A huge, free piece of public art unfolds on a drab corner in Drummoyne, at the foot of the Bridge.



Renowned Australian graffiti artist Sytak leads the four man crew chewing through dozens of cans of spray paint to complete the mural. The artists themselves pay for the artwork, it is free to view.

Earlier in the day, a police car pulled to a stop and they were asked what the hell they thought they were doing. The owner of the garage, who owns the wall facing Victoria Road where the mural is unfolding, had given his permission for them to do their public art. When the police seemed doubtful, the owner jumped over the fence to tell the cops it was all cool.

Tomorrow afternoon and into the early evening, thousands of drivers will queue up at the lights there on Victoria Road. And now there will be something to look at while they wait those endless minutes for the lights to change. Some will hate it, and the artists copped a few serves from passers-by while they worked, but more stopped to see what they were up to, to ask what the words meant and what the mural overall is supposed to mean and also to thank them for brightening the area up a bit.





More detailing will be done next weekend.

We'll take another look when it's finished.

The Eye On The Pole Catches All

If you can't drive fast through city traffic, then what the hell is the point of being a cop?

Nearly four police officers a day were booked for breaking traffic laws including speeding while at work last year without any evidence they were responding to an emergency.

That's 1433 speeding fines issued to cops, by cops. Well, not real cops. The camera ones. Nobody escapes :

Of the fines issued to police most - 1325 - were issued by fixed speed cameras, including school zone cameras.

Most of those cops are probably feeling just as annoyed as the more half a million drivers in NSW, alone, who payed a few hundred extra dollars, each, for driving faster than constantly changing speed limits were supposed to inform them to drive :

The cameras doubled their fines revenue last financial year as they picked up a total of 677,839 drivers across NSW in the same period.

The lash of this story is you should be outraged at cops who speed, not that more than half a million people were fined because cameras that replace police determined they were speeding.

Speed camera lenses do not like Post-It notes.

A December Moon.

Now This, This Is Pain

For my American readers, imagine running full speed straight at your friend, who is also running full speed at you, both of you are holding pillows up in front of yourselves. You will smash into each other with extraordinary force, you will knocked half senseless, you will probably be left so winded you'll feel like puking and shitting your pants at the same time.

Now do it again, without the pillows.

This is how you play football in Australia.

You Better Get Used To It

The Professional Idiot sinks deeper by the day into wild-eyed, foamy hysteria as the true reality darkly dawns that the once formidable strength of the Australian conservative movement of the Howard era is now slipping and sliding away into a spectacular, humiliating festival of confusion, anarchy and Labor/Green lickspittling. With plenty of help from The Professional Idiot, of course. One of his readers, Wilt, nails the truth of what has happened, and is happening, brilliantly :

...nothing so galling for the True Believers of the Howard Descendancy, when their supposed support base actually wakes up to reality.

Poor, poor Australian Conservatism, has your pet industry-parrot started to squawk a different tune? What a shambles you are, emasculated, hung, drawn and quartered by Howard’s shameful selfishness, and increasingly left behind by a rapidly-changing society; vainly hoping for Australia to ‘wake up to itself’ when you are the ones sound asleep; waiting patiently for Peter Costello to work out whether he can be bothered to save the country, if only someone would come and beg him to do so because he won’t lower himself to do the dirty work in Opposition.

You hopeless, howling shower of wet whiners; you pointless complainers, voiceless declaimers, and spineless denigraters: your time is over. Your country has changed, and not to your liking. You must get used to it.

One of the key problems for the Liberals was, and is, that so many of its senior politicians, advisors and 'youth wing' treated everything that The Professional Idiot had to say about climate change, David Hicks, The Iraq War, the War On Terror, terrorism in general, asylum seekers, WorkChoices, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, the Cronulla Riots, emissions trading, the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal reconciliation, and a host of other vitally important issues that concerned a vast scope of Australians (not just those Evil Pagan Lefties) as nothing less than Holy Gospel. This was clearly evidenced in The Howard Years documentary series recently screened on the ABC. Every issue the Liberals got wrong in the lead up to the 2007 election, every key issue they misjudged and misread the general Australian public on and over, were echoes of The Professional Idiot's beliefs and whiny, paranoid, fear-soaked opinions.

