It Had To Happen In Reality Before Anyone Would Believe It As Fiction

By Darryl Mason

So, I've been playing around with a novel/screenplay idea for a few years, based around a small, dying, city newspaper and a serial killer.

The scenario goes like this :

The newspaper owner and lead journalist are desperate, as advertisers bail for the internet and circulation/sales plunge, they are living in the last days of the city newspaper business. The newspaper owner's mini-media empire is old school, he's only now just getting his content online, and he knows he's only a few months away from total financial implosion. He needs an exclusive story that will make his paper famous and rocket circulation, in print and online. A story that takes a while to unfold. Something that will capture the public imagination, make them choose a side, get addicted to the story, for months.

The journalist is a former legendary crime reporter, who had his family slaughtered a decade ago by the brother of a crim he helped put in prison. The journalist is a broken man. He got off the booze and painkillers a few years ago, but hooks hard nto ecstasy instead, an addiction that has stripped his emotional personality of extreme highs and grinding lows. He's not so bothered by that. He sleeps better.

The journalist was planning for the series of true crime books he wrote about Sydney's crime splattered streets, in the 1970s and 1980s, to eventually be optioned for movies, and to continue selling well enough to fund his retirement. That was before the internet came along, and a TV series about the underbelly of Sydney's organised crime scene that strip-mined his
books for historical detail, interview transcripts, criminal CVs, everything, without paying him, without even giving him a credit. He's suing, but the legal costs have cleaned him out. So he's generally pretty fucked off with the world right now.

He needs The Story. The newspaper owner needs The Story. Over a midnight bottle of rare scotch in the office, the journalist and owner put together a solution to not only their dire financial situations, but the city's dark and terrible Problem as well.

The city has a plague of pedophiles. Kids are being abducted in broad daylight, all but snatched from their parents arms. The police force is under-resourced, there's no money to take on some of the worst offenders because they exist at the top of the social order. The most vile of them are rich, well protected, paying all the right bribes. And they don't make mistakes. There is a steady drumbeat of calls from the public, protests, rallies, "who will do something about these monsters?"

The journalist, using his old contacts, tracks down a former target of his investigations. A teenager who was cleared of killing four of his neighbours. The journalist knows the kid did it, the kid knows he did it, but nothing ever stuck. He was never convicted. The kid, now in his early 30s, has nothing going on his life, and listens to the journalist's proposition, and promise : kill the pedophiles, one every two weeks or so, write letters about what you're doing for my paper and I will make you a front page star, you will become a folk hero. A legend to the frightened families of this city. You will do what the police cannot. And they will love you for it.

The unreformed killer now has his life mission, and he goes to work, and by the third murder, his moniker is famous not only in the city, but around the world. The stories and reports go viral. The serial killer's letters to the newspaper are read by millions. His words are turned into songs. Hit songs. But all the letters are written by the journalist, once he discovers what an appalling writer the killer actually is.

The newspaper, now loaded with exclusives about the serial killer, and his targets, and letters from the public and former victims of those killed, triples its circulation, and the journalist's exclusive reports go into mass syndication, the bare bones newspaper website pulls in a million visitors a day from across the planet. The serial killer also occasionally pops up in comments at the website, addressing his 'fans', and the police, who are all but reluctantly trying to track him down. But when the serial killer shows no interest in providing these comments, the journalist again has to write his words for him, and find a way to keep himself anonymous online. This interaction with the serial killer makes the website even more popular, and nobody knows when he might show up in comments. Or on what story.

A small river of gold runs into the newspaper now, all thanks to this killing spree. The journalist gets interviewed on CNN and the BBC. The owner is stoked. Until one of his friends is killed. Then an innocent man is killed, wrong place wrong time. Then it happens again.

The newspaper owner is terrified, it's gone wrong, he wants out, he wants the journalist to either kill the serial killer, or hire someone to do the job for him. If the journalist doesn't agree to working with the owner to extract themselves from the mess, and now growing public outrage, the owner will hire lawyers and give him up to the police.

The journalist has to make a decision about who he must kill. The serial killer, or his boss.

Or. the serial killer dies at the height of his fame, the journalist finds him dead at a murder scene, and the journalist decides to hide the serial killer's body and continue his work.

Maybe.

So anyway, I wasn't intending to outline most of the story to you, but once you get started explaining something like that, it's hard not to pile on the detail.

