Rudd's Totalitarianyrannical Grip On The Nation Even Extends To The Family Pet

7.30 Report, August 28, 2009 :

Q : So (PM Kevin Rudd) doesn't come home and kick the cat?

Therese Rein : Oh, no, he would never kick....

Q : ....to use a well-known imagery.

Therese Rein : He would never kick Jasper or the dog or anyone at home. No. I don't see him do that.

No, Rudd has other ways of disciplining Jasper The Cat :



Looks like a combination nerve and throat hold.

Every cat owner knows the expression on Jasper's face. It's equal parts "Someone or something's about to get shreddded" and "Help Me!"

Free Jasper!

Meanwhile, Rudd exploits the cat and the dog, by turning their adventures around The Lodge into a children's book :

"...we've interviewed the cat and the dog. They have been very co-operative in their responses..."

Yes, I bet they were.


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Eyes In Australian Skies

Surveillance drones very similar to the one in the below story have already been test-flown in the skies above Australian cities by the Australian Federal Police. All a journalist has to do is ask the AFP to officially deny it :



Surveillance drones were used, briefly, during the Victorian bushfires in February 2009, though there doesn't seem to be anything online about their effectiveness.

Rumours still float around the Defence Department that the Rudd government will be buying less Joint Strike Fighters so they can purchase some three dozen unmanned aerial combat vehicles (UACVs), which will fly fast enough to be used in missions with the JSFs.

In the 1980s, to have even suggested that by 2015 there would be 'Eye In The Sky' flying robots, and armed robots at that, cruising around Australian skies would have seen you labeled a loon, and a science fiction-addled paranoidian.

And yet, here they come.

There will be little outrage or fuss because UAVs, particularly in this age of Catatrosphic Bushfire Warnings, will likely prove extremely helpful, and life-saving, in spotting outbreaks of fire as soon as they begin, and essential in tracking the spread of those fires.

The future is here, and it makes a weird buzzing noise.

It's Time To Begin The Debate On A Big New Tax On Knee-High Socks

You'd think living somewhere nice and green with an open sky, fresh air, breeding beautiful alpacas might put you in a positive, optimistic mood about the future.

Not so, as alpaca breeder Gerard Oosterman reveals while detailing "My Dreams For 2010" :

A kind of BUG A UP campaign to install loathing towards those that continue, despite many warnings, to drive obscenely large fuel gulping hydrocarbon, nitrogen oxides, CO belching four wheel drive vehicles including SUVs, especially when those vehicles are black.

Spray cans will be distributed for the more sensible 1200cc electric/gas/diesel combo car owners to spray those ratbags car owners that defy all warnings. Those with spray on their fat cars will thus be stigmatised and shamed, and, furthermore, they will only be allowed to drive in slow lanes and by push power only.

To help combat obesity, closure of all food-courts at shopping malls, with the exception of coffee lounges with Portuguese cakes, Sushi bars and fruit juice bars. All tuck shop mothers to be trained in giving dietary guidance to school kids.

All McDonalds to be phased out, replaced by Finnish, Estonian or Balkan black bread with cottage cheese outlets. Those 'car stop' eating venues will be indicated by modest signage portraying a thin but healthy couple with smiling kids munching on black bread with rising sun and sheafs of golden brown Rye in the background. Meat pies still OK, but one per family; no sauce.

Of course, all this to be funded by steep increases in tax on all alcohol, cigarettes, petrol, knee-high socks and drivers of hum vees and enormous four wheelers.

You've got to have a troubled mind to want to deny working families a bit of sauce for their pies.

ABC's The Drum Unleashed also has "My Dreams For 2010" from Tony Abbott, Sophie Cunningham, Keysar Trad, Robert Manne, Julian Morrow, Jonathan Green and others here.


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New Zealand philosophy professor, Denis Dutton :

Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.

This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment.

The Full Story Is Here

Then again, being blindly optimistic has its downside, as well :

A study published in the November-December issue of Australasian Science found that people in a negative mood are more critical of, and pay more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they are told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,” Joseph P. Forgas, a professor of social psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in the study.

