Aporkalypse, Please

By Darryl Mason

The first confirmed case of an Australian with swine flu, actually in Australia - but she had it in the US and claims she was no longer sick or showing symptoms when she boarded a plane to come home - is announced to massive media freakout on a slow news day.

So how did the Saturday 5pm news on Channel 10 in Sydney deal with one confirmed case of Australian Has Swine Flu! as the first story of the bulletin, without being too dramatic? Cut to newsreader questioning Some Expert :

Newsreader : Is it time to panic?

Some Expert : No.

It's like the declarations from government health departments and the World Health Organisation warning us, "Don't Panic!" as though there will come a time of "Fuck Yes, Panic Now!" announcements.

Newsreader : Health Minister, there are now 2000 confirmed cases of ManBirdPig Flu in Australia, with dozens of deaths. Is it time now for the Australian public to panic?

Health Minister : "Yes. Yes I do think the time has come for everyone to panic."

Newsreader : Are you panicking right now?"

Health Minister : "Yes. I am panicking. This is me in a state of panic."

Newsreader : "Sorry, minister, I couldn't hear you clearly over what sounds like breaking waves and a game of beach volleyball in the background there."

Health Minister (off) : "....close the fucking door, Wayne!"

Newsreader : "Minister?"

Health Minister : "Sorry, it was...the TV...in my hotel room...in Canberra."

Newsreader : "Just how should the Australian people panic, minister? Should they go all out bat fucking shit crazy, and start killing their neighbours and salting their corpses for future meals when quality food will be scarce? Or should we remain in homes for a third month and watch TV and shiver just a little at this news and make little defeated wincing, sighing and choking-sob noises instead?"

Health Minister : "I'd advise against the gathering and preserving of other working families for later consumption, at this time. It is in the interest of all Australians to remain calm even as we move through this state of obvious and prolonged panic."

Newsreader : "So you're saying the Australian people should stay calm but feel free to panic?"

Health Minister : "Yes, as long as your frantic panic is confined to your home, and you don't break anything and you don't start grabbing your family members by the shoulders and shaking them as you scream 'God hates us! He really does!' over and over again until you fall exhausted and dehydrated to the floor."

Newsreader : "So we can panic, but we need to remain calm in our panic?"

Health Minister : "Yes, that's exactly correct."

Newsreader : "Thank you."

Health Minister : "Thank you."

Newsreader : "In other news, the NRL is reeling after more group sex allegations surfaced, but this time no females were involved..."

Health Minister (off) : "...that's what I told that clue-bat worthy idiot. I just can't believe how fucking doomed they all are back there."

Newsreader : "..........I'm sorry, it appears the health minister's microphone is still on and we are trying to get the..."

Health Minister (off) : "....well you tell Kev he should have thought about packing his own frigging hair dryer before we evacuated. And another thing, Wayne, if I'm going to be staying here for six months, I want a bungalow right on the beach, goddammit. I'm not spending half a year in Vanuatu living in some damp shack a half kay back from the frigging beach."

Newsreader : "In breaking news, the federal government and opposition have announced the relocation of Parliament to a well-defended, heavily stockpiled island in Vanuatu, for the immediate future."

I think there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of people in Australia who have picked up the swine flu virus in the past five weeks or so, and because they are used to dealing with flu symptoms most years without feeling the need or urgency to see a doctor, they don't know they picked it up, suffered briefly and with no mammothic discomfort, and are now feeling much better.

It's a flu, one that will probably prove more fatal to those it infects than seasonal Influenza A viruses usually do, but it does not deliver vastly different symptoms than those 'usual' flu. You'll only know you've got or had ManBirdPig Flu once you've been tested by a doctor.

If the New Flu made your nose change into a snout, or made you puke out the inside of your own leg, then yes, it would be obvious you'd picked up H1N1 and dozens of people a week would be announced to have become infected.

Even if H1N1 turns into a pandemic and kills 2% of everyone it infects, these deaths are not going to happen all in one week or month or probably not even in the same year.