I pitched that idea to a couple of producers in 2007 who kind of liked the idea but said it was impossible to pull off as a movie because the whole basic plot was so unrealistic. A journalist hiring someone to commit murders so his newspaper had murders to report on? Fucking ridiculous. Yeah, it was. I already knew that, which is probably why I never wrote anything more on it than a couple of screenplay outlines, and a few trial chapters of the novel.

The point of all that, is this story from today's headlines :

A Brazilian TV host ordered murders and then presented exclusive stories about the crimes on his show, police say.

Wallace Souza built up a huge audience on the program Canal Livre by regularly obtaining dramatic film of police raids and arrests, The Sun reports. "Investigations indicate they created scenes themselves," a police chief said. "They determined which crimes would be committed in order to generate news for the program."

The TV presenter is charged with murder, gun possession, drug trafficking and threatening witnesses.

Who thought something as nuts as that above outline would actually turn out to be not all that far from the truth?

The true crime TV host who actually hires people to commit the crimes he can exclusively report on will be an episode of Law & Order before I get around to getting the tale down.

Doesn't matter.

I've just been inspired by CNBC to write a different kind of thriller.

This time the prime minister is the serial killer.

The prime minister's staff, naturally, want to keep the bloody goings on secret, until they start disappearing themselves. Nobody cared when it was just lobbyists who were the PM's victims.

I think I'll call it 'In Due Season.'

John Laws : "I'll Be Back (Please?)"

John Laws, fresh from his disastrous self-demolition on Melbourne radio, eyes a return to the airwaves, reports Mumbrella :

“I miss it all quite a lot. I would be telling a lie if I said I did not miss it because I do, particularly when there are issues that I would like to be involved in and make mischief.

“If somebody asked me at the right time I would probably do it because I do miss it. And I miss it when there are things going on that I think need an irreverent look.”

Laws also revealed that he still speaks to some of his regular callers, on the phone, at home. So why doesn't he record the calls and podcast them? Or simply live stream them? There's has to be a few thousand Australians who'd tune into Laws online. He could do a live broadcast over the net straight into every nursing home who'd broadcast him.

Unless he only wants to make his return for the dollars. But it doesn't sound like that. Laws sounds downright lonely, and utterly aware of his irrelevancy.

John Laws also thinks Kyle Sandilands is "annoying", "devoid of talent" and "stupid."

Remember Laws' reaction to being called an "idiot" by Neil Mitchell?

Mumbrella has more.

Turnbull Resigns...Probably

UPDATE : Malcolm Turnbull refuses to resign, preferring to drag out the humiliation and public mockery for a few weeks, or months, more. Whatever.


By Darryl Mason (channeling the recently deceased Grods)

You can read all the news and quotes about the (confirmation pending) resignation of Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull elsewhere, there is more important issues to discuss right now.

This one :



This is for you, Bren :

Get your motor running,
Head out on the highway,
Get down to the Liberal Party HQ
You can take on Abbott & Costello
(You're a doctor after all)

Yeah Bren you can make this happen,
Take the leadership in a love embrace
Fire up your cans of pensioner soup
And explode into Rudd's face
(You're a doctor after all)

You were born, born to be mild
You can fly so high
Even if you've never voted Liberal in your life


I know, I know. Just let me dream this pleasant Bren dream a little longer, before the cold moist nightmare of Tony Abbott as Liberal Party Leader begins....


.

Goodnight Cockhead

By Darryl Mason

With an ego this vast and royal and regal, and a fall so very hard and fast and public, 'the king' should probably be on suicide watch right now :



That's not fake. That's Kye Sandilands actual production company logo.

He can forget about TV and radio for the time being. 'Multimedia'? How quaint to see that word still being used. He could do a film, but from the impression you get of reading Australians' feelings towards Sandilands right now, most would only want to see the film if it ended with him giving live organ donations.

In one of the most exhilarating fuckups by a manufactured celebrity, Kyle Sandilands has lost his main sponsors, the corporations that pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to be associated with his Brand.

Sandilands has also lost his 'Number One' radio show and his gig on Australian Idol. His name, his Brand, has plunged in value to advertisers. He's just another loudmouth obnoxious fuckwit to most Australians now he doesn't have these high-profile gigs anymore. He might as well be a blogger.

Sandilands corporate sponsors, of course, wanted him to be controversial, they wanted him to grab headlines for outrageous behaviour, for going off, for doing the stuff that teenagers might think is cool, even if, or because, much of it was cruel.