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A UFO Encounter Of The Third Kind At Milne Bay

Rowan Callick digs up extraordinary letters from an Australian Anglican missionary, William Gill, detailing a spectacular UFO sighting at Milne Bay, in Papua New Guinea, back in 1959 (excerpts) :

"Last night we at Boianai experienced about four hours of UFO activity, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are handled by beings of some kind. At times it was absolutely breathtaking.

"We watched figures appear on top - four of them - no doubt that they are human.

"Two smaller UFOs were seen at the same time, stationary. One above the hills west, another overhead.

"On the large one, two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the centre of the deck . . . were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or setting up something (not visible).

"One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same."

"As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFO apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth."

"...there was nothing eerie or other-worldly about any of this. It was all so ordinary, as ordinary as a Ford car.

"It looked a perfectly normal sort of object, an Earth-made object. I realised, of course, that some people might think of this as a flying saucer, but I took it to be some kind of hovercraft the Americans or even the Australians had built. The figures inside looked perfectly human."

There were almost 40 other witnesses, and the encounter lasted for hours.

Read The Full Story Here

The Australian and/or American military were obviously test-flying some very interesting new aircraft in PNG during the Cold War, piloted by crews bored enough by their tasks to want to do something to excite the locals, and willing to flash their lights in return to the blinking torch light coming from William Gill and his friends below.


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"I Don't See Why It Should Be Blasphemy....Just Saying Jehovah"

How sad. Ireland steps back into the dark ages :

From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine. The new law defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion....

There's a list of 25 Blasphemous Quotes Here published by Atheist Ireland to commemorate the utter stupidity of the reviving of this old law, but it's always hard to go past this piece of brilliance :



As the number of true believers of all religious faiths continues to plummet, those who profit the most from organised religions will do everything they can to try and stop the criticism, and mockery, that is ultimately freeing people the world over from dangerous historical lies and fear-ruled absurd mythologies. The introduction, or reviving, of blasphemy laws are just one of the weapons they are utilising in their war against the loss of faith in Faith.

Note: I've used the Google Cache link for the 25 Blasphemous Quotes because the www.blasphemy.ie page has been inaccessible for hours.

Feel free to include your favourite blasphemous quote in comments.

And so forth....

2009 : You Mean That Was It? Part One

I was going to cram a full year of posts from The Orstrahyun that I thought you might be interested in revisiting, but the list got too long, too fast, and I kept stopping to re-read stories I'd forgotten I'd written, about incidents that have already washed down most peoples' memory drain. And then the sun came up....

So here, in no particular order, are January/February 2009 :

Black Saturday, 3.26am

Holocaust Of Fire, Cyclones Of Flames, Burn Hundreds To Death

Mother Nature : Terrorist Or Mass Murderer?

Sam The Koala : "C'mere Mate, You All Right Buddy?"

One Beer-Battered Sea Kitten And Chips, Please

Even Teenage Girls In Australia Can Punch Out A Shark

Tragedy Porn : Did It Do It For You?

John Howard Happy That Al Qaeda's Prayers Have Been Answered

Raging Against The Firey Accused Of Killer Arson Challenges Online Freedom Of Speech

Thousands Of Working Families Live Without Electricity, Gas

Australian Ally Slaughters Hundreds Of Women And Children

Adelaide Always Delivers

Essay : This Is Australia, We Burn

Peter Costello : Non-Christians Threaten Australia's Future

Moderated Mainstream Media Blog Bleeds 'Assassinate Bob Brown' Comments

"Fuck Off, We're Full"....Of Racist Bogans

True Blue Australian Stuff Australia-Hating Lefties Love To Hate

Tony Abbott : May I Compare John Howard To The Lord, Or Is That Going Too Far?

Just Another 'Possum Goes Wild In A Leagues Club' Video

The Anti-American Hatefest 2009-2017 Begins

The Rise Of The Mid-Life Crisis Hoon

Australia's Bermuda Triangle.....Or Is It Australia's Area 51?

You Can Dump A UteLoad Of Horse Shit At The Gates Of NSW Parliament And
Only Cope An $1100 Fine

Photography : A Native Garden In Springwood, New South Wales.

The rest of the year in highlights to come.