Twenty or thirty thousand Australians dying from HumanBirdPig Flu over 18 months will be big news, and the changes to the most basic functioning of society from widespread absenteeism will be monumental and unavoidable, but the deaths, if they come, will come in waves, across those many months.

With constant nightly news attention focused around the spread of a virus that is killing hundreds a week, even the news of an ongoing pandemic will get old for most, or will want to be mostly avoided by those who have already lost friends and family to the virus.

A pandemic killing tens of thousands of Australians in a year will be one of the biggest stories of the century, but it will be one of the hardest for the media to cover, respectfully, and without hysteria, and also maintain interest in.

The science is difficult, the lies and deceptions from governments about what is actually going on will be monumental and the visuals of people lining up outside hospitals, or bodies being carried from homes, the mass funerals, the quarantined being interviewed from behind their living room windows, and barren city streets and squares, will quickly become boring to most viewers.

A pandemic is not a fast moving story, at least not fast enough for the speed of today's news, it will crawl along, a tragedy that unfolds slowly filled mostly with intimate dramas behind the front doors of quarantined homes. And there will be months when nothing happens at all, when road accidents and heart disease deaths beat out pandemic influenza for 'Most Deaths This Month.'

I'm sure the evening news will give us maps of Australia with death tallies for each state and territory, too, if a pandemic becomes reality, and you'll know just how serious the pandemic actually is by whether the reporter 'on the scene' will be wearing a face mask or a full biosuit, breathing like Darth Vader.


Aporkalypse Now?

Aporkalypse When?

Just, Wow

A twelve foot barrel captured in high definition super slo-mo :



(found on Digg)

I See Dead Pets....And Easy Profit

The Daily Telegraph runs one of those stupid stories about something stupid nobody's heard of before, which they can follow up on a few months from now when the publicity they gave this stupid idea has found its faithful amongst those who think it perfectly reasonable to pay $100 to hear made-up messages from their dead cat :



You don't need to pay $100 to know what the secret message your dead cat is trying to send you from beyond the grave. I'll give it to you for free. The message is this :

Feed Me.

I'm tempted to set up a Dead But Psychic Pets hotline. Not that I hear dead animals talking to me or anything....

Correction : We Are Not Under Siege From Monster Spiders

The Brisbane Times has moved fast to reassure Australians that British tabloid media reports are wrong - a Queensland town is not currently being invaded and overrun by giant, "barking" spiders :

The story was picked up by several other UK news outlets, including The Telegraph and the Irish Independent, with Sky News running it under the headline: 'Super-sized tarantulas are spinning a web of terror in a town in Australia.'

But Mr Geiszler laughed off the coverage this morning, telling brisbanetimes.com.au it had been "blown out of all proportion and massively sensationalised."

"There have been no more than 10 sightings of these spiders here," Mr Geiszler said.

"There is definitely not an invasion or a plague or anything like that."

The Brisbane Times didn't notice that it was in fact the Townsville Bulletin that began this story with a sensational report of "five "monster spiders" spotted in Bowen.

We Will Laugh At Their Coffins

Australia's most boring columnist, Gerard Henderson, thinks that The Chaser is "media".

After The Chaser boys completed some pre-new show publicity over The Vatican, Gerard Henderson unfurls a troubling little fantasy he has about what would happen, and how the ABC would respond, if The Chaser "Boys" tried to pull that kind of shit somewhere Islamic :

“The Chaser shoot was approved by ABC TV. Not all the Chaser boys got their throats cut in the resultant mob violence. Fortunately, one of The Boys was pretending to urinate in a Tehran toilet fixture display store at the time and escaped injury. He has our full support. We are certainly sad that two of The Boys did not make it safely home. But the return of The Boys’ coffins will provide an opportunity at gallows humour to match the 2007 skit by The Boy Licciardello aimed at the disabled in wheel-chairs.”