But no corporation with shareholders wants someone they're paying six figures to to suddenly have their name, their Brand, anywhere near endless headlines that throb ugly with the words '14 YEAR OLD GIRL' and 'RAPE SCANDAL'.

As far as corporate advertisers go, Sandilands might as well have been caught frotting a pregnant panda that he'd just bludgeoned to death with a handful of puppies.

The media, every branch and wing of it, has gone hard on this story. It's rare you see such a public crucifixion by the media of one of their own biggest stars, even one who hammered in his own nails.

It's been an online orgy for the Murdoch media in particular, and a successful one, with huge viewerships, and comment counts raging beyond 500 for multiple stories. And this time, they didn't have to print unverified old titty photos and claim, on the promise of self-sackings if they were wrong, that the nipples belonged to Pauline Hanson, to get such heavy traffic and ad revenue zing.

Sandilands did all of this to himself, and his genuinely weird attempt to explain himself in The Punch, acting like he wasn't in control of his own show and hey, he knows people that have been raped, so....only further fuelled and fevered the coverage, and the (probably temporary) destruction of his career.


Media Watch last night revealed an episode of incredible cruelty and humiliation heaped onto genuinely upset young people, all of it totally refereed by Sandilands. What he did to these two young women is far worse than his moronic attempt to get a laugh out of a rape confession by asking, "was that your only (sexual) experience?"


As far as I'm concerned, Kyle Sandilands should have known he was doomed from the moment he decided to fuck with Ernie Dingo.

.

RIP Grods : 2004 - 2009

By Darryl Mason

Andrew Bolt on Twitter actually breaks a story of great importance :

The blog that made my friend Tim Blair cry and phone his lawyers (http://www.grods.com/) is gone.

It's true. Grods is gone. "Teh End", as editor in chief Scott Bridges puts it, in this final, poignant, fleshlight-free Grods post.

If you don't know what Grods is, or was, it's too late now. It's over. Gone.

Well, not completely gone. Grods has been archived with the National Library of Australia. Here's the NLA's description of Grods :

Grods Corp is a blog with many contributors from around Australia and the world. It comments on all aspects of Australian and international culture, including political, media, environmental and societal issues.

No mention of fleshlights.

But to get a heaped dinner plate full-flavoured idea of what Grods was, and what it achieved in its five years online, it's best to turn to these actual testimonials from readers, which were proudly displayed on the now disappeared site :

“Internet elitist.”
- Tim Blair

“Your kind of blog makes my stomach churn. Why am I reading it then? I don’t know…"
- Fimsy

“Orthographic Nazi.”
– Iain Hall

“You’ve been pretty boring for weeks, and I use you as my principal source of leftist-oriented entertainment.”
– Strider

“Mindless, fascist-driven drivel”
– Prodos

“GrodsCrap”
– Prodos

“some internet dump”
– Tim Blair twice!

“Wow. What a post. Most (sic) be a new low… even for this site.”
– Bob

“Grodscum”
– Rebellion

“sad flaccid amoeba”
– Elijah

“Your website is a disgrace, a bunch of ego inflated wannabe’s casting judgement on situations you know nothing about”
– Julie

“Brendan Nelson tragic in denial”
– Club Troppo

“…brought the scribbling on public toilet walls into the computer age”
– Josh

“hyper-intelligent lefties”
– J.F. Beck “

"This blog post is the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s badness creates a vortex.”
– Cormorant

“[GrodsCorp] is 100% abuse and mostly fiction”
– Dr (sic) John “TingTong”

“bastion of immaturity and sex fetishes”
– Private Tom

[Scott is a] modern-day totalitarian socialist vegetarian"
– ;;;;

[GrodsCorp] is 100% abuse and mostly fiction”
– Dr (sic) John “TingTong” Ray

"intellectually baron"
- Albi

“This post, and its comment thread, exemplifies the problem with this whole blog: an inability to move beyond the politics of the playground.”
– daddy dave

“left-wing hate site”
– J.F. Beck

“Why don’t you GrodsCorp or rather GrotsCreeps, FREAKS get a life. You lefty retarded commo zombies belong in a zoo… Do everyone a favour and go jump in an active volcano or stay in the sewers where you belong!”
– Paul Johansenn

“No wonder you guys have no cred, you’re all assholes. You treat people with contempt. Good luck getting your opinions heard, fucktards.”
- Top Country Boy

Grods was all of the above, and more :

Death By Wanking

This is an example, from the BloggingCatGate Scandal of earlier this year, of the usual quality of comments to be found at Grods :


(click to enlarge)

Club Wah pays tribute.

