RuddRagers thought they had found and noted and ranted and whined about every last fault they could or would ever possibly think of when it came to the prime minister. They were wrong.

The photo :



The comment :

....who else holds a hot dog like that?

There is the brink of petty, and then there is the abyss.

Charlie Brooker on why the contestants for Britain's Next Prime Minister seem so hollow :

Two-faced contempt is the basic mode of operation for many newspapers: mindwarping shitsheets filled with selective reporting and audacious bias. The popular press is a shrill, idiotic, bullying echo chamber; a hopelessly poisoned Petri dish in which our politicians seem resigned to grow. Little wonder they develop glaringly artificial public guises. Picking a modern leader boils down to a question of which false persona you prefer.

Luckily we don't have that problem in Australia. Our politicians would never develop false personas designed to please the media, before the people. That would be UnAustralian.

Looks like this John Clarke and Brian Dawe bit is circulating online as a real current affairs interview, starring an Australian politician struggling to spin his way through a massive oil spill,. Which is just brilliant, really :



(via @clubwah)

Nipples = Clickbait

Back in the 1970s, Rupert Murdoch's mum put her foot down and refused to let her son publish topless pics in his Australian tabloids, as he was doing to great success in Britain. That ban has stayed in place ever since, denying generations of Australian newspaper readers some nipples with their breakfast, or morning tea break.

Until, that is, the arrival of the News.com.au 'After Dark Special Edition'.

1am :



9am :



News.com.au's 'After Dark Special Edition', for insomniacs and really early risers. But only until Rupert's mum wakes up.


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Stories I've Been Reading :

New Scientist : Adverse Reactions To Australian 'Triple Flu' Vaccine Seen In Less Than 0.5% Of Vaccinated Children

One Mile Down In Gulf Of Mexico, 'Failsafe' Systems At WellHead Fail Completely, Now Hydraulics Won't Work, Oil Continues To Pour Into Gulf, Will Obama Nuke It?

Nick Clegg, January 2009 : Israel Must Be Punished For Its War On Gaza, UK Must Stop Selling Israel Weapons

Obama Waited A Week, Just Like Bush, To Get Geared Up For Major Disaster Response

Obama's War On Wall Street Carves $21 Billion Dollar Hole In Goldman Sachs

Pervy Humans Force Animals To Fuck In Public At Zoos Because They're Denied The Right To Privacy....No, Really

Publishing Books In China : "It's Not As Controlled As You Might Think" - But Nothing On Islam Or The Dalai Lama Allowed

Flying Killer Robots Via Videogame Controls May Result In Real World War Crimes - CIA Drone Pilots Liable For Prosecution In Countries Where Attacks Occur

The United States Wasn't Under Threat From The Soviets In The 1980s, They Made It All Up, To Keep The War Industry Alive

If We Lose All The Bees, We Will Have To Eat Each Other

Pope Benedict XVI Has Seized Control Of Powerful, Wealthy Roman Catholic Religious Order 'The Legionaries Of Christ'

John Lennon's Across The Universe Has Been Beamed To The North Star - "Aliens Are Alien. If They Exist At All, We Cannot Assume They're Like Us"

17 Million Americans Use Twitter - Half Don't Update, They Just Read Along (Or Don't Exist)

Warren Buffett Has $5 Billion in Goldman Sachs - "It's Hard For Me To Get Terribly Sympathetic When A Bank Makes A Dumb Credit Bet"

The Green Rush Is On : This Is The Early Days Of The American Corporatisation Of Legal Cannabis

We Are Loading Up On Data Like No Generation Before Us, It Is Ruling (And Perhaps Ruining) Our Lives

Some Funeral Homes Will Pose Your Corpse, Say, On Your Favourite Motorcycle

The Age Of Self-Publishing : Three Times More Titles Were Published By Independent, Niche Book Publishers Than The Majors

President Obama Praises 'The 99', Islamic SuperHeroes Who "Embody The Tolerance Of Islam" & Who Will Soon Team Up With Superman And Spiderman

Tim Flannery : Elephants Have Raided Warehouses Where Body Parts Of Elephants Were Stored, Taken The Body Parts Back And Then Buried Them

Up, Up And Awa....Shit



An ABC News crew shot spectacular footage of the launch and subsequent crash of a new NASA space research/spy balloon in the Australian outback.