I hope Gerard wasn't touching himself inappropriately while conjuring up that fascinating little fantasy.

"Are They Leather Bound Pounds?"

Dylan Moran at the ABC Shop, Queen Victoria Building, May 3 :












Photos By Darryl Mason


He didn't want to be there. He was happy to meet his fans, but he wanted to spend more time with his family instead, it's been a busy, sold-out-show filled visit to Australia.

So Dylan Moran was sitting in a bookstore, wearing black, ruffled and scruffled, and he was grouchy.

Unfortunately no-one had a megaphone so he could clear the shop.

"Right, shop is closed. Everybody get out."

"But it's only three."

"Yes, but it's my shop."

Excellent Interview With Dylan Moran Here

Stupid Sure, But Pragmatic

As freaky as this sounds now, such a spectacle was not a completely unusual sight in the streets of outer suburban Sydney in the 1970s :

Travelling without the standard fittings, including a bonnet, lights and a conventional car battery, the Werribee man managed to draw further attention to himself by running a red light in peak hour in full view of police.

...the battery powering the car was sitting in the front passenger footwell, beside a full ashtray and a slab of bourbon cans.

He's probably more upset about losing the bourbon than the car.

A Million Typing Cats Locked In A Room Could Eventually Compose The Collected Works Of The Professional Idiot

By Darryl Mason

One of the most relevant questions ever asked by a commenter at The Professional Idiot's :



No-one bothered to reply-comment in the next nine hours to deny such a reality exists, or try to shake Arovet out of his/her apparent belief that The Professional Idiot's blog is perhaps teaming with comments from Liberal Party staffers using false names.

How anybody could ever come to believe such a thing is hard to comprehend.

The Professional Idiot may be an idiot, but he is still professional, and he would never allow his blog comments to be filled up, falsely inflated you might say, by people employed by the Liberal Party, or financial backers of the Liberal Party, to post dozens of comments a week there in a desperate attempt to try and influence public opinion, and ramp up pressure to get rid of Malcolm Turnbull.

The Professional Idiot would surely know if this kind of fakery from Liberal Party staffers and/or PR agencies was happening and would put a stop to it.

He'd have no choice but to take action.

What would Rupert think?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Professional Idiot was interviewed by John Safran on Speaking In Tongues in 2006.

John Safran : Have you ever, like, turned down money or a job based on ideological grounds?

The Professional Idiot : Ahhhhh, no.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull appeared on the Red N' Geen Kerry Report last night, and said some of the exact things ("socialists running this country") that regular commenters at The Professional Idiot have been demanding he say about the Rudd government, for months. You'd think they'd be all cheering, but no.

Bizarrely, The Professional Idiot only quoted the questions of Kerry O'Lefty (probably Pagan, too) O'Brien in this piece on Malolm Turnbull's appearance, and not one single thing the Liberal Party leader had to say. Nothing.

The Professional Idiot has campaigned through his newspaper, blog, morning TV and radio appearances for three Liberal Party leaders in a row (Howard, Nelson and now Turnbull) to end their leaderships.

I ranted on the curious way The Professional Idiot, an avowed conservative, has so successfully seeded chaos and division in the Liberal Party, for years, in this comment at Grods :

Nothing I’ve seen him write or any ’stand’ he’s taken in the past three years has swayed me of the belief that The Professional Idiot’s mission is to destroy the Liberal Party. Or at least, destroy it enough so it can be recast along his ideological lines. With his close friend Peter Costello as leader, obviously.

Every time they do what they are told to do by him, through his columns and blog and TV appearances, and when they start robo-quoting his lines to the media, the Liberal Party falls further into a heap.

The Liberal Party is his plaything, has been since he started campaigning through the Herald Sun for Howard to quit as leader a few months before the election.

The mission isn’t just to seed division amongst the Liberals, but to spread chaos and destruction.

Turnbull is trying hard to bring the Liberals into the 21st century, and The Professional Idiot just hammers away at him, day after day.