As does The Bastard Son.

The former editor in chief of Grods, Scott Bridges, is now writing for New Matilda and Crikey and has a great writing career ahead of him. The Orstrahyun wishes this socialist, totalitarian vegetarian, and internet elitist, the best of all luck, and safe travels.


I miss Grods already. I'm sure Brendan Nelson feels the same way.

The Australian blogstream just got a whole lot more boring.

John Laws Stars In A Staggering On Air Meltdown

By Darryl Mason

If you spent the mornings of your early school years in the 1970s getting dressed and breakfasted in a household in suburban Sydney, you very likely endured hearing John Laws' voice gruffing through the house most mornings.

Even at five years old, it was easy to know that John Laws was an arsehole.

The former king of Australian radio did a lot of great charity work during his five decades on air, he often counselled elderly, lonely people, but he also spent a lot of his time shouting at those who bothered to call in, abusing them, humiliating them. He incited racism and intolerance. His shows could often be extremely nasty and vindictive. But he was king. He could call anyone whatever he wanted, and he did. It's good to be the king.

That was then.

Now? John Laws is retired, and clearly bored. He decided to zero in on a recent comment made by Melbourne talk radio's Neil Mitchell, where he supposedly called Laws "an idiot" and someone who had clearly been involved in "grubby" behaviour, particularly during the Cash For Comments scandal. Laws called into Mitchell's program to demand an apology.

Mitchell didn't have to induce Laws into humiliating himself live on air. The former "Golden Tonsils" provided a pre-full-dementia self-demolition as he struggled to comprehend how anyone could think he'd ever done anything wrong. Ever.

If Laws had not treated so many people so abominably, for so many years, it would be quite sad to hear this old man - who was a hero just about every male neighbour, relative or school teacher, over 30, that I encountered during my childhood - struggling to remember what he said only a minute or two before.

Idiot John Laws Takes Incredible Offence At Being Called An Idiot

By the end of the conversation, Laws seems to understand what a fool he has just made of himself. Neil Mitchell clearly gave the presumably near-senile Laws ample opportunities to get out of the embarrassing phone call, but Laws kept going, to the point where he actually started whining and threatening legal action.

And yet, two years ago, during the following Media Watch exchange, Laws seemed all but completely on top of his game in justifying himself, despite believing that accepting money to praise corporations on air that he had only recently criticised - cash for comments - was not deceiving his listeners.



Anonymous Lefty :

Another lesson from this: if you’re a news media figure who has a prominent platform in the national debate, and you start threatening people with defamation, you look like a complete and utter hypocrite and buffoon. You become an object of mockery and derision. You lose professional credibility.

Look at how idiotic Laws sounded when he tried the stunt. A fearless crusader for truth, threatening to UNLEASH THE LAWYERS because someone called him a mean name?

The Chaser's take on John Laws :



Another icon of the John Howard generation stumbles and falls, stripped of his power. He won't be the last.

"Basically, You're A Commercial Wanker"

By Darryl Mason

Let's not go all the way over Kyle Sandilands seriously gruesome attempt to get a laugh - "is that you're only (sexual) experience?" - out of a 14 year old girl's confession that she'd been raped when she was 12.

Instead, let's revisit an earlier episode of on air fuckwittery from this violent idiot.

To start, below is a song from Frenzal Rhomb. The lead singer, Jay Whalley, didn't take shit from fuckwits, which didn't do a lot for his professional music career. Of course, it never does.



Frenzal Rhomb had a very dedicated audience. Entering the mosh pit at a Frenzal Rhomb festival gig in the 1990s was like plunging into a cyclone made of humans.

It was intense on a scale that you wound up so pummelled, battered and out of breath you thought you might die, but didn't care.

If Frenzal Rhomb were about to start a show, the crowd was already wired, thumping to go. That was never a good time for a corporate radio personality, basically the enemy of Australian punk rock, to step onstage and start talking. Enter Kyle Sandilands' radio partner, Jackie O. :



Jackie O, already hours late for her 'host' duties at the music festival in WA, was heckled by the crowd and the band, and probably the roadies, music journalists, parents of members of other bands who'd played that day....basically, "Get the fuck off the stage!"

And she didn't go.

