Rogue Wallabies : Luxuriantly Lawned Nursing Home Just Asking For Us To Invade And Cause Ruckus


Photo by Scott Radford-Chisolm

They are called "rogue" wallabies, and they've been "terrorising" elderly residents of a Queensland nursing home.

From here :

Wild wallabies are terrorising a Townsville retirement village, knocking over residents and defecating on lawns and patios.

Residents at Carlyle Gardens are said to be too afraid to leave their homes when the 100-strong mob runs amok in the early mornings and late afternoons.

The wallabies are crashing into cars, scooters and even elderly residents.

"Where else would they get lawns that are green and watered and people planting new plants all the time?" he said.

"The nutrition is great, there are no predators and there are no fences so they can move freely. I have been there and seen a big buck male sitting in the patios lying in the shade."

Large male wallabies, over a metre tall and weighing up to 30kg, are fighting, falling against the side of homes and damaging walls.

"Some of the residents were very worried because now they find themselves confined to their homes because they are afraid of being knocked over..."

An operation is now under way to relocate the animals.

Crazy. Why not arm the more able elderly residents, let them go to war on the wallabies and video the bloodbath? It won't do anything much for the elderly or the wallabies, but it will make for some very entertaining TV.

What absolutely incredibly evolved creatures they are :

"A kangaroo can have a joey at foot, a joey in the pouch and one inside fertilised and ready to be born if something happens to the one in the pouch."

Get Another Job You Middle Class Welfare Bludgers

By Darryl Mason

The Professional Idiot gets the nod from his ex-Australian boss and declares war on the Australian middle class, with all the venom and bile he usually reserves for single mothers, Aboriginal activists and immigrants :

"The explosion in welfare money hasn’t gone to bludgers so much as to middle-class and lower-class families that do work, but feel entitled (justified or not) to handouts of other people’s money for anything from first homes to child care. It’s bludging..."

How refreshing to hear someone who is fortunate enough to be able to work from home and still earn more than $250,000 a year lecture the middle class because they can't afford to put their children into childcare while they hold down full-time and second jobs and because they were gullible enough to believe John Howard's lies about them all being "relaxed and comfortable".

Even better to hear the same hectoring from one of the richest men in the world, about how shameful it is that the Australian middle classes (or the New Poor) want and/or expect minimal financial help to prop up their McMansion, two kids in childcare, two cars, two jobs reality, even though that fantasy was routinely primed and pumped through all of Murdoch's Australian newspapers for a decade :

...while real incomes increased since the end of the 1980s, about 20 per cent of the working aged population today receives income support, compared with only 15 per cent two decades ago. While a safety net is warranted for those in genuine need, we must avoid institutionalising idleness. The bludger should not be our national icon.

Yes, better our national icon be the working poor instead. Or perhaps a 50 year old man who worked and stressed himself to an early grave and missed out on seeing his children growing up.

But of course, when it comes to handouts, Murdoch was all for stiffing the American taxpayers with the $700 billion BailUp, which ensured some of those who traverse the same canape circuits as he does, back in Manhattan, are not forced to give up too much of their wealth because they monumentally fucked up the American economy and the retirement plans of millions of aging workers.

The lyrics of an old Insurge song, circa mid-1990ss, come to mind :

You tell me everyone without a job should go away and die,
And what the government spends on welfare really makes you cry,
Well, you're a strange little thing,
You don't mind if a rich man does his thing,
When he gets his subsidies and tax breaks,
And his research and development grants
This is welfare for the rich,
but because it's welfare for your mates,
Here I am living in a welfare state

Here's a comment I made yesterday on The Professional Idiot's near total supplication to his boss, and why he should feel the hot sting of shame for being such a monumental wuss :

Andrew Bolt’s response to Murdoch’s speech was as expected : lame and just plain sad.

Here’s the biggest and most influential promoter of Global Warming in the world, who uses his media to endorse the reality the global warming and its “catastrophic” effects on the climate (seen Fox News lately?), and Bolt has nothing to say. Nothing.

Tim Flannery? Hell, he’ll do two hundred posts on Flannery for being an “alarmist” and a “true believer” and supposedly trying to destroy the world economy, but Murdoch gets a total pass. Is Murdoch a “true believer” in the “new pagan faith?” According to Bolt’s definitions, he sure is.

Does Bolt remind Murdoch that global warming has supposedly stopped? Or that climate change belief makes you a Green Nazi? Does Bolt tell Rupert that his mind has been poisoned by Al Gore’s new religion, statistical fakery and enviro-fascism? Of course not.

The fact that Murdoch is Bolt’s boss is not enough of an excuse for Bolt not taking Murdoch’s claims and advocacy of, for starters, climate change and Aboriginal reconciliation down to the mat.

Murdoch is reiterating primarily the Labor Party platform that won them the election, and Bolt has nothing to say. AT ALL. Even more bizarrely, Bolt’s followers mostly agree with Rupert, and support Bolt’s echoing of Rupert’s Ron Paul Meets Al Gore beliefs and opinions. In fact, they praise him for his vision and clarity.

It’s hallucinatory reading those comments. How many of these commenters are paid for their work? How many are News Ltd staffers? What other explanation can there be for almost unanimous support amongst Boltists when Rupert wings in from hanging out with Evil Pagan Lefties and ‘The Hollywood Elite’ in Manhattan and LA to remind Australia that climate change is a reality, that Aboriginal reconciliation is a priority, that welfare for poor people is a necessity and that John Howard was wrong on just about everything?

Bolt doesn’t believe what he writes, not really. That couldn’t be any more obvious now. How he handles Rupert Murdoch is always a good test. No doubt, Bolt is a passionate believer in some of his regular subjects of mockery and derision, but only just a few. Most of it is there for pure entertainment, to tap and trap a target audience of dwindling Howard-era conservatives.