Don’t you think it’s interesting that The Professional Idiot, through his broad reach across Australian media, gets in more snarky stings and hammering blows against the Liberal Party (all through the leaderships of Howard, Nelson and Turnbull) than anyone from the Labor Party ever does?

Name just one Peak Lefty multi-media columnist, from The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, fucking anywhere, that so effectively eats away at the unity and confidence of the Liberal Party like The Professional Idiot does, day after day. Just one.

The Professional Idiot has heaped more praise and admiration on American conservatives like Sarah Palin than any conservative politician in Australia.

Rudd doesn’t give a shit if The Professional Idiot calls him SpinSpinSpin or hopeless or out of his depth or even a liar. It doesn’t make any difference. He rarely says anything about Rudd that most people don’t already think about politicians in general.

Rudd and his media team know that The Professional Idiot is doing far more damage to the Liberal Party than he is to Labor, and they love him for it.

Of course, almost none of the regular commenters at his blog appear to have any inkling, insight or knowledge of any of the above.

Which proves that comment about Liberal Party staffers, or PR flacks hired by Liberal Party backers, filling up the comments at The Professional Idiot's must indeed be false.

If it was true, if, say, 10-20% of the comments at The Professional Idiot's blog were coming from Liberal staffers, or PR flacks, they wouldn't let him get away with his constant attacks on the Liberal Party, would they?

And they certainly wouldn't be campaigning in the comments, a few times a week at least, for The Professional Idiot to get his own TV show on the ABC.

Right?

Okay, Time To Send In The Monster Spiders

Australians have grown bored by the repeativity of cyclone attacks, shark attacks, crocodile attacks, leg-gnawing possum attacks, kangaroo attacks, camels trashing our towns and turning on our taps, possums invading our Leagues clubs, and aggro-wallabies invading our nursing homes.

We like variety in how Nature tries to wipe us out. We appreciate the unusual.

Good news, then, from the Townsville Bulletin. Nature's War On Humans ramps up a notch with this dramatic new front line opening up in Queensland :

SPIDER INVASION IN BOWEN

IN a scene that could almost be out of a B-grade monster movie, giant spiders have invaded Bowen.

For about six weeks, residents have reported seeing huge bird-eating spiders crawling around their backyards and gardens.

That's not too over the top an intro for a story detailing how a few big, occasionally bird-eating spiders have shown up in a few Bowen backyards, is it?

While at this stage there had only been about five sightings of the giant spiders, Mr Geiszler said it was unusual to see that many in such a short period.

"They are very shy. They normally never venture out too far but obviously these ones have been flushed out for some reason.

"It's more than enough to scare a few people. It's not plague proportions or anything.

Or invasion proportions.

Freaky fact.

The spiders whistle or make a hissing sound when aggravated, which can be heard about 2m away.

So if you're in or around Bowen in the next few weeks, poking around in a garden and you hear a bizarre hissing sound, run, run and flail your arms around your head and back to make sure one of these "monsters" isn't hitching a ride. There probably won't be a "monster" spider trying to eat your ear lobes, but you will look fantastically funny to anyone who sees you running down the street.

"The spiders have been getting fed and now they're out walking about looking for females to mate with."

The monster spiders have had a good feed and now out cruising for chicks.

The bite from a bird-eating spider is not known to be fatal to humans, however it can cause up to six hours of vomiting.

Yeah, like a spider bite's the only thing that can happen to you in Townsville that could lead to six hours of vomiting.

Great Story

Then again, you don't want of these fuckers crawling over your face when you're passed out in the backyard :

Righteous Spider Photo by Greg Brylund

Greg Sheridan : If A Palestinian Says It, It Must Be A Lie

The Australian's "most influential" foreign affairs commentator Greg Sheridan on February 5, 2009 :

I do not believe a single story of Israeli war crimes or atrocities in Gaza. There is no evidence of any such story beyond Palestinian eye-witness accounts....