Frenzal Rhomb tried to get Jackie O. off the stage, where she was dying the worst kind of onstage death there is (not knowing how monumentally everyone there just wants you to disappear), and they were not polite about it. Then again, why should they have been? Jackie O. was a no show for the whole day, and suddenly there she is, getting in the way of the fucking gig.

To Kyle Sandilands (proof positive that having the personality of a deranged guinea pig will not stop you from enjoying a successful career in radio), Frenzal Rhomb had insulted Jackie O. So he decided to take on the Rhomb's Jay Whalley in the one arena where Sandilands knew he could beat the the little punk into a quivering mess. One the phone, on his own radio show.

What a goose.



Whalley winds up Sandilands, easily, over many minutes, leading into the ultimate denouncement of a fake like Sandilands, who entertains a fantasy that he is a maverick in the music industry, and nobody's slave. Whalley tells Sandilands he is the enemy of good music in Australia, music that is about something, that means something, that he is commercial radio lackey, and it snaps Sandilands mind.

UPDATE : Actually, I think I like this stain wiping by Ernie Dingo better :

Get Rooted, All Of You

If you were watching Spicks & Specks earlier this week and you were being driven mad by how much you were absolutely sure you knew the voice of the lead singer of the band Root! but you couldn't remember where you'd heard the singer's voice before because he didn't look familiar and how the hell could you know that voice so well but not know the face? and dammit! you were this close to remembering, but were also far too groxed to attempt even the most basic of googling, the singer of Root!, Damien Cowell, was formerly the main singer, rapper, punk poet, songwriter and genius-shadowed cultural eflluviant of TISM, Humphrey B Flaubert.

Some more Root!



I didn't know Tex Perkin's real name was Greg.

The End Of The War...The Funny One, Anyway

By Darryl Mason

Do you know who this beautiful, bronzed young man is?



What about now?



You'll have to watch The Chaser's last War On Everything tonight to find out why Chas Licciardello did this to himself, but here's the recipe for his 50% full body makeover :

Licciardello has had 34 Botox injections, eight Restylane lip injections, teeth whitening, four coats of spray tan, hair and eyebrow bleaching, and leg and chest waxing.

The Botox, fat lips and tan will take up to two months to wear off.

And he did it, just to make you laugh.

The last show is easily one of their best. They saved some of their most hilariously outrageous bits for the finale. The stigmata segment is deliriously gruesome, very, very bloody. If it doesn't get cut.

At last night's taping, a few moments before the end, The Chaser team watch, on monitors, the final segment that will close the show :



(click to enlarge)

Is the final bit of the final War On Everything funny enough?



Yes, it is.


Chris Taylor said they'd pulled off something like 180 public stunts over 50-something episodes. An extraordinary amount of work, considering one gag in tonight's episode - a crowd of tourists at Circular Quay each try to get a passer-by to take "just one more photo" - chewed up an entire morning for about a minute of screen time.

While The Chaser's War On Everything ends on Australian TV tonight, outside of 11pm repeats on ABC2 (for decades to come), the best bits that are not too confusing to Americans and the British are being screened right now, in the US and England, with sales of the series rolling in from plenty of other countries around the world. For all those who attempt to claim The War On Everything was a waste of taxpayers' money, the syndication of the series and warehouse emptying DVD sales will prove the low-budget Chaser series turned out to be very profitable indeed.

Chas said they have no idea of exactly what they will do next, but whatever it is the five of them will stay together. There will be no Chaser equivalent of the KISS solo albums. At least until it's time for a violent, hate-drenched break-up, followed by years of sniping and feuding, before the inevitable reunion.

The War On Everything set just before it was dismantled :







It was a great War, lots of laughs and nobody died.


Julian Morrow has promised The Orstrahyun an interview in the next couple of weeks, a sort of look back over the four years of The Chaser. If he bails, the questions part of the interview will be conducted, in due season, through Rose Tattoo's mammothic PA, on the back of a truck, parked outside Morrow's home. At 2am. On a weeknight.

I'll have a story up here soon about the location shooting of the "Just One More Photo" gag that airs tonight.

Few seem to have heard of Big Train, a brilliant sketch comedy show from Britain in the late 1990s. Did it never air on SBS or ABC?

