verging_on_random

Billy Thorpe

I confess that if anybody had asked me I would have said I thought Billy Thorpe was already dead … he seemed to belong so thoroughly to the ‘live fast die young’ culture of Johnny O’Keefe and Bon Scott. Then again Jimmy Barnes is still going strong so what would I know?

Anyway Billy’s dead now. The prime minister issued a statement saying so, thus ensuring that any news story about the death will give an obligatory hat tip to J-Ho. Has the man no shame at all? Yeah silly question, I know. But it’s getting to the stage where anyone who dies without Howard giving the event some public acknowledgement will feel highly offended. Or they would if they were still alive … you know what I mean.

But enough being snarky about Howard, I want to share with you the lyrics of one of the songs that launched Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs on their stellar career. Here they are:

Mashed potato yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Mashed potato yeah

Yeah

Yeah

(Yeah well you get the idea)

Do they write lyrics like that any more? No dammit, it’s all emo kids crying in the corner and the world’s the poorer for it.

….

(PS I was gunna help these guys out but screw ‘em, let them do their own research.)

New house

For friends and relos, some pics of the new place. The rest of you get on with your work.

Front view:

View from veranda:

It’s about a third of the way across on the left, tucked in the bottom of the hill (no it’s not the building you can see, that’s a horse thingy).

Interior:

I love it. Though I do miss the bloke from the caravan park who’d knock on the door to tell me the daily petrol price. He’d be so disappointed when I didn’t jump in the car to drive 10 km to put in 20 litres at the newly discounted price. He was no quitter though, he kept coming back.

The bloke who’d come round full of excitement and share the rain gauge reading as if we we’d just planted wheat on the black soil plains … I miss him so much too *sigh*.

Comes the caliphate

Isn’t that a great word? ‘Caliphate’. Nothing’s as useful to scare the littlies as a big word they never heard before. It’s pretty innocuous though; my old Macquarie Dictionary defines it as ‘the rank, jurisdiction or government of a caliph’. So it’s a system of government, like a monarchy is government by a monarch.

Anyway Dick Cheney wants us all to be very worried because:

Their ultimate aim, and one they boldly proclaim, is to establish a caliphate covering a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia. And it wouldn’t stop there.

I’m guessing the last bit about it not stopping at Indonesia was thrown in for the benefit of any Australians who were thinking ’so?’ Oh the ‘they’ in ‘their ultimate aim’ are ‘the terrorists’, as if you hadn’t already guessed. No Dick didn’t get down to saying which terrorists, that’s probably classified info. The fact that most of the violence in Iraq is Muslim v Muslim makes me wonder how ‘the terrorists’ can have this grand plan to set up a caliphate covering half the world when they can’t even agree on who should run Baghdad but Dick obviously knows better.

The trouble is … and I know I shouldn’t question the VP of the USA … but I have this nagging doubt. I keep asking myself if we really need to be working ourselves up into a panic because a comparative handful of freaks in the Middle East have an ‘ultimate aim’ that they keep talking about. I mean ‘want to’ isn’t the same as ‘have the means to’. Brendan Nelson was ranting yesterday about how the terrorist threat is every bit as serious as the one Australia faced in 1942 but he didn’t convince me somehow. All he made me think was how glad I was that I never consulted him while he was a GP in Killara.

Anyway there’s a bunch of boring experts on terrorism meeting in Europe right now. They’re not politicians like Dick and Brendan so they don’t have the knack of explaining things as colourfully as them. They’re just diplomats and intelligence chiefs and police officers from different countries whose profession it is to combat terrorism. They had some interesting things to say at a conference:

The international terrorist threat is increasing as more recruits become radicalised, even though police and intelligence agencies are getting better at disrupting militant plots.

Well that’s kind of bad news/good news. No doubt the increasing number of radical recruits has been caused by the Iraq invasion and occupation, as predicted by the US National Intelligence Estimates. Later on:

Busso von Alvensleben, counter-terrorism commissioner at Germany’s Foreign Ministry, said it had become harder for groups to mount massive attacks.

Which has to be good news, n’est ce pas? The rest of the conference was apparently a similar mixture of cautious optimism mixed with substantial concerns about future terrorist acts:

Among other concerns raised at the three-day conference: the likelihood of terrorists gaining increased access to short and medium-range missiles in coming years, or attempting an attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.

“Terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction in the future is a near to absolute certainty,” said Greg Austin, analyst at the EastWest Institute.

Experts concurred that the risk of cyber-terrorism, possibly involving attacks on systems controlling critical infrastructure like power grids, is increasing because of societies’ growing reliance on computer networks and the Internet.

“The current risk of large-scale harm from cyberterror is low but increasing dramatically,” said Ahmet Oren, chairman of Turkish media group Ihlas Holding.

Philippine counter-terrorism ambassador Benjamin Defensor struck a rare note of optimism, saying Southeast Asian militant groups like Jemaah Islamiah were on the retreat as governments pursued them both by force and by reaching out to communities to undermine their hardline message.

“The leadership of these organisations are slowly being neutralised or eradicated, so slowly the support is eroding,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “They’re losing right now in Southeast Asia.”

So at the worst, we can expect more widespread attacks in future, perhaps involving much more dangerous weapons and/or interruptions to essential services or communications. If that happens it will be a nightmare for the people affected, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not in the same category as a serious war like the one that’s been raging in Iraq for nearly four years.

The thing I don’t see is this: even if the worst predictions from the professionals’ conference come true, how is that going to lead to this new caliphate that Dick’s so worried about? Does he think one by one the people from Spain to Jakarta are going to scream out “OMG the power’s off again … terrorists we surrender, set up your regime now”? I mean I just don’t see any connection between what the terrorists say is their ‘ultimate aim’ and what they are capable of doing in practice.

All sorts of religious leaders have ambitious aims. I suspect the pope’s ultimate aim is to convert the whole world to Roman Catholicism but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to happen. For the VP of the USA to go round spreading this alarmist bullshit just makes him look silly … perhaps explaining why the half-hearted applause at the end of his speech was plainly (and deservedly) insulting.

David Hicks

Yeah well the title probably means nobody will even read this post, because there is surely nothing left to write about David Hicks and his continuing incarceration at Guantanamo Baythat hasn’t been said 100 times already. Nevertheless it seems to me that the man’s becoming some kind of national celebrity and in the rush for people to fall into two opposing teams as seems inevitable in this country’s public discourse, the issues that make his case one worth getting concerned about have largely been forgotten. So for what it’s worth, here’s my take.

Number one, Hicks has done absolutely nothing admirable or heroic or deserving of sympathy. On the contrary, he’s almost certainly a thoroughly nasty piece of work. This idea that he was just an innocent abroad, a wide-eyed young idealist out for a bit of adventure, is bullshit. He was in his 20s for god’s sake with two kids. He went overseas to hang out with some shadowy organisations for one of two reasons: he was driven by a powerful ideological sense of mission or he’s more than a little deranged. Either way I’m not about to start writing “Poor David” posts.

Even in the unlikely event that he was just seeing the world and having a bit of fun, he would soon have realised what kind of people he was hanging out with. Even the thickest plank in the wood pile would quickly have grasped that Al Qaeda consisted of a lot of freaks who wanted to kill people of Anglo-Saxon appearance, including Hicks’ friends and family back in Adelaide. So this crap about how he didn’t understand what he’d got himself into until after September 11 and then all he wanted to do was get away doesn’t wash with me.

However, and here’s the vital thing, our society has a few bedrock principles. One is that the State, generally meaning the government, can’t lock citizens up without having a lawful reason. What’s more, because it’s obviously unacceptable to let the State decide whether or not there is such a lawful reason, any citizen who gets locked up has the right to challenge that detention before an independent court. It’s a fundamental right that was won hundreds of years ago in English-speaking countries, and people have had to fight for it over and over in the centuries since.

That’s the principle involved in the Hicks affair - it’s got nothing to do with whether he gets enough sunlight or he’s going crazy or his lawyer seems like a real good bloke. The grievous wrong that’s been done to our society is that we have acquiesced in our closest ally, the USA, locking up hundreds of people including one of our own countrymen and denying them the ability to have their detention reviewed by an independent court. Once we concede that it’s OK to do that, we open the way for arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and concentration camps and all the other foul things that are associated with authoritarian governments throughout history. Our cry should be ‘close down Guantanamo Bay’, not ‘justice for Our David’.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking this is alarmist scare-mongering and it couldn’t happen here. Governments of any persuasion can always invent plausible reasons why it’s in the ‘national interest’ to lock a few people away for a while. Once they get used to it, it becomes the standard response to all sorts of problems. It’s not governments being evil, it’s just ordinary people trying to make their jobs easier … and nothing makes you job easier than getting rid of troublemakers who keep giving you a hard time.

