people get ready

Things about America that you're unlikely to read in a Murdoch owned newspaper.

And a bit more, but this one includes a sliver of hope about what happens when people take charge.

Must be a very strange country.

Via bookyforum as always.

eat the meek

Just remind me, who's going to inherit the earth? The meek, right?

Looks like a few forgot the training manual.

art of noise

It's not absolutely necessary, but every once in a while it's fun to get a reminder that organised religion really is a blight on humankind.

I was like.....like....what's the answer, Jesus dude?....

Britain is a nation of heretics and nothing can change the fact until your nation reverts back to Roman Catholicism.

(That comments thread is by turns quite, quite hilarious and deeply disturbing).

I looked for some other interesting stuff to link but there's nothing interesting anywhere. Everywhere I look, it's not interesting.

We bought Mrs VVB an iPhOnE today in what must have been one of the most deeply unsatisfying exercises in consumerism (ie buying something you want) in which I have ever been involved. Even being ripped off by second-hand car salesmen when I was younger was better than this.

For reasons that needn't be gone into here, we were happy to stay with the existing carrier (service? plan provider? some other blinkingly inane metaphor for supplier?). Also Mrs VVB had decided she wanted an IpHoNE and nothing else would do. So, a straight-up walk-in sale, "I'll have one of those over there please and don't spare the horses."

Given this you would think that the young salesperson, of the type the old man usually typified as a "popsy," could have negotiated her arduous assignment without pissing us off, but we were pissed off within the first 30 seconds with a series of demands for personal information that any passing Stasi recruiter would have applauded and stuck straight into the training manual. By about minute 3 I was asking her would she mind appending her snapped directions to us with the occasional "please." It didn't seem too much to ask, but she snapped that she had said please already. Must have been in Braille because I certainly missed it.

Well it took us about 15 minutes so it could have been worse. We eventually decided that popsy must have been either suffering from commission payment deficit or was so wired on something that it was a wonder her eyes didn't shoot across the shop and into the crowd.

Ah yes, the crowd. We left the shop clutching our IpHOOOne and what was left of our dignity and patience and slammed into....the NOISE! The PEOPLE, the NOISE, it was just horrific. No wonder salespersons are so stressed with (a) nowhere to sit and (b) all that NOISE just outside.

And people go to shopping malls voluntarily? As a form of recreation?

It's a wonder there aren't more murders.

i alone

What's happened to the Oz Politics site? Haven't been able to get there for ages.

Oh, and some people debate songs with great solos.

we are the champions (2)

Here's an article that also concludes something that I've observed: accolades go to people who don't seem to deserve them. I liked the reference to the Presidential Medal of Freedom: didn't a former PM of ours get that one? Love the company he's in. I also liked the rocket scientist comment.

Anyway, I always get bemused by architectural awards, which seem to go to buildings that are plain ugly to the general passer-by, and often hopeless for those labouring inside.

Also business awards, which seem to go to entrepreneurs or companies that go down in flames a few years after.

Apart from that, not much.

every day is exactly the same

Excerpt from discussion on ABC news forums today:

"you're forgetting that we were all born with exactly the same opportunities as each other."

Discuss, particularly if you believe you can support the proposition.

kind of a drag (2)

For no reason that I can remember, I've never thought Liza Minelli was much chop. Daughter of, that's not a CV that works for me. As I'd never seen her live or on film, this judgement can only be described as judgemental, certainly not informed by any rational or supportable process, if you catch my drift.

Anyway it seems she's here and I saw her interviewed on TV.

To my mind, it was awful. She's 'on', she's acting, every waking moment, it would seem.

Must get tiresome.

Anyway, I feel kind of vindicated for being so judgemental.

Kind of.

Any other views?

Roaring Jack

I'm advertising widely.

I have only one song of Alister Hulett's, Destitution Road with his band Roaring Jack, and I am now reminded to go and put it on, very loud.

What a shame I can't be in Sydney that weekend.

i'd like to teach the world to sing

I'm feeling violently antisocial, so I inflict this on all my reader. Make of it what you will. I'd like to teach the world to be confused.

I've been progressively going off rugby league ever since the end of the halcyon days of Raiders superiority when even Mrs VVB used to get a tad enthusiastic about our then local team and the incessant reports about the state of Ricky Stuart's groin, but if this ever comes off the game will be rooted for all eternity and I'll be around at the end to say "I told you so in 1996 and you didn't bloody well listen then, now look what you've done."

Unfortunately, I suspect it's an unlikely prospect, surely he saw the damage Rupert et al inflicted in the Superleague wars and will have realised that not everything dear about communities and their tribes can be reduced to a simplistic, reductionist, knuckle-dragging profit-driven view of the world.

Oh, ummm, yeah...

nothing

Friday = nothing.

This probably = something. Tozer was supported through publicly funded programs to take his work, and Australia, to the world.

This = nothing we didn't expect, but is wrong beyond 99% of Australians' understanding.

This = I don't know what, but it probably relates to a clause in the US Free Trade Agreement under which any US multinational can monster anyone else if its dodgy IP is infringed, which is certainly not free trade.

Back to nothing.

wolfman jack

Worth it for the reviews of the three wolf t-shirt alone (actually, I only read about .75% of them, I do have to get to sleep some time). Courtesy of Bookforum.

The picture is neither Amazon nor wolf related, and doesn't have anything to do with t-shirts either, but is intended to represent how "rightards" must feel because of recent "leftist" schadenfreude over lots of things such as winning elections, collapse of capitalism, failure of the globalisation experiment, and so on.

There's so much snarking, evil intent and postmodern bullshit about (read all the usual blogs, they're thick with it), it seeps out from under the monitor, which is where we usually only get mouse poo.