What sort of man lets his boss trample all over his supposedly passionate, righteous beliefs and then hails him for doing it?

It’s clear too, now, that Bolt is also there to feed really bad ideas and self-circling missions to the Liberal Party, who plunge deeper into The Shit the more they do what he tells them to do. How can Coonan, Turnbull and Abbott not see that doing Bolt’s bidding harms them, not helps them?

A perfect example of this is Bolt’s demands that the Liberal Party go nuts over Rudd’s public mocking of President Bush over the G20 phone call. The story didn’t catch fire with the media because there is essentially nothing there. Bolt knows this, but he drives the Libs on and on to chase their own tails over it, when next to no-one outside of politics or the Boltarium could give a shit. Bolt also knows that the editor of The Australian newspaper was present when the Rudd-Bush call occurred, and that’s why the story got into The Australian newspaper in the first place. Does he tell his readers this? Of course not.

Murdoch’s got five lectures to go, where he will continue to essentially shore up much of what Rudd is planning for Australia, and our eventual integration into a larger Asia community, with China as our new, more powerful, more wealthy bestest friend.

Bolt will have five more opportunities to shred what he has told his readers, daily, he believes are dangerous and culturally disruptive ideas and policies. That they come from Murdoch should make absolutely no difference to Bolt’s usually venomous dismantling of such Evil Pagan Lefty ideals and beliefs. Considering the prominence, influence and power of the man delivering these messages of mostly liberal idealism, Bolt should be expected to spend a great deal of time indeed going at him.

Unless Bolt really is a fake, a mere entertainer, a carnival huckster, which would be disappointing for his fans and critics alike.

Do What I Tell You Or My Newspapers Will Bury You

Ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch is back in town, singing the praises of the country he loved so much, he simply had to give up his citizenship so he could make another few billion dollars in the US.

Murdoch is getting an extraordinary amount of coverage in his own newspapers for what was, essentially, a fairly uninspired speech, his first in a series of six Boyen Lectures for the ABC, where he mostly reiterated the Labor Party campaign platform from 2008.

Here's a story that isn't getting any attention at all from his Australian media news drones :

A newly disclosed Down Street memo has revealed how Tony Blair helped Rupert Murdoch overcome an official investigation which was jeopardising one of his big investments. It shows that Blair, while prime minister, immediately ordered his top officials to help the tycoon who was frustrated that a potentially lucrative scheme was being blocked by a long-running European commission investigation.

Blair told the media magnate that "he was instinctively sympathetic to what Murdoch was aiming to achieve".

Blair has been accused of granting political favours to Murdoch in return for support from his newspapers; Lance Price, a former Downing Street spin doctor, said Murdoch seemed to be one of the four most influential people in the administration.

The memo reveals an episode in 1998 - a year after the Sun's conversion to Labour - in which Murdoch appears to call in one of those favours. Murdoch had privately approached Blair when he feared that the European commission investigation was hindering his business opportunities.

Blair gathered members of his inner circle to see the tycoon - his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell; James Purnell, then a Downing Street special adviser on the media and now a cabinet minister; and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell.

Murdoch complained that the investigation by the European competition commissioner into one of his planned television schemes was costing him money. He told Blair: "The competition commissioner, [Karel] Van Miert, had come up a long list of complaints and the project was being delayed at huge cost. Sky's own investment was very significant (£800m so far) and the success of the venture was crucial to their overall plans for developing digital services."

According to the memo of the meeting in January 1998, Blair backed Murdoch, saying "it was important that the UK remained at the cutting edge of developing this kind of media product".

Murdoch's 'on demand' television retail plans were already out of date by 1998, and it was hardly surprising the whole venture went tits up when people found it far easier, and more convenient, to simply shop online through their computers.

But the above story of Murdoch basically blackmailing Tony Blair with 'unfavourable headlines' must be wrong. Surely. Everyone knows Murdoch, of course, has absolutely no influence on the editorial content or direction of any his newspapers. Right?

So far, Murdoch has had far less of an influence over Rudd than he had over Howard, who seemed genuinely terrified of the old gossip. But Murdoch media executives court Rudd and his crew, heavily, excessively. For now, Murdoch's boys come to Rudd and do the groveling. But how long can that last?

It'd be fascinating to know what Murdoch has had to say to Rudd about the government's plans to introduce an internet censorship regime even more restrictive than those in China or Iran. If it helps to peel away some of the online competition, then count it as a win for Murdoch.

Murdoch Admits, With A Laugh, That He Used His Newspapers And TV Shows To Shape Opinion For The War On Iraq

"We Can Change The Way People Think" - Murdoch Admits He Tells His Newspapers What To Print

The Australian Welfare Bludger As Ex-Prime Minister

By Darryl Mason

Ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch has a message for welfare-soakers, like our ex-prime ministers, including his old mate John Howard :

(We should be) working for a society where citizens are not dependent on the government. That means ending subsidies for people who do well...

While a safety net is warranted for those in genuine need, we must avoid institutionalising idleness. The bludger should not be our national icon.

Too bloody right.

John Howard is now clocking up over $8500 per week in 'expenses', beaten only by fellow ex-Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser. And that's on top of their super-super and pensions which total beyond $400,000 a year.

Some of the items and luxuries you can claim as 'expenses' when you're a living Australian ex-prime minister :

$5000 worth of newspapers and magazines, per year.

$700 to hire indoor plants.

$3000 a week for rental of office space.

$4000 a week for office staff.

$1000 a week for mobile phones.

Naturally, Howard does not want to talk publicly about this awesome display of professional welfare-soaking.