In most developed countries, people who are detained by the State are entitled to be given a reason within a very short time - usually a matter of a day or two - and to challenge that reason if they choose. Our close ally the USA is trashing that long-standing principle on a grand scale at Guantanamo: it’s admitted that most of the hundreds of detainees will never be charged or face a military commission. They’ll stay there as long as the administration damn well feels like it, and if that means for the rest of their lives well so be it. In other words let’s call the place what it is, a concentration camp. The Brits had them in South Africa during the Boer War, and they were subsequently held to be a shameful moral stain on the British Empire, just as Guantanamo Bay will be on the American one.

These don’t seem like complex arguments to me but for some reason they don’t appear capable of holding the public’s attention, at least if the media coverage of Hicks is any indication. The government’s tactics are obvious: convince everyone that Hicks is guilty of serious offences. They’ve been at that since they announced he was in custody and Peter Costello was still at it over the weekend. Unfortunately most people seem happy to debate on the government’s chosen territory, which has now turned out not to be such a great choice for the government since it’s getting harder and harder to come up with things Hicks has allegedly done that would even justify the punishment he’s already undergone. But important as that no doubt is to Hicks and his family, it’s a lot of noise about the wrong things.

The trouble is that all this argument about whether Hicks deserves his treatment is a distraction from the important issues. It’s turned into a party-political shit-fight and we all know where principle ends up in them. If Howard and Bush succumb to political considerations and find a way to repatriate Hicks without a trial it will be widely hailed as proof of his ‘innocence’ when in fact all it will demonstrate is that a man’s freedom has become the absolute plaything of politicians. If he faces trial and is convicted (which is almost certain I would have thought, given that they invented the crimes after they knew what they could prove he did), he’ll be some kind of martyr. Either way it’s been reduced to a petty argument about one bloke instead of a defence of one of the fundamental rights that we all should have.

So far in the ‘War On Terror’ there have been fewer total casualties in the liberal democracies than occurred in a typical month in the Second World War, but out of fear or apathy people have sat without protest while their governments imposed more restrictions on their liberty than was ever the case in a proper war. They are the issues that we should be debating vigorously in public, not how many times David Hicks met Osama bin bloody Laden.

What happened to creeping socialism?

Night after night Alan Kohler announces that the stock market has closed at a record high. The prime minister and other conservative pollies boast that Australians have the highest rate of share ownership in the world, mainly through their membership of superannuation funds. Compulsory superannuation has been one of the outstanding success stories of the last 20 years, providing a forced saving mechanism that’s allowed consumers to go on a credit-fuelled rampage that would otherwise have sent the place broke.

It wasn’t meant to turn out this way. According to John Howard, by now we were supposed to be in the iron grip of socialism as trade unions took over every private company in the land using the massive resources of their superannuation funds.

A bit over 20 years ago the employer association that I worked for joined with the ACTU and the building unions in setting up the Building Unions Superannuation Scheme, the first national industry scheme of any size. The scheme’s called CBUS now. It has over $9 billion under management, consistently ranks amongst the best-performed funds in the country in terms of member returns and has never had a breath of scandal or improper practice associated with it, despite desperate efforts to find one on the part of the born to rule mob.

In 1983 I was ostracised by many employer association representatives for being part of this socialist initiative. When I became one of the foundation directors of the scheme I was barred from attending meetings at the Confederation of Australian Industry, for which I remain grateful to this day. The national director of my association was invited to a meeting with one of Bjelke-Petersen’s ministers under false pretences, and when he got there, subjected to ritual humiliation at the hands of the mental defectives who used to run the Queensland Confederation of Industry with the blessing of the Queensland government.

The then federal opposition ran a sustained campaign against what they dishonestly christened ‘union superannuation funds’, led by one John Winston Howard and his offsider, the execrable Richard Alston. They issued press releases and went to conferences and gave interviews in which they explained how union super would destroy the private sector. Unions would use their funds strategically we were told to gain control of companies and install tame union-loving boards of directors. What would happen next they didn’t bother to spell out; the thought of unionists having control of a private company board was presumably terrible enough of itself without having to imagine the horrors that would flow from it.