Now The Professional Idiot's trying to finish off The Liberals for good with the kind of eviscerations that he used to unleash on Mark Latham and The Greens, all the while pumping his mate Peter Costello as the only man who can save the party and lead them to victory in the next election. Funny, funny stuff. Correction : Absolutely fucking hilarious stuff.

In the past few years since The Liberals have, quietly, championed The Professional Idiot as their Yoda, the conservative movement in Australia has crashed and burned, spectacularly.

Coincidence?

The more conspiracy-minded amongst you may wonder what The Professional Idiot's real agenda is, and some in The Liberal Party most definitely already are.

After all, The Professional Idiot once worked for Labor.

If The Liberals continue to crash to burn and burn so, it won't be Costello and the Liberals on the opposition benches come 2012. It will be Bob Brown and The Greens.

'Funniest Home Videos' Distributes Child Abuse Imagery

According to this story it does :

Police say it is a crime for anyone to even watch a viral video of a man swinging a baby around the room.

Will they pursue and arrest Coca-Cola or American Express executives for putting an ad on such a clip on YouTube or another video sharing website? Fuck no.

(Police) comment comes after uproar over 60-year-old Chris Illingworth, a father of four from Maroochydore, was charged with posting the video on Liveleak after he stumbled across it on YouTube.

The video, which shows a man swinging a baby over his head by his arms, was broadcast on US television and has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people on the internet.

But, despite that, Mr Illingworth's home was raided after he posted the clip on Liveleak and he was charged with using the internet to access and publish child-abuse material.

In a statement, Queensland police said the term "child abuse material" even extended to clips where the child "appears" to be a victim of cruelty.

Queensland Police from the anti-pedophile squad, Task Force Argos, raided Illingworth's home on Sunday November 30 and subjected him to a thorough forensic examination of his home and office computers and a gruelling interview over several hours, complete with finger printing and mug shots.

Asked to respond to claims by Illingworth that he was targeted unnecessarily and unfairly labelled a child abuser, QLD Police said it was a crime "to participate in the exploitation and abuse of children by seeking to view, possess, make or distribute child abuse or child exploitation material".

It provided a definition of "child abuse material", which was any material that shows a person under the age of 18 who "is, or appears to be, a victim of torture, cruelty or physical abuse".

Any week you can tune into Funniest Home Videos, one of the most popular shows on Australian TV, adored by most children, and see videos where parents have purposely fed their children, say, chilli, to get a funny, screwed up face reaction, or let their two year ride his scooter down a steep drive knowing he will crash at the bottom. By the definition of Queensland Police, letting kids fall from swings or flip off lounge chairs, even if they enjoy it, and capturing the laughs on video, is child abuse. And perhaps it is. But it's all a very gray area, and police are now going after old people like Illingworth who didn't even film the incident of alleged child abuse, he merely passed on what he no doubt thought was a funny clip to another website.

Insanity. Have they run out of real pedophiles or perverts to go after?

Illingworth said it was unfair that he was being labelled a child abuser over a video he didn't make, when Steve Irwin was let off for dangling his baby near the open jaws of a crocodile.

Very good point.

"This thing started because they were looking for a pedophile, it didn't work, so [police decided] 'lets just take him for something else, make it look like we're doing our job'," Illingworth said.

Is it illegal now for a parent to 'aeroplane' their kid in a public park? I loved being swung around like that when I was a little kid. Awesome fun. Is it illegal to do that to your own child? Or is it just illegal to video it? What if a mum videos dad tossing their laughing, gurgling daughter higher and higher into the air as a Christmas video gift for grandma? Is grandma a criminal if she posts that clip to a website so her friends in another state or another country can share in the joy of her grand-daughter laughing her little head off?