That's another thing: poo is spelt poo, not Pooh. Only the G-G gets it right because he's had a classical education. All the others have been indelibly infected by a combination of (almost certainly) American cartoons and on-line commentary, from the sort of people who write "it's a doggy-dog world."

if

remote control

If I was a betting man my money would have been on the Cats, my heart was definitely with the Saints. I have kind of associations with both sides, if you draw a really long bow. But long bows are de rigeur when identifying associations that compel - or authorise, perhaps more accurately - one to support a particular sporing team. Bummer for the Saints, but.

Now for something completely different: the application of neo-classical economic theory to how you get to be king (too lazy to insert mandatory link for Python fans, just run the script in your head, I can hear you now, matter of fact):

Why is there only one Royal Family? In this age when the market solves all our problems, what we obviously need is choice and opportunity. The market for Royal Families should be open to anyone who wants to enter, and the public should choose who it wants to be Head of State at regular intervals, having considered what the various candidates offer. This would not quite be the current hereditary system, so we might call it something else; "republic" sounds about right.

And....whatever the other thing was that I was going to write about...and do you know, just by starting the sentence it came to me.

This.

Pretty weird, eh?

Anyway I hope that they find some countervailing evidence or a methodological mistake or something, because I lose a lot of sleep. Thanks, work.

No, actually I lose a lot of sleep thinking about how I wish we lived in an age when you only had buttons for 'on' and 'off'.

Actually no, it's the work.

sorry (*)

I wrote a post yesterday that had "roflmao" in it.

I am so, so, so, sorry.

Going forward, I'll be ruling that kind of language right out.

However, if I go in any other direction than forward, all bets are off.

This is a type 2 blog.

*Here it is.

after the fall

There are a couple of forms of blogging. In one case, the blog owner or author has demonstrable knowledge and competence in a given subject and will hold forth. There may be footnotes, references, there will be informed and (often) civilised discussion by commenters who, in many cases, will demonstrate equal facility and knowledge.

In another case, someone without a clue will trawl the interwebzzz and go omg, lookatthis, with some added feeble and invariably superfluous comment. For example:

Pot! Kettle! ROFLMAO!

This is just wrong wrong wrong and it makes my blood boil. But then, it's in a newspaper so can you actually believe it? Probably not. Even though it is The Times. And can I go on letting things that don't really concern me - unless I am genuinely alarmed at the decline in standards and schoolyard bullies and cyberbullying and sexual assaults by minors and why didn't we wake up in the 1960s at the damage we were doing to society and how did a generation of people grow up without any parenting skills whatsoever, well my kids don't have kids but they did they would be good kids because we brought our kids up with some sense of right and wrong, geez maybe I actually agree with what that former leader of the National Party, which one was he, there's been so many, ha ha, who said that the 1960s did all the damage, where was I, oh yes and another thing, these vigilantes that have got the NSW to change the law in respect of one person, well I don't know about that, even if he is very likely to reoffend, we can't let our children out of our sight, and where will it end, taking down public playgrounds because of the insurance liability, you can't have a cake stall any more, that Obama hey? space aliens, I mean Republicans and their tea parties, did you see that video clip, scary, I'm going to be armed next time, isn't that a direct threat of violence? and blah blah blah

Look at my last post, you get the point. Not sustainable.

kind of a drag

I'm kind of gone. Just a coincidence of factors and as my longer-suffering reader/s will recall, every time I say this something happens and I'm back.

Lettuce sea.

television

Your evening reading, courtesy of the Times.

The stipulation for a contestant on The X Factor is an uncontrollable vibrato and a great deal of cancer in the family.

That one's about television shows.

This one's about televison too.

It’s dizzyingly exciting, like finding Jesus’s diary, and discovering that he had Crunchy Nut Cornflakes the day he got crucified.

But it's mainly about the Beatles.

PS: If you don't read this tonight, then strictly speaking it won't be your evening reading. Unless you read it on some future night.

Good luck, it's a battle zone out there.

doctor doctor

Now he knows how I felt for 11 years.

Anyway, enough of that or I'll start with the hyperventilating again.

Have you ever noticed the preponderance of references to doctors in popular music? And telephones? I'm thinking of writing a PhD dissertation, I think I'm onto something.

Oh, and now it's stuck to my shoe.

modern times

So Mrs VVB and I are in the supermarket doing the weekly supermarketingthing, and the bloke on the PA says, "Would the customer with the red GT please return to your car, the windows are being smashed."

Of course that customer could have been in the butcher, the travel agent or the $2 shop.

I'm ashamed to admit that Mrss VVB and I both thought of driving around the car park on our way out to view the damage. But no obvious police presence to guide us....

What sort of lunch box did you have as a child? Did you ever regret it?

And what was in it?

Perhaps this:

These treats were apparently made for people who love eating cheeseburgers and fries but who don't want to go through the hassle of mashing them together into a fine paste.

The above two via Look at this.

Last night I thought I had a brilliant opening to a post on the Ikea font-change war, a google for which brings up about thirty nine trillion hits.

But I use Trebuchet for this here blog.

Bugger.

around and around

They say what goes around comes around, or the other way.

I'm still waiting.

In the meantime, they're reinventing instant black and white photography. You can hold it, or drop it on your foot, so it's a product not a service.

Sort of.

I'm still waiting.

While I was waiting, I heard a McDonalds advertisement on TV for their "gen-you-whine" Angus steakburger. So much for years of trying to pretend they're adapting to the Australian environment and that actually they're rooly trooly Australian.

I never believed it for a second, along with all their "good works', and they can fuck right off, imho.

Still waiting.

Mood: distracted.