I hope you've enjoyed reading The Orstrahyun this year as much as I've enjoyed writing it.

I think I might have to get into video stories a bit more next year, or at least some audio as opposed to just words and the occasional photo.

I've been editing a movie I shot with Dave Gleeson (as brilliant an actor as he is a lead singer) a few years ago, about an anti-war protestor who takes the prime minister hostage for 48 hours. I decided to wait until Australian troops were out of Iraq before I finished the movie, it gets a bit hardcore, and I never liked the way it ended before, with the Iraq War still unresolved, at least as far as Australia's involvement.

But the editing of that movie, and trying to fix an infuriating number of sound problems, has been the sort of fun but frustrating challenge that I think I need to wrap my brain about a bit more next year, lest it grow (more) dull.

I'll try and get some clips from the untitled-for-now movie up on this blog in a few weeks.

Have a great New Year's Eve.

And to the thousands who visit here regularly, I'm glad you like what you read enough to keep coming back. And thanks, as always, for not making me spend hours a day moderating comments, or reminding me too often of the stories I've promised but haven't yet finished.



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Possum Vs Cat

"Hey, how you doing? Look, I'm just here for this scrap of apple, okay? I don't want any trouble. I'll just suck the juice out of this and then I'm outta here" :



"Okay, cat, I can totally see you, you know. And my claws are bigger than yours, buddy. You wanna dance? Huh? Do you?" :



"I asked you nicely to leave me alone. But I will kick your arse if you don't get out of here!" :



"Come back and fight like a cat! You coward!" :



"I said I just want to finish this bit of apple and then I'll be on my way, okay?"



Photos by Darryl Mason

Roland S. Howard died today, aged 50.

There's a fine selection of Howard videos and interviews on YouTube, if you're not familiar with his work, or you want to take a look back.




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From the front page of news.com.au today :



At the bottom of the front page of news.com.au, as on most other Australian news sites, readers are encouraged to video 'news events' and send the footage in :

News.com.au wants you to be involved in breaking the news. When news happens and you are there, let us know by sending us your pictures, video and news tips.

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"One Reason Conspirators Said They Bombed The Nightclub In Bali In 2002 Was That It Did Not Allow Locals In"









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Oxford Falls, near Sydney's Northern Beaches, December 27 :













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Jump It, Crash It, Burn It, Blow It Up

Grant Page, the legendary Australian stuntman, was sitting at home in early 1997, wondering what crazy thing someone would be willing to pay him to do next. The phone rang. It was Damon Albarn from Blur. The band was on tour in Europe, they had to come with a video for the new single M.O.R. and they'd recently come across the DVD of Grant Page's 1970s stunt doco Danger Freaks. They'd loved it and they now wanted to give Page more than $200,000 to put together a stunt-packed video clip. He had less than a month to conceive it, shoot it, edit it and deliver it to MTV.

From the Grant Page biography, Man On Fire : A Stunt Of A Life (Allen & Unwin, 2009) :

The scenario was simple. We were a group escaping with a whole load of money and kept facing all sorts of dangerous situations as we fled. It was, of course, just an excused for us to perform lots of stunts that were connected by a soundtrack and a loose narrative.

We had one of the biggest cranes on top of a big new building in the city - it was huge, hundreds of feet high - and all four of us, as the four members of the band, had to grab hold of it and swing off the building, right out over the city, then back down until we landed on the truck.

(shooting the Blur video) was very exciting, very daring and, ultimately, very dangerous. It was not without mushaps either, including the one where my son Gulliver abseiled down the Harbour Bridge, landed on me and broke his kneecap.

Because we were basically in charge of the shoot, I was able to do a few stunts that I'd always wanted to, of of which was a ground-to-plane transfer. Actually it turned out to be a water-to-plane transfer.

Here's the video :





The Man On Fire biography is a pretty good read. A lot of it reads like transcripts of interviews with Page, and it can be a bit all over the place, but he's got some incredible stories of Australian movie and TV history to tell from over 35 years of crashing cars, throwing himself off cliffs, setting himself on fire and riding motorcycles off waterfalls. All without breaking a bone, on set.