Watch The Vid Here

First news reports claimed that wind was responsible for the crash. But conditions around the Alice Springs launch site are now described as "calm".

No explanation has been offered yet for the crash of the balloon and its payload that was supposed to have soared to the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere at 50 metres a second.

"The World Thinks Australian Wine Drinkers Are Smug Wankers"

Mumbrella cites the below Jacob's Creek ad, screened internationally, as one of the most hated, most utterly despised Australian ads of last year, if not of all time. The Mumbrella YouTube channel, where this cloying drivel is embedded, is awash with brutal, violent comments from around the world, including this one :

"If I were at that party, I’d smash that Jacob’s Creek bottle and jam it into his throat"

And this one :

"What a complete fucking cunt that bloke is. He needs to be savagely raped with that wine bottle whilst his equally detestable stable of middle class cunt friends need shooting too."

Over the top? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Until I watched it :



Mumbrella has collected more comments on how much this ad has made the world hate Australians here.


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An impressive collection of The Best Movie Posters Of 2009. Who says a movie poster can't be art? This is one of my favourites, and induced me to see a movie I otherwise would not have bothered to check out, which of course is the whole point of a great movie poster :



Dozens More Here

Australian born novelist Peter Carey, now living in New York City, explains Australia to the New York Times :

“This is a country that began with the most enormous trauma, and things like that stick around. History matters. For the people who settled there, it really was like being sent to Mars. They were an outcast lot — not just the prisoners, but the soldiers who guarded them. You were not a very successful soldier if you got sent there.

"So you grew up with the notion of the convict stain — people really talked about that. And that’s the power of the story of Ned Kelly: it’s really about the possibility of a people who seem to have no possibility.

“A trauma like that leaves enormous amounts of self-hatred, and we carry that degree of damage. It’s not inconceivable that a country like this would be a little unsure of itself culturally. You wouldn’t be nuts to feel insecure.”

Stories I've Been Reading Instead Of Writing Blog Posts Here :

In Australia, You're More Likely To Be Beaten By Drunks Or Sexually Assaulted In A Place Of Worship Than In Strip Clubs Or Brothels

Ratings Agencies Conspired With The Worst Of Wall Street To Defraud Investors

Pat Tillman : How Journalists Betrayed Americans By Publishing War Industry Propaganda

British Right Wing Media Has A Nervous Breakdown Over Nick Clegg

The Future Of Online Business Development - The Lean Start-Up

"Elephants Have Been Losing The Battle For Survival For The Last 50,000 Years - Since Humans Started Leaving Africa"

The Buck Stops With News Limited In The Melbourne Storm Scandal

For The First Time In A Decade, Rupert Murdoch Is About To Be Locked Out Of British Politics

European Royalty, Alive And Living Well In New York City

US Troops, Defeated By Taliban, Retreat From Remote Afghanistan Outpost

No Explanation, Yet, For How Potentially Fatal Fungus Found In Australian Eucalyptus Trees Reached North America

Democrats & Republicans Agree That War-Born Militant Populist Movements Must Be Smashed

James Cameron On Avatar 2 : "Not Only Is It Good Business, It's Good For The Environment"

The British Ministry Of Defence Have Been Ordered By A Court To Pay Iran More Than $700 Million For Decades Old Dodgy Arms Deal

Why Old Media And Social Media Don't Get Along

"Its a primitive game sometimes"







Via Reddit

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

ANZAC Day in a Sydney nursing home :

The Australian Piles On The Lawyers To Hide Its Secrets

Amazing :

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

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

Your Right To Know?

Not in this case.

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

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




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



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

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

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

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

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



A couple of Australian images made the list.

Slaughterhouse photo by Tommaso Ausili

More Winners Of The Sony World Photography Awards 2010

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


(click to enlarge)

"Good Headline, Boss!"

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

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

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

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





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

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

That's gonna hurt.

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

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