I remember Alston putting on a staggering performance at a conference where one of our independent directors challenged his rant filled with absurd predictions and outright lies. Alston’s behaviour was that of a man unhinged - anyone who remembers the vitriol he used to spit at the ABC will have some idea. The pack of dogs around him joined enthusiastically in condemning union superannuation as the virus that would destroy our way of life. The truly frightening thing is that many of them actually believed it.

Needless to say nothing of the sort happened. Union directors of super funds turned out not to want to use all that money to bring capitalism crashing to its knees (though we did have to speak harshly to George Crawford a few times). Believe it or not, they wanted to use super funds to provide the best possible retirement benefits for union members. Well who could have seen that coming? Certainly not the Howards and Alstons and Costellos whose fevered imaginations are incapable of perceiving trade unions as anything other than an anti-social group of thugs intent on wrecking their world.

In a way it’s all the game of politics of course but it would be nice if just once, the conservatives admitted that they’d been wrong about something. They specialise in creating disaster scenarios … Chicken Little isn’t in the same league. Defeat in Berlin/Korea/Vietnam will hand global hegemony to the Commies. Decriminalising pot will cause Australian youth to become a bunch of drug-fucked parasites breaking into your house and stealing your TV. Doing something about global warming will wreck the economy and take us headlong into the third world. And most recently, pulling out of Iraq will see a thousand terrorist cells bloom across the Muslim world, all presumably intent on blowing up Australians.

The thing is … I can’t recall any of these apocalyptic predictions ever turning out to be right. Even when they were made, they lacked any persuasive logic or evidence to back them up. And maybe I’m biased - well I am biased - but these illogical dishonest tactics seem to be a tool particularly favoured by the conservative side of politics. They definitely fall into the ‘half glass empty’ category, as I heard the president of the USA express it (gosh he’s cute with those little verbal slips).

Anyway industry superannuation turned out to be one of the better legacies of the Hawke/Keating Government, and I’m glad I played some minor part in preparing the ground for it.

MySpace Panic

It didn’t take long for American social conservatives to revert to type. It might be OK for someone running for president to set up a MySpace site but let’s get back to the main game, which is spreading moral panic. Yes folks MySpace is a tool of Satan, in which babies as young as 13 can have unprotected online contact with people they don’t know. If that possibility doesn’t make you drop everything and rush in to check what your kids are doing on the comp then you’re obviously well down the slippery slope to depravity.

Here’s the thing. According to these fundie conservatives, technology is being used to expose kids to all kinds of frightful perils.

“Perfectly good parents who have a lot of communication with their kids are having problems with this. It’s very scary. Teenagers cannot assess risk. Getting into serious trouble happens to other people and not to them,” she warned.

What kind of trouble is she talking about? Well, there’s heaps of things. Like did you know kids can put pictures of themselves and their friends on MySpace? Yep, it’s shocking I know.

One New York City mother got a chilling first-hand view of the problem after her teenage daughter’s friends posted a picture of her in a bathing suit on MySpace.com.

Fuckin’ hell!! In a bathing suit!!!! What do they think MySpace is, page 3 of a tabloid newspaper? The entertainment section of the Daily News where ‘Tiffany Jones, 15, of Tumbulgum enjoys a night out at Sizzlers with her friends Dana Roberts and Travis Amoot, both 16′. Oh wait, all those photos of kids in the media with A/S/L are only seen by hundreds of thousands of people, whereas a MySpace page, being one of a mere 156 million other MySpace pages, might be seen by as many as 2 or 3 strangers over the course of a year.

What happened to this poor girl whose pic in a bathing suit got revealed to the world, like meat left out in the sun at a Lakemba mosque? Did the cats come out to play? You betcha!

Her daughter found it funny and tried to brush off her mom’s concerns, begging her not to call the other parents, even after the post attracted responses that appeared to come from adult men.

Did a shiver of fear run down your spine when you read the bit about ‘adult men’? As opposed to child men, I guess.

But seriously, that’s where the story gets weird, in the same way that all these stories get weird (there’s about one internet moral panic scare story a week in the American media. CBS ran one last year that was truly hilarious. After all their research they found a story where a girl disappeared … and she used to log on to MySpace every day … so obviously there was a connection). Anyway getting back to bathing suit girl, what’s this shit about the post ‘attracting responses’? It was on a friend’s site, right? So what were the responses, ‘Ooh your friend in the bathing suit is hawt, can I have her digits?’ In which case I’m sure her friend used the ‘delete’ icon that’s so useful in these situations.