That's the problem with 24 hour news cycles in a country like Australia, sometimes there really just isn't all that much breaking news to report. So you get this, from the Sydney Morning Herald :

If The Crocs Don't Eat You, The Locals Will

Considering the consistent popularity of gruesome horror movies amongst the world's youth, and the lack of tourism campaigns focusing on the more grislier attractions, perhaps the Daily Telegraph is onto something here :



Now there's an advertising campaign to draw in tourists, cannibalistic locals hiding in heritage listed forests and hungry crocs cruising for meaty thighs at resort beaches.

'Australia : Will You Make It Out Alive?'

Fox News : We Don't Want To See Obama Or McCain Gunned Down, Honest

Both The Professional Idiot and his Sydney counterpart, Tim Blair, have spent plenty of time cataloguing Evil Pagan Lefties' apparent obsession with crazed American rednecks wanting to gun down Barack Obama. Hell, there's only been three known conspiracies to Obama in the past few months by, what a surprise, racist rednecks. But 'Kill The WannaBe President' imagery and allutations must be catching, because even Fox News is pumping these visuals now.


More on this here

But Fox News is owned by The Professional Idiot and Tim Blair's boss, ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch, so it must be okay then to go completely fucking insane and pump visuals like the one above to an audience that includes many heavily armed rednecks.

How much do you think Rupert himself would gain, cash in hand, from the assassination of either McCain or Obama? Remember, the increased Fox News viewership (almost triple the normal ratings) from the first year of the Iraq War, plus massive increases in sales of Murdoch newspapers across Australia, the US and England, when the war still looked likely to be won (without needing to bribe the Sunnis who were successfully killing many American soldiers a whole bunch of money to stop the slaughter), earned Rupert a few hundred million extra dollars.

A few weeks of increased viewership and historical newspaper sales following a successful assassination would have to earn him at least $20-30 million.

Thank God this circus of an election campaign, which has soaked up a truly insane amount of Australian news time, will be over in less than 100 hours. Well, probably. Then again, who the fuck knows? This is American democracy we're talking about.

John The Howard Years : We Will Decide.....What I've Already Decided

More biased ABC programming, funded by taxpayers, loaded with the usual suspects mostly all singing the same song, and all of it aimed at making John The Howard look like an even bigger loser than he already is :

After keeping his peace for almost a year, John Howard will use a forthcoming ABC series to present his version of events leading up to last year's election loss - including why he did not stand aside in 2006.

The program also reveals that three of his government's most important policies - the GST, the Pacific solution and self-determination for East Timor - were decided with little or no discussion.

The Herald has learnt that Mr Howard, who was interviewed extensively for the four-part series, has explained candidly that he did not step aside for Peter Costello in 2006 because the vast majority of his party wanted him to stay.

An outrageous waste of taxpayers money. It's an obvious attempt by Evil Pagan Lefty ABC journalists to make Howard look like some kind of dictator for not bothering to consult with Cabinet on some of the most important decisions of his years in power.

Why won't the ABC just tell the truth - that the Howard Years were the best years in the life of any nation, in history, ever, anywhere, forever, amen?

Isn't it bad enough that Howard had to suffer the icy total humiliation of losing his seat to an ABC journalist in last year's election? Lefty, socialist, watermelon, Marxist, pagan, Whitlam worshipping, ABC brown shirterers are now devoting hours of prime time TV to letting Howard humiliate himself further in public. And you pay for it! Privatise The ABC!

It's amazing how easy it is to write like a thoroughly demented Boltoid.

Actually, 'The Howard Years' doco series sounds very illuminating :

On the Pacific solution, the former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, says the policy was formulated when he was asked by Mr Howard to "Go and find someone who will take [the asylum-seekers]". Mr Downer says that one of his staff members suggested Nauru, which was desperate for aid money.

The former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer reveals the same lack of consultation when Mr Howard decided to write to the then Indonesian president, B. J. Habibie, telling him Australia would be backing independence for East Timor. The letter "never went to cabinet," he says.

Similarly a former Howard chief of staff, Grahame Morris, says there was "no great discussion" about the GST because the prime minister was afraid of leaks.

Howard knew he couldn't trust most of those closest to him in political power. At all.

Welcome To Tasmania : The Locals Are Dying To Eat You

There's a movie kicking around that is using the natural beauty of Australia to promote itself, and thereby promoting Australian as a tourist destination, and tourism officials are right behind it.

This movie, however, is not about some English bint with a ridiculous accent and that weird side story about stressed out Manhattan media execs swimming in NT rock pools, this movie is about cannibals, and it's set in Tasmania. This is Dying Breed :



Can you use a true story about a convict era cannibalism spree to promote Tasmania as a tourist destination? Sure. Why not :

Tasmanians hope a new Australian horror film about cannibals will attract more tourists and movie makers to the Apple Isle.

The film, Dying Breed, portrays a remote Tasmanian community as flesh-eating savages.

But Tasmania Tourism Council chief executive Daniel Hanna said the movie, mostly filmed near the Pieman River, western Tasmania, should help lift the state's profile.

"Any film that shows some of the key parts .. like the rugged wilderness, is going to be a good thing and will hopefully spark some interest," Mr Hanna said today.

"Obviously as long as visitors don't expect there really to be cannibals in Tasmania."

Be careful Mr Hanna, the people in the forest don't like outsiders making jokes about them, even if you are a distant relative.

Tasmania's (locally) legendary Alexander 'Pieman' Pearce is an Australian convict era story of remarkable, brutal survival that you don't hear much about. There's a reason for that :

The Pieman River gained its name from the notorious convict Alexander 'The Pieman' Pearce who was responsible for one of the few recorded instances of cannibalism in Australia. In a bizarre footnote to the history of the region Pearce and seven other convicts attempted to cross the island to Hobart where they hoped they could catch a merchant ship and escape to some ill-defined freedom.