A few friends told me this often twisted attempt to reinvent sketch comedy, or put it out of its misery, was an acquired taste, it was too strange and obscure and it often made the viewer have to think too hard to get at the laughs, I told them they were wankers :



More Big Train here

Police Enjoy Excellent Free Rock Festival At Byron Bay With Smiling Happy People

By Darryl Mason

The NSW government missed yet another golden opportunity to raise a couple of hundred dollars in taxes over the weekend.

More than 200 people were caught with drugs at the Splendour in the Grass music festival...

Out of a crowd of 17,500 people. In Byron Bay. At a music festival where the Hilltop Hoods, Happy Mondays and Living End were playing.

One-hundred-and-twenty people were ordered to face court on drug charges, while another 89 were let off with a caution for having cannabis.

From the cautions issued by police to "Shit! I can't believe I left that in my pocket!" cannabis carriers at some of the festivals this year, it would appear you can get busted with no more than two cigarette-sized joints and not get fined, or have to turn up at court.

Police should ditch the cannabis 'cautions' altogether and thank the festival goers for not getting violently fucked out of their minds on alcohol. Ask a police officer who'd they'd rather deal with : a giggling kebab-obsessed cannabis user, or someone so savagely drunk and fired with aggro that even a taser to the nuts doesn't wind them down.

Put it this way, there are few, if any, cannabis-related glassings.

If the NSW government granted a permit to music festival organisers so vendors could, under police supervision, sell, say, two moderately strong joints, or happy cookies, to each ticket holder over 18, taxed at the same rate the government taxes alcohol sales, at least $200,000 would have been raised.

Similar rules for drink driving would also apply to cannabis imbibers.

The majority of people who now attend expensive music festivals don't want to bucket a quarter ounce in an afternoon, or get blitzed on scuds the size of wallpaper rolls. They want a couple of puffs, or a few bites of a brownie, to help kick the music along.

Then Wayne Swann and Malcolm Turnbull could sway together at Simon & Garfunkel without being criminals.

Random photo from my archive so Kevin Rudd's head doesn't appear in the top story on this blog during all the hours it takes for me to get around to stealing more content from John Hartigan :

How Did You Hang On For So Long?

So there is an explanation for why prime minister Kevin Rudd appears so uptight.

Twitter :



Thanks to friends in high school, I will probably laugh out loud every time I hear the words "laying cable" on the news, during all the years ahead that it takes to complete the high speed broadband network.

"..............."

Malcolm Turnbull reminds Howard-era Liberals that an emissions trading system was also part of John Howard's plans for Australia to sign up to the Global Carbon Tax so favoured by Rothschilds and Murdochs alike :

"We've already experienced one election on climate change so we know what …"

Yes, what?

"....so we know what...."

Yes, Malcolm? What?

Mr Turnbull argues internally that the Coalition would be savaged in an early, double dissolution election on climate change and he started to say this publicly yesterday before checking himself.

I thought he was having a Life Of Brian moment :

Brian: And to them only shall be given...to them only...shall...be...given......

Woman in crowd: What?

Brian: Hm?

Woman in crowd: Shall be given what?

Brian: Oh, nothing.

Woman in crowd: Hey, what were you going to say?

Brian: Nothing!

All crowd: Yes, you were!

Woman in crowd: Yes, you were going to say something!

Brian: No, I wasn't, I'd finished!

Man in crowd III: Ah, come on, tell us before you go!

Brian: I wasn't going to say anything, I'd finished!

Blind man: What won't he tell?

Man in crowd III: He won't say.

Blind man: It is a secret!

Man in crowd II: I know.

Blind man: Is it?

Man in crowd II: It must be, otherwise he'd tell us.

Man in crowd III: Oh, tell us!

Yes Malcolm, tell us!


.

It's 9/11 X 1.5

If all hospitals had to put up a sign out front revealing how many people died last year in its wards due to "errors" - that is dying from a condition they did not have when they entered the hospital - they would probably not be quite so crowded :

Hospital errors claim the lives of 4550 Australians a year, equivalent to the death toll from 13 jumbo jets crashing and killing all on board, says a report to the Government which urges sweeping reforms of the health system.

4550 sounds bad, obviously, because it is. It's fucking appalling. But does breaking that figure up into deaths per week read even more horrifying?

'The equivalent of 87 Australians dying in hospitals due to "errors" each and every week.'

87 "oh shit, they just died" deaths every seven days.

Per day?

'12 Australians die per day in hospitals due to "errors".'

12 people a day is a shocking lot, but 4550 deaths each year still reads more dramatic, even though it's the same thing.