Crazy, crazy shit.

The death of all fun.

Too High, Too Happy For Violence

An interesting paradigm for our times. Do journalists not see the link here, or are they not allowed to draw such obvious conclusions?

Cocaine and ecstasy use are on the rise across the state but domestic violence rates in Sydney have dropped for the first time in seven years, crime figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research reveal.

Crime rates have fallen in almost all major areas, including a 26 per cent drop in robberies with a firearm and a 19.2 per cent drop in robberies with other weapons. Common assaults have remained stable.

But arrests for recreational drug use have surged, with a 55.4 per cent increase in ecstasy use and a 37.5 per cent jump in cocaine use in the two years to September, the report shows.

There are a lot more middle aged couples in Sydney who drop Es now on Saturday night, or Sunday afternoon, or smoke joints, instead of getting stuck into the piss. For a big night out in the clubs, or at a party, dropping an E can be a lot cheaper than drinking heavily. Most people don't drink hard if they're on Es and having a good time, and they are far less prone to beating the shit out of each other.

Instead of booze-fueled seething, jealousy and arguments, middle-aged couples on Es mostly dance and laugh and fuck instead. Well, those that aren't getting arrested.

Porn, Rape, Sex, Incest, UFOs, Sorry

Can you tell much, if anything, about Australians by the news stories they read online?

The Top 100 Most Popular Stories For 2008 from news.com.au, and its network of city daily online newspaper sites, features an abundance of stories about porn and rape and tech and sex and freak animals and incest and UFOs.

The ultimate online newspaper headline, then, would go something like this :

Incest Aliens Video BigFoot UFO Rape On iPhone

Rudd's 'Sorry' to the Stolen Generations made it in at Number 27, while the death of Heath Ledger hit number one.

Violent Pleasures

What exactly is the Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman trying to say here?

How can the social cost of alcohol-fuelled violence or the dismal effects of wasteful wagering be measured against the temporary pleasures of engaging in such pastimes?

So now you know, engaging in alcohol-fuelled violence, as a pastime, provides only fleeting enjoyment.

Saving Lives Or Wasting Your Money?

Police and drug dogs were out in force at the HomeBake Festival. They made plenty of arrests, mostly drug-related. Eight people were done up for supplying drugs (that is, possessing a quantity of drugs deemed beyond personal use), and 76 were charged for possession.

The entire police operation on the day cost beyond $100,000 and yielded this not so impressive haul :

...police detected 78 grams of cannabis (less than three ounces), 256 ecstasy tablets and 18 grams of white powder (consisting of cocaine and speed) at the event.

I'll be generous in calculating the total street sale value of that one day haul - $30,000 max.

Obviously there were a hell of a lot more people on 'prohibited' drugs at HomeBake than those arrested. Those caught carrying drugs into HomeBake were dealers, or idiots.

As regular drug-using festival goers already know, you do your shit before you walk through the gates and come face to face with drug dogs. And, as regular drug-using festival goers already know, there are any number of ways to consume cannabis and Es and speed well before you reach the cop-crowded gates of a music festival, and still be high as all fuck for most of the day, and well into the evening. You can cook your cannabis into cookies, you can make toffee and dip your Es in the cooling toffee a couple of times (coating the E in shells of sugar delays the final dissolving of the pill), and you can sprinkle your speed into a cigarette rolling paper, 'bombing' as it used to be called, and then wrap the small wad in a few more layers of cigarette papers (the papers take a while to dissolve in your stomach, but this is a good way to give yourself ulcers if you do it too often).

Most cops will tell you the main reason there is so much LESS VIOLENCE at music festivals these days is because more people do Es and pot than get stuck into the booze. Music festivals in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s were regular bloodbaths, mostly because the alcohol flowed so freely.

However, policing music festivals is a great day out for most cops, surrounded by happy kids and great music, soaking up the sun. It's a fuck of a lot better than responding to domestic violence calls in St Clair or Rose Bay. But many cops hate the fact they have to bust kids for carrying cannabis, and that some of these kids they bust will wind up with criminal records.