Or maybe bathing suit girl’s friend had info on her site that allowed these apparently-adult-men to find bathing suit girl’s MySpace, and they contacted her directly. What exactly could they do? For the benefit of those who don’t have a MySpace, they could send her a message asking to be added to her list of friends. That’s all they could do. If she refused, or just ignored the request, they couldn’t have any other contact with her. I think most kids could deal with that level of trauma.

But maybe you’re one of these parents who lies awake at night convinced that your kid is a congenital retard who runs with scissors and accepts lifts from strangers and takes lollies from old men in greasy raincoats. Like this mommy:

Lori Hahn, a computer savvy mother of three teens who keeps up with IM acronyms, said she signed on with the company after stumbling upon a chat session in which her 13-year-old son was talking with an adult male, whose picture came up in the IM window.

“We had a conversation about it. He hadn’t been aware that talking to strangers on the Internet wasn’t a fine thing to do … He was just naive,” she said.

Oh please Lori … I know who the naive one is and it sure ain’t your 13 year old son. Don’t you think kids talk about this sort of stuff all the time? While he was IMing this stranger he probably had half a dozen other convos going with friends. The clue to the mentality behind this whole moral panic is in that description of Lori as ‘computer savvy’ … because she ‘keeps up with IM acronyms’. Shit Lori, talk about cutting edge. Next thing you’ll be doing postgrad stuff about chat rooms. The perceived ‘problem’ is nothing to do with being ‘computer savvy’, it’s to do with people believing that all those monsters in the cupboard actually exist and are running wild eating children.

So many grown-ups are scared of the online world it’s hilarious. it’s a kind of primitive superstition - they fear what they don’t understand. I remember a few years back there was a front page story in the Melbourne newspapers about a web site that had pictures of boys from a Melbourne private school online. Not naked pictures or pictures of them gang banging a llama or anything … just pictures. They were taken at a rowing contest of some kind. One mum was hyperventilating all over the Herald Sun about the way she scrolled through the pics in a muck sweat, horrified that her son might be there. Her relief when she found he wasn’t! WTF was she panicking about?

Since then I’ve realised where my perceptual problem lay. I was making the mistake of thinking that kids have always been exposed to stranger danger, and that it’s actually a lot easier to deal with online than when a sinister old bloke pulls up next to you in his car, or starts talking to you on a train. I mean when I think back to my youth I can remember quite a lot of encounters with dodgy adults. Learning how to handle them is a highly desirable life skill. Tragically of course a few kids get hurt while they’re learning how to do it, just like they get hurt learning how to ride a bike or play football or cross the road or have sex. Reacting to the possibility of injury by preventing kids from doing all these things at all just means they’ll never grow up, never be able to cope with the real adult world. Only a dumb, smothering parent would react that way.

Except of course, as I now understand, that’s precisely how lots of parents react. They try to keep their kids in a protective cocoon like those poor little buggers who used to live in bubbles because their immune systems were stuffed. The kids live at home, they get driven to school by a parent, they come home the same way, all their leisure activities are undertaken with adult coaches or tutors or whatever the ballet wankers are called, every waking minute of their day is closely supervised by adults. An increasing number is even home-schooled for chrissake, because you can’t trust those public schools, you never know what risks the kids might be exposed to. I remember some parents tried to sue Epping High School not long ago because a couple of kids escaped from the stalag at lunch time. These parents’ ambition for their kids is to transform their lives into one 24/7 institution in which they can never escape the scrutiny and correction of adults.

In other words the only private space a lot of kids have where they are free from adult supervision is their room, where they can have some privacy and room to grow emotionally. The irony is that kids brought up in this over-protective climate are the ones who are least likely to know how to handle a dodgy online contact, in the unlikely event that they ever get one. And I shudder to think how socially dysfunctional they’ll be when they finally have to confront the real world. Again ironically, the advice I’d give to kids like that is to get online and meet lots of strangers! At least you’ll get a glimmering of understanding that the world’s a lot richer and more complex than the one your fucktard parents are trying to keep you in.

Unfortunately even the online world is now coming under adult supervision. There’s this:

IMSafer, a company that monitors conversations on AOL, Yahoo, MSN and MySpace IM programs and flags dangerous, inappropriate or threatening words, IM jargon or themes and alerts parents who subscribe when it detects a potential threat.