They lost their way and in the ensuing weeks all of the escapees disappeared except for Pearce. When he was recaptured unproven accusations of cannibalism were made against him. The following year Pearce escaped again accompanied by another convict, Thomas Cox. Once again Pearce found himself without food and, to solve the problem, he killed and ate Cox. When he was finally recaptured Pearce admitted to eating Cox and confessed to cannibalism during his first escape. He was subsequently executed in Hobart.

He didn't turn them into pies, but he was a pie maker by trade, so quite familiar with the chopping up and making use of all that offal.

********************

The young directors of the new era of Australian Horror movies have a great attitude to the true value of the movies they make, which is probably why they've been so successful. Dying Breed director, Jody Dwyer :

"There is a move to be more commercially aware by a new wave of filmmakers that is actually getting tired with the cliches of drug ridden suburbia or flat red heat haze outback movies, we've seen a lot of them," Dwyer said.

"You are going to still make those the Rowan Woods films, – the Little Fish films because they're beautiful films but they won't do well internationally they will be respected but not do well economically.

"A lot of films are being funded that nobody wants to see and it's a shame because people want to support the industry but if something doesn't excite me I won't spend my 15 bucks."

Exactly.




I'm still waiting for the reverse Wolf Creek type movie, where two good-hearted, but innocent rural Australian teenagers come into the Big City for a concert, ignoring the warnings from friends about "how crazy" those city people are, and then and wind up being seduced by expensively dressed Sydney residents who hold them hostage in an Eastern Suburbs mansion, dope them with drugs and booze and then attack and torture them, promising the whole time that they "can really help them break into international modelling." The kids escape, of course, but when they run to the next house, they only find more country kids like them being drugged and assaulted. And the next house, and the next house.

Do You Remember When You Actually Had To Remember?

By Darryl Mason

For whatever reason, the stories in the list of links (a couple of paragraphs) below captured my attention for a minute or a few hours, and I managed to push away the niggling ache to immediately write something about them at the time, taking comfort in the fact I could always come back to them later. But then of course, the mind and blog moved on to something else and they were left in the 2nd memory, floating around in digital drafts. Forgotten, but easily accessible, a far simpler retrieval than wading through paper files, or stumbling the long halls of physical human memory opening door after door and not finding the details you were absolutely sure you had left there, somewhere.

As the onslaught of news, and the fast rise and quick death of a breaking news story, only continues to ramp up in intensity, with the most minor of scandals elevated to 'My God, This Can't Be Happening!!!' status to feed the constant hunger of online front pages for stories that will win clicks and eyeballs, even two month old news, let alone last year's, quickly gets forgotten.

Even the biggest of stories don't seem to linger long anymore. It's very strange to see how abruptly something that seems mind-boggling, shocking, utterly scandalous, monumentally reality-changing disappears, never to be heard from again. Or not for a while.

The current merging of financial democracy and capitalist communism hogs the headlines because it is still unfolding, and because the story near daily reaches into the pockets of almost everybody to shake out another $20, or $100, as basic food prices rise to 'What The Fuck?' levels and stock markets faceplant in the loose gravel of the free market.

Perhaps it's just me, but this list of old headlines, from blog posts never written, or never completed, from a couple of years ago up to last month, tell a faster, quicker story of a country undergoing sweeping change, and the rising toll of emotionally-impacting events, than....nope, lost that thought. When I can remember online everything I'm thinking, that won't happen. I can just go into the online 2nd memory and think it back again. It was something about how events that seem to suddenly just happen in the media have actually been in the news for a while, while other events, perhaps more minor, but eventually far more important, are quickly forgotten. So here are those headlines :

June 30, 2006 : 'Police State Australia' Becomes Reality - Downloaded Documents Can Score You 15 Years In Jail

November 16, 2006 : John Howard Admits His Beloved "Low Interest Rates" Led To Australians Amassing Record, Crippling Levels Of Debt

October 8, 2007 : It's Only Terrorism When Muslims Want To Blow Stuff Up : Leader Of Christian Group That Advocates Destruction Of Mosques & Casinos Meets Peter Costello To "Prepare" Him To Become Prime Minister

February, 2007 : David Hicks Shown Images Of Saddam's Hussein's Execution For Mental "Stimulation"

October 11, 2007 : First Australian Soldier Dies In Iraq - Brendan Nelson Doesn't Wait For Proof, Says Bomb "May" Have Come From Iran

October 12, 2007 : Howard's Version Of Australian History Deletes Cyclone Tracy, Death Of Ned Kelly, Anti-Aboriginal Laws That Led To Stolen Generations, British Live Testing Of Atomic Bombs On Australians, Decriminalisation Of Homosexuality

October, 2007 : Police Seek Power To Spy Without Warrants For Months, Want To Spray Radioactive Material On People So They Can Be Tracked Remotely

November 13, 2007 : Police Were Told To "Test" New Anti-Terror Laws By Arresting As Many People As Possible And Charging Them With Terrorism

January 7, 2008 : Conservative Hero Admits Publishing LSD Formula & 'Try It Now' Propaganda Written By Suspected CIA Agent In University Newspaper, Now Thinks It's "Funny" LSD Helped Fracture Powerful Anti-War Movement

February, 2008 : UN Troops Left Assassin-Shot East Timor President Lying In Road "For More Than Half An Hour"

February 3, 2008 : The Howard Legacy - 300,000 Australians Expected To Lose Their Homes As Toxic Debts Mount

March, 2008 : APEC 'Police State' Laws Will Become Permanent Powers For Police In Future "Special Events"

March, 2008 : Treasury Secretary Ken Henry Demands "Water Market" Be Established, Warns Of "Water Rage", "Human Casualties"

May 27, 2008 : This Pisshead Nation Costs $15 Billion A Year

September 21, 2008 : The ADHD Generation - Thousands Of Australian Children Daily Fed Mind-Altering Drugs For No Reason


Blogging seems to have become a 2nd memory, and in a growing number of very helpful ways, perhaps even a far superior memory, where information, ideas, chunks of news, can be stored, for later review, or just as drafts of things perhaps worth remembering, but not utterly essential for daily life.