....savings of $1 billion a year could be made if problems including hospital-borne infections, medication mix-ups, drug side effects and patient falls were only halved.

Such "adverse events" are estimated to have affected about 16 per cent of people admitted.

"Adverse events" = "Oh shit, someone fucked up."

It's easy to imagine that large city hospitals, trying to care for hundreds of people at the same time, battling rupturing budgets, lawsuits and MRSA bacterium invasions, will be history within the next couple of decades.

Get used to the words "Home Care" because it will soon be part of your medical reality, if it's not already.

Harry Patch : War Is "The Calculated And Condoned Slaughter Of Human Beings"



Harry Patch, the last veteran of World War One's European slaughter has died, aged 111.

Here was a man who knew better than most that war is about one thing above all else - depopulation, of all sides.

From Your New Reality, July 2007 :

Harry Patch remains haunted by the Battle of Passchendaele, where three thousand young Britons were killed or wounded every single day, for almost 100 days straight.

Harry Patch's comments should be etched in the stone of every war memorial :

"Too many died. War isn't worth one life," said Mr Patch.

He said war was the "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".

During the three months of fighting Harry Patch experienced in France in 1917, the heaviest rains in 30 years churned mud so thick, men and horses drowned in it.

Mr Patch also paid his respects to the tens of thousands of young Germans who died in the same fields as his friends.

"The Germans suffered the same as we did," he said.

Harry Patch commenting during a ceremony at a Flanders field war cemetery, July 2007:

“Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left."

And now there are none.

Harry Patch's Memories Of The Flanders Battlefield

Still my favourite love song :



I checked the lyrics, I've been singing it wrong, there's no line that goes "Hot Diggity Now."

Pandemic Flu : 'The Biological Tsunami'

The Howard government spent hundreds of millions of dollars preparing for a deadly influenza pandemic through late 2005 and 2006. Anti-viral stockpiling was ramped up, large-scale rehearsals for government and emergency departments responses to a pandemic outbreak were held, millions of dollars were given to privately owned vaccine manufacturers to increase their ability to pump out alleged flu vaccines in the millions of doses for the (then) coming day when mass vaccination programs would be unveiled...

Compared to current health minister, Nicola Roxon, then health minister Tony Abbott was Mr Doom, and pandemic flu Fearmonger In Chief. He also happened to be mostly right.

From Lateline, September 13, 2005 (excerpts) :

TONY JONES: In a little publicised speech at an infectious diseases conference several months ago, the Health Minister Tony Abbott spelled out the worst-case scenario for a global avian flu pandemic. As you'll hear, contingency planning is well advanced in this country, though many thousands of deaths are still anticipated, along with the potential for social and economic chaos in a health crisis that could last six months or more....

TONY JONES : Now, would you agree that preparing this country for a possible avian flu pandemic could well be the most important job you ever do as a politician?

TONY ABBOTT: ....We don't know if a pandemic will happen, we don't know when one might happen, but if one does happen it will be a public health disaster, the magnitude of which this country has not seen at least since 1919 when we had the last flu pandemic.

....back in 1919, Australia had a Spanish flu pandemic outbreak and that killed some 13,000 Australians, in a then population of about 4 million and at different times in the first half of 1919, schools were closed, churches were closed, places of public gathering were off limits. Normal life had pretty much ceased in large parts of Australia. We have little folk memory of this thoug...

TONY JONES: You've actually said and referred to it in this way - that what a new pandemic might be like would be a sort of biological tsunami?

TONY ABBOTT: That's correct, because if we have a pandemic of the severity of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1819, many, many tens of millions of people could die in the absence of effective prophylaxis and treatment and while we are reasonably confident that antivirals can be effective in preventing people from getting the disease, there's nothing like the kind of antiviral stockpile anywhere in the world that will fully protect people....

TONY JONES: ....Hugh White has told us that the threat of a flu pandemic to Australia makes the threat of terrorism really pale into insignificance. Do you agree with him?

TONY ABBOTT: I don't think that the threat of terrorism is something that we should take lightly and there is an element of horror in man killing his fellow man, which is absent from things which are truly acts of God. But still, there is no doubt about it. A pandemic if it hits Australia and it is of the severity of the 1918 outbreak, will potentially kill many thousands of people and it's hard to imagine any terrorist attack - short of a nuclear bomb in a major city - that would have a comparable impact.

TONY JONES: I understand the quarantine arrangements that you have are quite extensive, six times 500-bed facilities, is that the case? Where would they be and how quickly could they be put in place?