However, the Top Cops are warning there will be no easing up of heavy policing of music festivals :

Police said the results served as a warning to those planning to take or supply drugs at forthcoming events this summer.

"Police will be present at all similar upcoming events, and those people found supplying and possessing prohibited drugs, along with any anti-social behaviour, will be arrested and charged," they said in a statement.

Naturally, this level of hardcore drug-policing at music festivals will also apply to Opera In The Park as well...right?

"Why Does It Have To Be Morning?"

Doc Neeson, in videos like the one below for Face The Day (the paranoid speed freak's lament), used to scare the absolute shit of me when I was a kid. But he turned out to be such a nice guy, so very well read, and polite, unless you screwed up his onstage lighting.

Fantastic song, excellent video. By looking at it, you'd barely be able to guess it's almost thirty years old.



The Angels, at their prime, are still the best live band this country has ever produced. Evidence :


I've found a couple of interesting articles and interviews on The Angels I wrote back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which I'll post up on Junkhead in the next week or so, but they'll also be linked here.

Beer Banned In Bourke

It may be necessary, but it just sounds so downright UnOrstrahyun :

A violent NSW country town that is drowning in broken glass will have the state's most draconian liquor laws when takeaway sales of bottled beer are banned.

Liquor and Gaming director Albert Gardner said it was the first time a town-wide ban on retail beer sales had been imposed in NSW.

In Bourke, police say most of the alcohol-related violence occurs in the homes of locals, not in the pubs or in the street. It's almost impossible for the cops to stop people guzzling litres of cheap piss in the privacy of their own homes, but it's easy to imagine a day coming when the card you have to show to legally buy booze also reveals the number and ages of the children you have in your care.

Alcohol related crime and violence costs taxpayers billions a year, and that's before the health costs associated with hardcore alcohol abuse are factored in. Millions of Australians getting hammered and harming themselves, or members of their families, or total strangers, is an incredible drain on public resources, and state and federal governments are already showing their tolerance of these rising costs is fading fast.

How long before widespread limits on alcohol sales become a part of everyday life for all Australians?

"Just these, thanks."

"Sir? Why are you buying four cases of beer and ten litres of cask wine?"

"What? It's grand final weekend."

"I know that, sir, but it says here you have two children under the age of five years old. I'm only allowed to sell you six cans of beer, and two bottles of wine. By law."

"Are you fucking shitting me? What in all fuck..."

"Now you're being abusive, sir. Therefore, I can only sell you low alcohol beer and wine. By law."

"That's fu...that's wrong."

"I'm sorry, sir, but that's just the way it is."

"All right. I'll just have four doses of Happyland Ecstasy instead, thanks."

"Grinners or Laughers?"

"Better make it Grinners. My mates might get violent if I laugh my head off when their shitty team is losing."

Be Very Careful Who You Poke In The Eye

Being an idiot on the piss in front of your mates can be extremely dangerous :

A soldier bit a police officer on the face at a pub after being accidentally poked in the eye ...

Security camera footage played in court appeared to show the 31-year-old policeman apologising to Koutsoubos as he held his swollen eye. "All I said was 'oh f---, sorry bro, I didn't mean to bump into you'," Constable Hogan said.

"As I attempted to walk past, he grabbed my head and bit me on my left cheek. I remember him grabbing that side of my head and pulling it down. I couldn't understand why he did it."

Automatic self-defense, or attack, responses from special forces training appear to have been activated by the eye poke.

Following an application from the Federal Government, the judge hearing the case imposed a number of protective orders under the Commonwealth Crimes Act to suppress information about Koutsoubos's role in the defence forces.

This involved the suppression of information about military training, tactics, procedures and the capabilities of the Australian Defence Force's Special Operations Command and the 4th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, also known as the Commandos.