The human memory keeps the essential phone numbers, the details of the daily rituals of working, eating, occasionally sleeping, the names that must be always remembered (partner, parents, close friends) in order to counter social exclusion.

But the 2nd memory, the online memory, can accurately store everything else you think you may need to remember later. Or simply wish to revisit. Ten thousand news articles, reams of notes, video, audio, 100 of libraries worth of information and history, all can be stored for free, in your online 2nd memory. Two years ago, the online 2nd memory was easy enough to access by laptop, with all files totally searchable through a keyboard. Today, access is even easier through a phone, almost anywhere, and keyboards are being replaced by voice recognition or simple scrolling and point-clicks.

Soon enough something as small as an ear-ring, if you have a palpable fear of small circuit boards being embedded into your skull or scalp, will let you access your online 2nd memory, as easily as you now pull up details from your flesh bag brain. When the human mind is permanently connected to the digital reality, you will find what you need by thought. You will be able to brain google the net, obviously, but searching your own (2nd) memory will become an invaluable addition to the processes of the human mind.

In many ways, the online 2nd memory is already far superior to the real one. You can already store every photo or video you image of your life, with sound. Every letter of anything you type on a keyboard can already be stored for you, for instant access later, or for searching (the digital version of "I remember when...") when needed. You will be able to watch all that imagery back, images far more crisp and vivid than the old mind movies the memory can conjure up, far more accurate recollections of past events, more real, through the same .

Human memory will not be able to compete, though it's sometimes lurid and distorted recall, basic creativity, will always be needed, if only for entertainment reasons.

I have no idea how I got onto all this, and so it ends. Hell, it's the weekend.

Sorry I'm Late, I Was Stuck In Love

By Darryl Mason

For some, the effects of university cannabis experimentation lingers on, many years later, layering thinking with gooey slices of interesting weirdness. Observe unelected NSW premier Nathan Rees, with that itchy eye problem :

"Congestion is a concern for all Sydneysiders," he said.

"If you think you are in traffic, you are in traffic...It's like being in love. If you think you are in love, you are in love. If you think you are in traffic, you are in traffic."

What if you don't just think but know, really know, you're in traffic because you're surrounded by cars and trucks and buses and nobody is moving forward and it was exactly the same yesterday and will be the same tomorrow and you've just calculated you've blown about 1000 solid hours, 40 full days and nights, you will never get back sitting in the same heavy traffic every work day for the past three fucking years and you start thinking 'Fuck this shit, if all these cars don't fuck off and let me go faster than 2.6kmh I'm going to lose it, I mean I'm gonna completely lose my shit'.?

What then?

Don't think traffic. Think love.

Put it on a t-shirt, Mr Rees, and walk along the shoulder of a jam-packed motorway. Field test this Spinoza-esque concept of yours. Dare you. But please wear a helmet.

Some NSW premiers didn't have to deal with city traffic at all, not in the way mere workers do. A speeding, sirening ambulance was a much faster way to get from one side of the city to the other, if you were a premier in a hurry.

That's not a state secret or something. Is it?

Yeah, probably just one of those rumours...

Epic Dag

By Darryl Mason

The line at the 7/11 reaches halfway up the shop. Everybody seems to be using their credit cards these days, even for the most minor food purchases (a loaf of bread, juice, milk). People in line have time to talk. Which is weird in itself, conversation breaking out between strangers in a place that was designed for no-nonsense, "Hi! Bye!" lightning quick transactions.

Anyway, a rough approximation of an overheard conversation between a man in his late 50s/early 60s and a kid of about 13 or 14 does now follow.

The man coos in delight over sports results in the back pages of the paper while he waits. The kid watches assorted, muted, street violence vids on his phone.

Old Bloke : "Look at this! They blew it! What a pack of losers. Epic Fail!"

The kid visibly flinches.

Kid : "Grandad, you know how..."

Old Bloke "Dave...is fine, you don't have to call me that."

Kid : "Whatever. You know how when you were a kid in the 1960s? Do you remember how majorly grim it was when your grandad used words like 'That's cool'...."

Old Bloke : "....yeah. He sounded like a dag."

Kid : "That's how me and my friends feel when people your age say 'Epic Fail'."

Old Bloke : "But...that's....you don't...."

Kid : "We don't even say it anymore 'cause you all keep saying it."

Old Bloke (actually, and suddenly, outraged): "Hey, you use 'cool' all the time! That's our word."

Kid : "No, it's not. Aristotle wrote stuff about being cool....whenever ago. And black jazz musicians used 'cool' in the 1940s, it's their word. You all stole your best words from obies."

Old Bloke : "What's....obies?"

Kid : "Obies. Obama, Obies. Black people. You stole 'cool' from them."

Old Bloke : "How do you know about Aristotle and the jazz thing?"

Kid : "I'm reading it off Wikipedia. I knew you'd say 'Epic Fail' today a few times and I wanted to say something to you about, you know, how you say it all the time. It's tragic."

Old Bloke : "I don't say it all the time. Do I?"

Kid : "Yes, lots."

Old Bloke : "....right."

Kid : "You stole 'cool' from black people, and now you lift 'Epic Fail' from us. Why can't you guys come up with your own stuff?"

Old Bloke : "That's bullsh...rubbish. You don't own 'Epic Fail', you know. Other people have said those two words together before."

Kid : "Yeah, but you old grocks (?) only say it now 'cause we do...we used to."

Old Bloke : "What do you say instead, now?"

Kid : "That's So 9/11."

Old Bloke : ".....you don't. Really? Do you?"

Kid : "Yup."

Old Bloke : "You say '9/11' or 'That was so 9/11'?"