The United Nations isssued a report yesterday on Israel's clear and painfully obvious war crimes in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, which killed more than 1400 Palestinians, including hundreds of women and children :

United Nations investigators found that Israeli missiles killed 30 to 40 Palestinians in the immediate vicinity of the Jabalia school in Gaza Strip, where hundreds of others had taken refuge during the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to a report released Tuesday.

The attack against the Jabalia boy school, also known as the al-Fakoura school, which was run by the UN refugee agency in the Middle East (UNWRA), was among the six attacks against UN compounds cited in the report by a three-member investigative board.

'The board found that the undisputed cause of the injuries and the deaths to persons in the immediate vicinity of the school was the firing of 122 mm mortar rounds by the IDF, which landed in the area outside the school and at the compound of a family home nearby,' the report said.

If Sheridan writes about the UN report, he will use the words "one-sided" and "biased" prominently.

He doesn't need to get a memo, he knows what his job is.

Greg Sheridan's Bizarre Anti-Free Speech, Anti-Free Assembly Propaganda

If This Was America, We'd Already Have A Ned Kelly Amusement Park




By Darryl Mason

Bon Scott's grave in the Freemantle cemetery gets thousands of visitors a year.

How many visitors do you think the grave, and a monument, of Ned Kelly would bring to country Victoria each year? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? What might the value of a dedicated memorial and museum to Ned Kelly be worth each year to Victorian tourism? $10 million? $30 million?

The idea of exhuming the bones of Ned Kelly, holding a very public funeral and entombing his remains beneath a monument that would draw tens of thousands of tourists no doubt repels some in Australia. Those who don't want to remember the chaos of the decades of bushrangers and police harrassment and brutality that led to Federation.

But most Australians, I suspect, would think it a fine and brilliant idea, and would enjoy the media fuss and furious debate about his criminality and probably a televised pseudo-retrial of Kelly as well.

Before the corporatisation of sports, and the reckless slaughter of World War I, the bushranging era, through the mid-to-late 1800s served up to a young nation a series of heroic, but flawed, outlaws who then defined the spirit of what it meant to be an Australian : protect your family and take absolutely no shit, from anybody.

Pentridge Prison Chaplain : Give Ned Kelly Back To His Family :

The remains of Ned Kelly and other prisoners found at the Pentridge Prison site should be returned to their families, a chaplain says.

The outlaw's remains should be returned to his family and he should be given a decent burial, former Pentridge Prison chaplain Father Peter Norden said.

Fr Norden said Kelly should be granted a final resting place with his deceased relatives...

Bushranger movies, and movies about Ned Kelly in particular, were extremely popular in Australia in the early 1900s. Some of the first full-length feature films produced anywhere in the world were about Australian bushrangers fighting back against police brutality in a fascist police state. These films, of course, had to be banned :

• 1907 Victorian Chief Secretary bans screenings of The Story of the Kelly Gang
  in Benalla and Wangaratta.

• 1911 exhibition of The Story of the Kelly Gang film banned in Adelaide.

• 1912 New South Wales police department banned the production of bushranger films.

And here's that excellent shot of Ned Kelly's armour again :

The Hungry Jacks Bacon Deluxe as it dreams to be :



The above hamburger, from a store in Pitt Street, as it really is :



All that grease and mayonnaise really helps the dense mass of meat and cheese slide down your throat.

Absolutely delicious.

We're Definitely Going To Blame This One On A Computer

What is it with the Murdoch media pointing guns at an American president?



Automated but assassination-obsessed coders?

Can a piece of software be charged with threatening the president?

Start With The Koalas

An appropriate logo has now been located for the anti-nature resistance, Humans Against The Rest (HATeR) :



More on the unlikely source of the above image in a photo essay, later.

The Anzac War Memorial, Hyde Park Sydney, May 4









Directly below them, a Japanese youth wielding a long sword lept off the stairs of the memorial again and again, for a photo shoot for some Asian martial arts movie, until an elderly passer-by explained why doing this around any Australian war memorial was a really, really bad idea.