A best-of compilation of Page's work :





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It was a little bit crowded at the Queen Victoria Building earlier today.





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"Just For One Christmas, I'd Like To See The Meek Inherit The Earth"

To make up for the Santa-related violence of The Christmas Incident, here's a classic Twilight Zone from 1960, one of the great Christmas fables, and all the more remarkable a piece of TV because it was performed pretty well live to air.

Part One :



Part Two :



Part Three :



Yeah, it made me cry a little, too.

The Christmas Incident

By Darryl Mason

What are you doing here? Seriously. What the fuck? It's Christmas Day. You should be drunk and in front the TV. Or at least smiling at relatives as you quietly hum a familiar tune you don't even like, but like a lot right now.

Yeah, I forget that some of you have those phones that are the internet, but smaller, and you're probably in front of the TV right now, drunk as hell.

But surely there's got to be something more fulfilling to do with these precious Christmas Day minutes than to read this stuff?

No?

Okay, well all I got is this series of twoots collected from Twitter last night, about a shocking gun-related early Christmas morning incident.

Heard something on the roof. Sounds like hooves or something. I'm loading the shotgun. I'm going to have a look. Shoot first, questions later.

Oh God, I think I just did something terrible. In the dark, the bell the old fat white-bearded bloke was holding looked just like a pistol.

The old bloke fell off the roof when I shot him. He's flopping around on the lawn. He's wearing red, so I can't tell if he's bleeding.

There's a whole load of frigging reindeer on my roof. I'm reloading. One of them looks pissed. His nose is glowing bright red. Taking aim.

Took out two of the reindeer on my roof with one shell. Good eating. After butchering I can fit maybe five carcasses in the deep freeze.

If I'd known they were flying reindeer I wouldn't have shot 'em so fast. They'd be damn handy, better than a jetpack. Killed 4, rest flew away.

The old bloke I blew off my roof just croaked "R...uuudolph!" and that rednose deer crawled over to him. I thought it was dead. Tough deer.

If I am right, I can do em both with one cartridge. Seems to be a lot of crying, shrieking, screaming kids here now. Sirens coming closer.

Yeah, bit of a bad scene. Kids and parents are hysterical. They all seem to know who this white bearded dying bloke is. I can't finish him now. Dammit.

I've had to barricade myself inside my house. Screaming kids are trying to smash the windows. I left the deer carcasses on the lawn. Dammit.

Jeez, they got a cop on a speaker. They're saying this is a siege, and "You Shot Santo Claws, You Fuck!". I was defending my property.

That Santo Claws bloke wasn't as bad off as I thought. He just tried to kick in the front door. Cops told him to stop. He didn't. He got tasered

Police negotiator says he understands my plight, says I was in my right to blow that old fuck off my roof, but he still has to arrest me.

I said yes to a lawyer who offered representation after winching down from a TV news helicopter. Seven figure TV, book & movie deal on the cards. Coming out now.

Lawyer said I might have to do two months, then I'd be out and set. That Santo Claws fucker who landed reindeer on my roof is okay.

Apparently, I am "The Stupid Fuck Who Ruined Christmas!" according to the newspaper front pages around the world today.

I don't remember ever hearing about this Santo Claws bloke, and his very hard to believe story of delivering presents to kids, worldwide.

Lawyer says his name is actually 'Santa Claus' and is beloved by children across the world. Says I have to start saying "Merry Christmas." It's part of the plea deal. So ditto that. I still don't get it.

Mel Gibson's playing me in the movie. It's called I Shot Santa. Jack Thompson is playing the old fat bloke in red I blew off my roof. They got cool robot deer.

This Santa Claus fucker is suing the studio making our movie. He says the title, I Shot Santa, violates his trademark. I don't get paid until 1st day of production.

I may have to shoot him again.

Merry Christmas.





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A true bluesman.



Above image from RoseTattoo.com

We Stalk Mothers & Their Infants

The Daily Telegraph, now publishing stalker-creepy photo galleries of babies without their parents' permission.



You can find the link yourself, if it interests you so.

More of that "quality journalism" Rupert Murdoch insists people will pay to read online.

At least, that's what he's praying will happen.

Smurvatar



(h/t @Great Dismal)