Kid : "That's so 9/11."

Old Bloke : "That's....so wrong."

Kid : "If something turns out to be majorly grim, you say 'That's so 9/11'."

Old Bloke : "That'll never catch on....Is it just you saying 'majorly grim' or is that....anyway, I like Epic Fail."

Kid : "You can keep it."

Anti-Frown Ideology

Bored by repetitive acts of distant terrorism? Do you sigh and roll your eyes when wafflers rant about the threats of socialism, communism, fascism, Obamaism? Do you want to, need to, worry and fret about dark elements infiltrating the places where our children gather, shaping their pliable little minds with perverse indoctrination, but can't get all that worked up about hairy people saying trees are pretty cool and war is oh so 20th century?

Then you need to get up to speed on Clownist Extremists.

A Golden Orb Weaver spider, in North Queensland, devours a Chestnut-breasted Mannikin finch. Happens all the time, apparently.

This site claims an average Chestnut-breasted Mannikin weighs about 14 grams. That's some web.

More Here



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

You Are Poor, Blame Cate Blanchett

By Darryl Mason

The Professional Idiot plays another game of "Don't Look Up, Look Over There". As expected, in a time of crisis. As appears to be his duty.

So who do you blame for the world financial crisis? Ultra-rich bankers you say? No, don't blame modern day robber barons using the stock market ("Come on in, everyone's a winner!") to suck away even minor wealth and replace it with debt slavery, The Professional Idiot wants you to blame....err, Hollywood stars! Like Cate Blanchett! And Cate Blanchett!

Don't look at how much cream was being scooped away by the people who are supposed to guard your investments, deposits and minimal wealth, leaving you with watery-milky soup, look at what Hollywood stars earn for entertaining people, or at least attempting to.

In such a crisis as we have now, someone must be blamed, particularly for making the poor even poorer. This is when you need what Mark Latham called "the dancing bears" - a conga-line of opinionists, throughout the dominant Murdoch media, all pumping the same turgid dogma, all trying to sell the exact same creed. So far, it's mostly been : Blame The Poor, The Stupid Poor, Why Won't You Just Blame The Poor?

But that can't last, and won't. Not even the stupid poor believe that rank bullshit.

The Professional Idiot is testing the waters with "Blame Hollywood Stars! Look How Much They Earn!", but only the most porridge-minded of his readers are soaking up that bait. The Professional Idiot's own newspaper is crowded daily with stories about wealthy Hollywood stars and seven-figure sports celebrities. Rich celebrity fodder pays The Professional Idiot's wages for fuck's sake. His boss built a media empire on the piddle and crap of rich celebrity lives.

Blame the poor, blame Hollywood stars, but whatever you do, don't blame those who were paid handsomely with the most minor expectation that they would not lose everything.

Don't Look Up, Look Over There.


Most Australians can't, won't blame the poor, here or in the US, for what is now happening, because they too are finding out just how poor they actually are, or soon will be.

People know, or at least have an idea, of who fucked them over. And it wasn't The Poor, or Cate Blanchett.


Kevin Rudd's talk of "extreme capitalism" and "extremists" terrified the shit out of Australia's smallest financial minority. Terrorists who shout their God's name as they sprint into schoolyards are "extremists", not money-drenched CEOs, or coke-addled traders.

There must have been many outraged cries of "What The Fuck? The little shit is talking about US all over the fucking NEWS!"

John Howard would never have betrayed his patrons in such a reckless, feckless way.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a clear and growing anger in Australian society about where in fuck all their money has gone.

And it's obvious, even from reading the financial crisis-related comments threads that now only occasionally appear on Rupert Murdoch's online media, that this anger has to be focused somewhere. Else. Or else.

But the soon to be majority poor are not blaming Hollywood stars for the strip-mining of their investments and the value of their homes.

They know who is to blame. They know it's not Hollywood stars, or the American Poor, who believed President Bush's repetitive, hypnotic seven year long sales pitch of why they all had to become home owners. John Howard pitched the same mantras to potential debt slaves as well, but with an Australian flavour satchel sprinkled over the top.

"BuyAHomeBuyItNowAndFillItWithStuff" created entire industries, dozens of TV shows, racks of magazines, a slew of mind-melting media, including glossy liftouts in The Professional Idiot's own newspaper, generating billions over the Relaxed & Comfortable Years in advertising revenue, which flowed into "We're All So Fucking Rich! Let's Buy Heaps Of Shit On Credit!" advertorial content, everywhere, marketed as news and current affairs.

Of course it worked.

Of course hundreds of thousands of people rushed out to buy a home and fill it with stuff, even when they knew they couldn't afford it. Everywhere they looked was the same omnipresent advertising, the message simple, always the same : "Credit Is Easy, Buy Now, You Can Only Get More Richerer!"

Once in every generation the scam works, or works well enough to create a new population of debt slaves, who will keep working, until death, and pass on debts to their children.

Poor people can find anger easy, usually after the despair has passed. They must now be encouraged, by people like The Professional Idiot, to focus that anger on their neighbours, the people who ride the same buses and trains as they do, but who may not hold the same political or religious beliefs. Or even better, find a way to blame those who live somewhere else, another suburb, another town, city or country. But still mostly poor people. And blame Cate Blanchett, of course.

Don't look up, look over there.


So if the poor and/or Cate Blanchett are not to blame, who then to blame?

Can Muslims be blamed? That whole anti-usury thing at the core of their belief system probably rules most of them out. A shame that.

But what about Al Qaeda? Are they short-selling enthusiasts? Do they shift around a trillion or two a day trading derivatives? Were they purposely mass-hyping property values in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth from their laptops in the high mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan?

What about the all-purpose Immigrants? They've always been good, hell for two hundred years, as an emotional scratching post for Australian community discontent.