TONY ABBOTT: Basically we are prepositioning the equipment necessary to stock these quarantine centres and the quarantine centres will be close by international airports.

TONY JONES: Do you think we've got our priorities right here? We have spent hundred and hundreds of millions of dollars and perhaps nearly $1 billion on border security relating to terrorism. Have we spent anywhere near that much as what you admit theoretically would be a far worse outcome if a pandemic occurred?

TONY ABBOTT: We have spent everything that we can usefully spend so far, Tony. We've got on a per capita basis just about the world's largest stockpile of antivirals. We are working very hard and as quickly as we can on a candidate pandemic vaccine. We're prepositioning these quarantine centres. We've got our national pandemic plan in place in consultation with the states and territories. We are close to achieving our stockpile of masks and syringes. So all the money that we need to spend on preparedness that we can usefully currently spend we have spent.

TONY JONES: How detailed, though, is the emergency plan? Do you have plans to evacuate cities? Do you have plans as happened back in the turn of the century, or during the First World War outbreak? Do you have plans to close down public facilities, theatres, even possibly public transport?

TONY ABBOTT: Again Tony, that would depend upon the particular virulence of the outbreak. Certainly we have plans for an escalating health response, including mobile teams, home quarantine, home treatment, so that only the very serious cases have to go to public hospitals.

The Rudd government response appears, for now, to be following the pandemic response plans drawn up in 2005 and 2006.

But will the Rudd government give vaccine makers the same immunity from prosecution for deaths, side effects and illnesses (that may result from its pandemic flu vaccine), that the Howard government was willing to grant back CSL in 2006?



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I'm Offended, And So Is My Dog

The video :



The Offended :

Guide Dogs Queensland chief executive Chris Laine said her organisation had received a number of complaints from offended clients and had passed them on to ABC management and The Chaser team.

Ms Laine said of particular concern was the episode's title and the "incorrect and debasing suggestion that guide dogs can be used to accommodate irresponsible and drunken behaviour".

"In doing this skit, the Chasers have not only offended and degraded the work and dedication of guide dog schools around the world, but also the courage and commitment shown everyday by the many clients who use a guide dog."

I think the many blind people who have to tolerate fuckwits coming up to them pissed out of their minds shouting, "Hey, I'm so ratshit I need a guide dog, too! Hah hah ha!" would have understood what The Chaser were aiming for.

But this reaction, like that surrounding The Chaser's spluttering outrage-inciting skit about dying children asking for wishes beyond a charity's budget, helps to explain why Australian TV comedy is generally quite boring. It's been tamed. Whipped into submission.

I'm not quite sure what satire is supposed to be if it doesn't sometimes cause offence and disgust along with the laughs. Or because of the laughs. Do you really want to see satirical television that only allows you to laugh at that which you already think is funny?

Anyway, you'd think if anyone was going to be offended, it would be footpath-weaving drunks : "You shittiizh, I dun need no freakuning Dog! to get me..........Home! fukuuuzall. I cun walk it....bastards....watch me! lookit I'm walkun straighhht...ow, stupid pole."

The Chaser's War On Everything has one episode left to go.

Bob Brown On Claims Jimi Hendrix Was Murdered

A new book claims Jimi Hendrix was force-fed pills and red wine by his manager, or someone hired by his manager, and then asphyxiated by choking on his own vomit. In September, 1970, Greens leader Bob Brown was working as an intern in a London hospital when the already dead body of Hendrix arrived in casualty. Bob Brown did not pronounce Hendrix dead, but he did break the news to the media waiting outside.

From an interview on Radio 2GB :

Bob Brown "Hendrix was brought into St Marys hospital in South Kensington....I'd just graduated from Sydney University as a young doctor, I went to London....I was doing locum, and I happened to be in the casuality at St Mary's Abbott when Jimi Hendrix was brought in. The man had been dead some time. The supposition is that he had died from an overdose, early in the morning, and this was quite a few hours later, so there was no revival possible.

"It's a long bow to draw (that Hendrix was murdered). Of course the circumstantial evidence has long been gone, I have absolutely no opinion or information that would help one way or the other. It was an enormous tragedy at the time.

"It wasn't as if there was something to be done about (Hendrix's death). There simply wasn't...any medical remedy. And as to what police investigations took place at the time, I've got no knowledge of that."

You can hear the Bob Brown 2GB interview here.