I had a friend who'd done fairly similar training in Canada, and if you happened to bump his chair when he was snoring-sleeping he'd leap upright and have you in a choke hold, eyes blazing, faster than you could say "Oh, fuck..."

"I'm Weird In The Head....Sometimes"

I haven't spent as much time as I'd hoped on digging through my old archives of the rock journalism I wrote back in the first half of the 1990s for newspapers like the West Australian and the Herald Sun, and magazines like Rolling Stone and Hot Metal, but I'm getting there, bit by bit. Where possible, I've gone back to the original first or second drafts I wrote, which were usually cut way back in length by the time they were published, and were far more loose.

Here's an excerpt of an interview I did with Jeff Buckley, back in August, 1995. The full interview can be read over at Junkhead :

Is it like you have all these other people, these many other sides to yourself, is that what it's like?

"People have many people inside them, many selves I feel, and I feel that they shift from one to the other sometimes in times or stress or total importance. I'm not talking about psychopaths, I'm talking about normal people.

"You notice the difference in your girlfriend if she becomes the mother, and she slips into the mother telling the child what they can or can't do - drawing boundaries around the child. It's a normal thing.

"And every side of you has a language and a feel and rhythm and a melody and a colour, and it's hard to get to it, you just have to be open and unafraid. The more uptight and conservative that I am, the more conservative the music I'm making will be."

Is that a totally different self of you up onstage, from the one who walks through a garden, thinking about the world?

"Oh yeah, (onstage) that's me with the floodgates open. A different me....I don't fear that person......that's more me, empty......like a faucet with water gushing through it. But I know who that person is.

"People are different when music is in them, they change physically. A child feels different when it is singing. The energy in the room is different, you stop and listen, or you laugh, whatever. "When any artist is channeling through other people, they transform into this......I don't know, some people might call it the divine.....it has a special nature that is yours, even though you don't see it very often."

Have you got your head around (facing death) yet?

"These two friends of mine were robbed. These thieves broke in and tied them up and pointed guns in their faces.......my friends were talking about the numbness that came with the acceptance that they were going to die......and the calmness, almost a ridiculous calm."

He think about this for a while, a sigh, a silence of maybe 20 seconds.

"Like missing a bus, 'oh well, I'll just wait for another one'."

He laughs to himself. He seems appalled and fascinated by what happened to his friends. To face death, to know you are going to die.

"It must be the fear that hits you and it stops the mind from panicking, you just freeze and think 'okay, here I am'. I think that's the sensation that hits the rabbit before the truck plummets into it, they freeze.....I've frozen many times.....there's no life without death......it's very simple...."

Read The Full Jeff Buckley Interview Here

God : "Stupid Humans, Brains The Size Of Grapefruits And They Think They Know What I've Got Planned For Them"

How many other Australian politicians believe, truly believe, in this crap?

Labor MP James Bidgood thinks the Christian God is a vengeful God and has wiped out the stock portfolios of retirees, slashed the value of homes and crushed world financial markets because...well, that's what God does, isn't it? He fucks with us. God does whatever the fuck he wants and we struggle to comprehend how he can be such a complete bastard, and why he deserves our love, respect and reverence.

"I believe there is God's justice in action in what is going on here," says James Bidgood.

Okay, I think he's going to Say It.

"We haven't seen the end of it."

It's coming, I can feel it.

"The ultimate conclusion is like I say, we look at Bible prophecy, we are going towards a one world bank and a one world monetary system."

It's coming, he's really going to say it...

And if you believe the word of God and you read Revelations..."

The final book of the deeply superstitious King James 16th century re-write of the biblical canon is actually called Revelation, not Revelations. Anyway, Bidgood is definitely going to say it, any second now.

"...you will see clearly what is being spelt out."

I don't think I can stand the tension. Here it comes...

"We are in....the End Times."

Bingo!