But the problem now is, of course, that there's so many of them here, at backyard barbecues, in offices, in cinema foyers, in the pub, that that kind of loose talk just won't stand. Because the Immigrants will tell you, hey bro, we got fucking ripped off as well.

So it's time to for Rupert's dancing bears to circle the wagons, protect The Ultra-Rich, and find someone, anyone else to blame.

Anyone but those who are most responsible.

Just A Minute

Australian dads don't get much time alone with their kids, not during the week anyway.

"Right, son, the ads are on. You've got sixty seconds...."
"Oh, well, um, I was riding my bike and Jamie tried to..."
"Who's Jamie?"
"Jamie's my best friend. I told you about him on Monday, during our minute..."
"Yep, yep, Jamie. Keep going, you've got 50 seconds."
"I was on my bike and I was riding really fast past the new 7/11 and Jamie was on his bike and he..."
"What new 7/11?"
"It's near the train station...um dad, I think you need to turn off the..."
"Tell me the rest, you've got 35 seconds."
"...........It's okay, it's not important."
"No, keep going, son. This is our time together. I want to hear what's been going on. You've got 27 seconds."
"...It doesn't matter...."
"Of course it matters. I'm sure it's very important...to you. So you're on your bike, riding past the 7/11, the new one, and Jamie is on his bike and then what?"
"Nothing. I was just going to tell you..."
"Ten seconds left."
"Forget it."
"Nothing you want to tell me in seven seconds?"
"No."
"I know our time together is short, son, but I have to work really, really hard to pay for this new house, which is only going to increase in value, everybody on TV says so, so it's not time wasted. And I've been doing all those extra hours so I could buy up shares, like the prime minister said I should. The stock market will only keep booming, so it's not like the $50,000 I borrowed against the rising value of this house is going to suddenly disappear. In two years or so, in 2008, all this hard work is really going to pay off and we can spend lots more time together."
"Okay, dad."

Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing Down Under

In 1976, the great American writer Hunter S. Thompson, came to Australia for a lecture tour. This story promoting the new Thompson documentary, Gonzo, tells a few tales about the good doctor's Australian experiences :

...Peter Olszewski, who back in 1976 was "manager" of Thompson's often disaster-prone Australian lecture tour, says he was surprised by how "writerly" the Kentucky-born Thompson was.

"He worked on every word," Olszewski remembers.

"He told me how he wrote Las Vegas — what was true about the book and what was fiction — and that he set out to write an American classic, and even that admission gives the measure of the man.

"He deduced that most US classics were short books and he told me that if I did a word count on Las Vegas and The Great Gatsby, I would discover that the two were identical in word count, down to the last word."

...Thompson's...notorious smoking-drinking-swearing appearance on The Don Lane Show, but after a thorough search "in the bowels of Channel Nine's archives" (the documentary makers) discovered that all footage had been lost or destroyed.

Olszewski remembers it well. "This just confirmed the stupidity, crassness and ineptness of commercial TV producers at that time," he says.

"Rather than let Hunter the talent present himself as himself, the producer pushed him into appearing like a poseur, with coat casually draped over one shoulder. It looked so fake that when Thompson saw himself in the monitor he swore and brushed the coat aside, and of course the expletive was not deleted and it became a quite large story the next day in the morning papers."

I can still vividly remember Thompson's appearance on The Don Lane Show. He didn't brush that jacket off his shoulder, he violently jerked in his seat when he saw that he looked like a dick, and shouted something like "Get this fucking thing off me!" Don Lane's mouth fell open, a perfect O.

It's amazing to me now to think how incredibly controversial it was back then for someone to swear on live TV, particularly a loud, drunk American, and how impressive his performance was to a seven year old, already writing short stories, who didn't know that writers could be so outrageous, free, and wild.

Olszewski, who as J.J. McRoach stood for the Senate as an Australian Marijuana Party candidate, wrote about his often nightmarish job minding Thompson in Mandraxed Wombats and The Monster in Room 450, which was published in his 1979 book A Dozen Dopey Yarns.

His worst moment came when he "disobeyed the doctor's instructions" and swallowed a small piece of powerful blotter-paper LSD.

"Several hours later, after I had crashed a Fairlane into a concrete pillar in the car park under the Southern Cross Hotel, Thompson admonished me with, 'I clearly told you to chew it slowly'," he recalls.

Olszewski remembers (Hunter) on stage at the Melbourne Town Hall. "People weren't all that interested in meaningful discourse — they wanted gonzo madness. At one stage he turned to me and said, 'Help me in this thing. I feel trapped. I feel like a goddamned animal in a cage with people poking sticks at me.' "

Hunter S. Thompson never seemed to lose that feeling that he was a sideshow, that his notoriety, the Dr Gonzo character he created, consumed him and trapped him, as a person and as a writer. His widow recently said that his celebrity, the unreality of the rampaging Hunter myth versus the old, near crippled man that he actually was, added to the reasons why he shot himself in the head in February, 2005.

You Are Being Offended. Yes, I'm Being Offended

For its inflight internet access, Qantas knows what its customers find offensive, without even asking them :

"Restrictions may include sites that contain violence, profanity, nudity and other content we consider may be offensive to our customers."

No profanity? Well you fucking well won't be reading this blog on a fucking Qantas flight then, will you? I'm working on the violence and nudity.

It's Still Terrorism, But Without The Shocking Video

By Darryl Mason

Australia is under attack, PM Kevin Rudd, tells us, by the forces "of extremist capitalism." After Thursday's stock market blood-drainer, these forces seem to be winning. Or at least, what they set into motion is still wreaking incredible damage to the Australian economy.

How much has the stock market lost in the past year? A few hundred billion? Al Qaeda nuking Adelaide would have cost the economy less. So who is the greater threat? Al Qaeda kills people in the vicinity of the bombs they explode. Financial terrorists shred shrapnel into everybody.

