - Wests Illawarra, Shellharbour

Opposition leader Tony Abbott is not afraid to tackle the big issues of the day....well, most of the time :

QUESTION : ....The Catholic Church has had a few problems over the past few days with lights being shone on the Pope and now there’s been a link drawn between anti-Semitism and collective blame. Have you anything to say?

TONY ABBOTT: No, look, that’s right outside my field. Thank you so much.

The teaser trailer for the new Australian movie Red Hill, shot in the Victorian high country :

So what's it about? From the SMH :

....the film tells of an escaped convict (Tom E. Lewis from The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) who wreaks havoc on the isolated town of Red Hill as he seeks payback on the town's sheriff (Steve Bisley). Caught in the middle is a new cop (Ryan Kwanten of True Blood). Red Hill is bloody fun.

No Australian release date yet.

There's Nothing Like...Fake Fakes?

By Darryl Mason

Within just two hours of Tourism Australia's new international "There's Nothing Like Australia" advertising campaign being launched, a parody site with an almost identical web address, was posting mock ads, and scoring the sort of widespread media attention that the original campaign launch sought, but did not get.

Some of the first images on the parody site.

The parody site is now taking suggestions for future slogan and image combinations.

As is the legitimate site.

The cynic in me wonders if, in fact, the real and parody sites are not more connected than it would appear.

After all, what's a major Australian tourism campaign without parodies and mockery? Why let someone else get in first and do something much worse with the slogan than any of the above?

Word got out that Tourism Australia was going to take legal action against the parody site, which bumped up the media coverage of the real and fake campaign sites, before Tourism Australia announced that no legal action was on the cards.

An example of a fake fake ad campaign?

Australian Beaches "Like A Petting Zoo For Great White Sharks"

It blows my mind that anybody is seriously discussing whether or not Robin Williams is being racist in his jabs at Australians :

Robin Williams loves Australia, he's been working and holidaying here for decades, and owned a house up near Palm Beach for years. If you find anything at all offensive, as an Australian, in what Williams had to say, you should have heard him ripping Australia and Australians during his unannounced appearances at Sydney's Harold Park Hotel and The Comedy Store back in the mid-1980s. Now that was some hardcore slagging of Aussies. Brutal, and absolutely hilarious.

Prime minister Kevin Rudd would have been better off correcting Williams and pointing out that Charles Darwin did in fact visit Australia, and his observations of Australian fauna, and flora, played an important role in Darwin's humanity rocking theory of evolution :

While Darwin never saw a kangaroo in Australia, despite riding a horse from Sydney to Bathurst, he did see many other species. Darwin made some very astute observations about Australian animals, especially the platypus. At the time, the platypus was regarded as a curious creature, and it baffled the scientific world. Darwin was the first British scientist to see a platypus in its natural environment, at a creek near Bathurst, in 1836.

For over forty years after his visit, Darwin used and relied upon collections of specimens from Australia that related directly to his 'theoretical concerns at any given time and his recognition of the peculiar status of the continent'.

A Comprehensive Look At Charles Darwin In Australia

UPDATE : An unnecessary apology from Robin Williams, with an offer of friendship :

"Mr Rudd, I apologise. I would like to modify my terminology and use the term `English good old boys' instead.

"I'd love to go to a strip club with you in New York...."

Brilliant!