But in front of the statues of the memorial, the Pool of Remembrance shimmered in the afternoon light, and a dog (centre) was preparing for some essential ball chasing action.









Photos By Darryl Mason

You Won't Want To Be Throwing That Shrimp On Your Barbie

A new Australian supernatural splatterfest, Primal, heads for Cannnes. Below is a supremely gruesome trailer, fast and full of "what in all fuck was that?" glimpses of the action. Kids go looking for Aboriginal rock art in the bush, get lost, carnage, ancient evil and what appears to be some prawn-related mayhem follows..

Primal will probably be only one of the few Australian movies that finds international buyers at Cannes this year.



More on Primal here

That's Good. Can I Borrow Your Pen?

The brilliant Hollowmen wins a due award for Most Outstanding Comedy at the Logies.

Apparently Kevin Rudd is confused about the category in which the Hollowmen won. Rudd thought Hollowmen was a tense, riveting drama series, filled with real-world office life challenges and triumphs.

The ABC News website takes the opportunity to laddle upon itself some hearty praise, via the speeches of two Logie winners.

From the Hollowmen acceptance speech :

"[The producers would like to] thank the ABC for their undying support of comedy, and also in particular a few people - one Mark Scott, Courtney Gibson and there would be Kim Dalton..." Watts said.

ABC reporter Stephen McDonell who won for Most Oustanding News Coverage (the Sichuan earthquake aftermath) :

"Thank you very much for this. What do I say? Sometimes you're in the right place, and the right but good thing I suppose with the ABC - unlike I suppose anyone else - is that we've got correspondents all over the world and it's what you get from local knowledg..."

"So if you want to see the world through Australian eyes, I suppose the ABC's still the place to do it."

'See The World Through Australian Eyes'....The Hollowmen would be all over that phrase. It'd be trialed as a campaign slogan, or station ID.

In the time it took to locate the camera, a huge, clearly defined Z over Sydney drifted into this :



To the south, a few minutes later :



photos by Darryl Mason

Is This Real World, Or Just An Exercise?

The Sydney Morning Herald :

Pandemic or a dress rehearsal?

Whether swine flu is the pandemic the world has been dreading should be known within the next few days.

Surely, they're not using the term 'dress rehearsal' as Webster's defines it?

"a practice exercise for something to come".

August, 2007 : Bird Flu-Infected Chickens Fed To Pigs In Bali

Is This Where HumanBirdPig Flu Began?

By Darryl Mason

The World Health Organisation rejected a hopeless campaign by The Orstrahyun to have the new swine flu virus officially titled Pork Throat. Instead, the WHO has gone with Influenza A H1N1 as its official reference term for the new influenza virus, which contains the genes of human, bird and pig flu strains.

This retitling has led to an immediate downturn of interest amongst the public in the pandemic potential of the virus, which may have been part of the intention of giving this bizarre influenza such an academic, book lurnin' name.

But, to shift into serious news mode, how did strains of pig, human and bird flu first meet up, and start swapping genes in order to mutate into Influenza A H1N1?

There are theories, but nothing solid. Yet.

A possible source, or at least a scenario where such an unlikely blending of influenza viruses could have taken place, can be found in this report on two human deaths from the H5N1 (bird flu) virus back in September, 2007 :

Suyono said there had been sick chickens around the woman's house and many had died suddenly in recent weeks.

"The villagers didn't burn the carcasses. Instead they buried them or fed them to pigs," Suyono added.

Contact with sick fowl is the most common way for humans to contract the H5N1 virus.

Human to human transmission of the bird flu virus was believed to be occuring in Bali, by August 2007, though it did not prove to be highly transmissible, and further infections were usually contained within Balinese families living amongst bird-flu infected poultry, or those caring for bird-flu infected relatives.

You'll probably see this story in next week's Sunday Telegraph as well.