We supposedly know who Al Qaeda are, or at least some of them, the few who can bother to front up in front of a webcam every few months, and the various leaders who we keep killing, over and over again.

But what about these "extremist capitalists"? Who are these financial terrorists?

Can we have some names, please? Are there ten of them? Or a few hundred? What do we know about their sleeper cells? What is their ideology of hatred? Why do they hate our values of a fair go and rewards for hard work so very, very much? Will they be held to account for what they've set into motion? Why aren't any of these financial terrorists being arrested? Why aren't we seeing them being hauled in and out of police stations in shackles? Will they be waterboarded to get at the truth? And why will so many of them get to keep their jobs, even if on greatly reduced pay?

The financial terrorists who are gutting the savings, investments and retirements of millions of Australians seem, today at least, to be even more illusory than Al Qaeda. One enemy lives in caves and poverty-smashed villages in the middle of fuck-all nowhere. The other extremist enemies live amongst us, they fly over our traffic choked streets in helicopters for their daily commute, and they live in most of their same pre-The Great Fucktober Crash Of 08 splendour. Well, that's not completely true. Some of these nation-shattering extremists have already headed off for calmer waters in the 80 foot floating palaces they built from the fleecing of thousands of work-haggered 65 year olds, who are now contemplating another decade of unexpected labour, or battling with a rising tide of unemployed youth for fewer and fewer jobs.

It's all but too late now, but where was that Financial Terrorism Hotline, so those that knew could have anonymously dobbed all those fuckers in?

In a stunning week of actual non-boring financial news, it was also remarkable to see just how much money an Australian government can make available in a time of "national emergency". More than $10 billion to the people, before Christmas. With a commitment to prop up banks and institutions that could soar into the hundreds of billions.

Ten billion dollars, thwomp, slammed down on the table, to save the Christmas spending season from expected disaster.

But do you know any pensioners or families planning to rush out and blow their government mini-bailout on Christmas presents?

There is definitely a mood of "thanks, but that'll go to pay off some debts" instead. Shopping malls around Australia are emptying of customers, and soon, staff, as people quickly begin to realise just what they can actually live without.

Paying off debts before guilt-induced holiday consuming is never a bad decision, but if the point of throwing around ten billion in cash is to get the people back into line at the checkouts, it doesn't seem likely it will pay off. Even if most people take their fresh cash to their local megacentre, it will only delay the inevitable mass layoffs of Generation Y staff for a month or two more.

Most elderly pensioners won't be splurging but will probably be remembering the once easily dismissed warnings from Depression-era grandparents and will be stockpiling long life food, or ripping out the ornamentals and laying in vegetables for next year. Just in case.

You might want to take up veggie and herb growing as a hobby, very soon. You know, just in case. My local supermarket in Sydney put up a big stand of vegetable and herb seeds a couple of weeks ago, after months of requests from locals. They couldn't re-stock that display fast enough. They've now sold out of just about everything, with a few days delay in getting more seeds, or maybe a week.

I found the seeds I wanted in the next suburb. But still, it was a strange experience to go to a local shop to buy more seeds, and find they've run out. Another sign of these unnerving times.

And here's an excellent, edible, street beautifying project we should see all over our towns and cities. It sure beats lining up in a petrol station carpark for four hours, waiting for the government food trucks to maybe arrive :

The English have their allotments; in Sydney we use the streets. In a variation on guerilla gardening, Sydneysiders are moving veggie plots from the backyard to the street verge, and converting formerly fallow public land into mini-market gardens.

"Environmentally, ethically and, from a community perspective, it's a great thing to do," says Eva Johnstone, a landscape architect, who with her husband, Bill, has been growing vegetables on their Marrickville street verge for the past two years.

"We always wanted to grow our own food, but our backyard is quite small, so the logical step was to grow it on the street, which was not being used for anything," Ms Johnstone said.

The Johnstones now have an established vegetable garden, with spinach, artichoke, rhubarb, peas, potatoes, beans, broccoli and beetroot. A nearby tree bears a passionfruit vine and a sign telling passersby to help themselves.

Street verges are council property but Mrs Johnstone says the council has been "happy to turn a blind eye.

Global warming, the drought and rising food prices have other Sydneysiders looking at local solutions to food production, says Michael Mobbs, a sustainability expert. A year ago, he and fellow residents of Myrtle Street, Chippendale, planted their nature strips and footpaths with a range of edible plants, including tomatoes, herbs, strawberries and fruit trees. Raspberries, rocket, native mint and passionfruit vines climb the telephone poles.

"We want to show people that they can grow food where they live and return to simpler, lower-impact lifestyle," says Mr Mobbs,....

Other councils are following suit.

The mayor of North Sydney : "We would certainly be very supportive if communities wanted to grow veggies in their street, as long as it's a community initiative."

Blame The Microwave Oven

Very weird. One of the stranger possible explanations for why a Qantas jet almost plunged out of control into the sea last week :

Air safety investigators say they will look into claims signals from a naval communications base near Exmouth in Western Australia's north may have caused last week's Qantas mid-air emergency.

Early last week a Qantas Airbus travelling from Singapore to Perth was forced to land near the town after nosediving hundreds of feet in seconds, injuring about 70 people.

A preliminary investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) found a computer fault caused the aircraft to nosedive twice.

The ATSB says it will examine whether signals from the communications base could have sparked the glitch.

The communications base was originally used by the US Navy.

'Signals' from a coms base can cause a jet airliner to dramatically lose altitude, twice?

This might be the last you hear of that extremely curious explanation.


"What's this thing do?"
"Dunno. It's something the Yanks left behind."
"It's sure got a lot of buttons..."
"Don't touch any of them."
"...................okay."
"I'm going for a piss. You're in charge."
"Cool."