The End Times, to true evangelical believers of John The Hallucinatory, are not necessarily a bad thing. You see, we have to have the One World Bank and One World Monetary System in the lead up to the Final Battle between Good and Evil, and all the apocalyptic firestorms, blood moons, star falls, mantle-splitting earthquakes, exploding mountains and mass death that goes along with it, before JC can finally return and then...well, it's not pretty.

So how does the religious-based necessity - that is the realitising of ancient prophecies to concrete apocalyptic religious faith - of a One World Bank and a One World Monetary System influence the decisions MP Bidgood makes in Parliament?

We are only in the End Times if the loons who believe in this Necessary Massacre Of Humanity are in positions of power to make it a reality.

Does Prime Minister Kevin Rudd believe in the End Times as well?

Murdoch 'The Fake Conservative' Pals Around With Hollywood Liberals, And Likes It

Rupert Murdoch does what he is told by the women in his life. He always has. Now Australia's most famous ex-Australian Conservative obeys his wife and becomes a damned Hollywood Lefty Loving Lefty :

The author of a new book about media mogul Rupert Murdoch, which asserts that the owner of Fox News "absolutely despises" top-rated host Bill O'Reilly, believes that Murdoch's negative feelings about Fox go far beyond a personal distaste for O'Reilly's bullying.

Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, "I would mention ... Bill O'Reilly [to Murdoch] and he would get this look which was like revulsion." Wolff added that "I started to see this around all of Murdoch's people. ... No one says, 'O'Reilly, we hate him' ... but everybody goes into a contortion."

According to Wolff, however, the real issue is that Murdoch has "come to like the liberals more than the conservatives -- and many of them have come to like him, too. ... His life is now largely spent around people for whom Fox News is a vulgarity and a joke."

"If he became utterly convinced," asked Olberman, "not only would a liberal network make you five times the money that Fox News makes you, but one will exist and it will put Fox News out of business, would he go down the street tomorrow, shut off Fox News, and put on a liberal version of it just for the money?"

"In a New York minute," Wolff replied.

"He saw a market niche," Wolff explained. "It was easy to get into, it was easy to service these people, it was cheaper to service these people, and he went for it. ... He saw a money-making formula."

"...he's with a woman 38 years his junior, quite young, quite liberal, quite open, and certainly engaged with all of the Hollywood people."

Wolff is wrong. A lefty Fox News would be nowhere near as entertaining, or flat-out hilarious.

Yes, even more New Zealand photos.

This will end soon, I promise.















All photos by Darryl Mason

Beat My Tilt

Julia Gillard lays down the supreme challenge for all future head tilters :


(screengrab from an online front page photo in The Australian)

While Googling 'head tilting' I came across this 2004 post by the Daily Telegraph's associate editor Tim Blair, back in his independent blogging days. It's easy to forget what a nasty, insipid little shit he was back then, gloating about the Iraq War, before he knocked off the caustic edges and adopted his 'Nasty, But Nice' persona for the mainstream media gig.

The Last Days Of The Booze-Soaked Politician

How overdue is this? Very :

A push was last night under way to breathtest NSW politicians after Nationals MP Andrew Fraser's late-night altercation with a female colleague.

Health Minister John Della Bosca and Liberal leader Barry O'Farrell backed the unprecedented call to supply breath testing kits for MPs to ensure they do not turn up drunk.

"Honestly, if you are going to have breathalysers for people driving cranes you should have breathalysers for people writing laws," (Greens MP Dr John) Kaye said.

Why stop at testing for booze? If we have to fucking tolerate having drug dogs sniffing us at music festivals, the local pub and walking to the supermarket, then our state and federal politicians can put up with being drug-tested in their workplace.

Home Free, As Long As He Stays Home

'Freedom'? :

"This is the beauty of Australia or the common law countries. They do not as yet criminalise thoughts," he said.

"In European law your thoughts can be criminalised. We haven't got that in common law countries yet."

Not as yet. But maybe soon. Our government already holds a black list of blocked (or to be blocked) websites, supposedly around 10,000 sites in total, and not all of them are related to child porn or ultra-violence.