Why stop there? Why not make kids carry a microphone so parents can pay someone to monitor their verbal convos too? I mean the world’s a scary place, let’s not leave anything to chance. Like the CEO of IMSafer says,

“It’s open season on kids”

Maybe that explains why so many Americans, despite being citizens of the most powerful nation the world has ever known (as our prime minister keeps reminding us), sit clinging to each other in the corner, teeth chattering, terrified of all those evil foreigners circling their country to do them harm. They’ve never … grown … up.

Bugger the unborn

I’ve just read yet another screed by an environmentalist in which I’ve been told that I owe a duty to future generations.

Maybe I have an ethical blind spot but I’m stuffed if I can understand why I owe obligations of any kind to people who don’t exist. It’s like telling me I owe a duty to the people who would inhabit Antarctica if there were any. Or I shouldn’t go to a wilderness area because it will upset the people who aren’t there but would be upset if they were.

There are lots of good reasons to manage our environment, all of which are grounded in our ethical duty to people (and arguably other animals) that are currently alive. With every minute that goes by new creatures are born and have to be included in any calculation of ethical obligations. But screw feeling obligated to creatures who only exist in some imagined future. Life’s complicated enough already without visiting the ghost of Christmas-yet-to-come.

Technology belongs at home

Some technological ‘advances’ are straight out pointless, infuriating and generally a huge step backwards. Number 1 on the list is the car CD player.

Back in the good old days you had a cassette player. A cassette would play for 45 minutes, the clever little thing would then reverse automatically and play the other side. You’d then press your thumb firmly on a big round button and eject the cassette, which could be chucked onto the back seat and replaced with another one without even taking your eyes off the road. Every few months you’d collect the cassettes and put them back into their boxes … not necessarily the right ones, but who cared? The cassettes themselves were practically bulletproof. I had a box full get totally submerged in a flood a few years back and once they dried out they were as good as ever, though the labels had gone a bit runny.

Contrast that with the in-dash CD player. CDs play for 80 minutes max. It’s hard enough to slide them into the slot even if the car is parked, impossible to do it on the move. Getting the buggers in and out of the jewel case takes two hands and even then they’re so flimsy and slippery that they’re likely to end up on the floor, where the tiniest scratch renders them unplayable. If you tried to design an audio system that was completely unsuited to a motor car, you’d come up with something like the compact disc.

Stackers of course are even worse. You have to predict in advance what you’ll feel like listening to the day after tomorrow, or alternatively risk a serious accident while trying to navigate between the tracks on 6 discs when you can’t remember what order you loaded them in. Then when it’s time to change the discs you have to sit in the car for 20 minutes enduring an interminable series of whirs, beeps and sundry other mechanical noises while the screen issues peremptory instructions (’Wait’ being the most common one), and rejects discs at random just to test your homicidal fury threshold.
The next technological breakthrough will be even worse. We’ll get cars with 200 gigabyte hard drives in the dash, and have to take a week’s annual leave while we load them up with our music collections. Then we’ll be able to experience incandescent road rage trying to find a track while we’re driving, incurring yet more panel-beating expenses by trying to make sense of a digital readout cunningly designed to be illegible from a distance of more than 10cm (three if the sun’s shining on it).

I’d get rid of the lot and replace it with a good old-fashioned cassette player but I did that with my last car. It took several attempts to find a car audio place that even stocked such an esoteric item and I think they installed it using a crowbar and a four pound hammer. Half the dash was broken and glued back in untidy pieces (he broke the window winder putting a speaker in the door too - there was so much araldite in the car I had to drive with an oxygen mask for a week).

So it looks like I might just have to start listening to the radio again … except my spiffy in-dash CD stacker struggles to pull in any stations more than two km away.

Technological progress … BAH! I say.

Conservatives are funny

Conservatives are really uncomfortable with change. They wish things would stay the way they are forever. You know those jokes you hear about people over 40 needing to get the kids to program their VCRs? They’re conservatives projecting their own inadequacies onto an entire age group. Little do they know that lots of people over 40 got rid of their VCRs ages ago, and DVD recorders cost too much to let bloody kids near them.

I was prompted to think about this again by a piece written by a conservative American blogger who’s just discovered MySpace. Now I know MySpace has only been around since 2003 or something but in internet years, which are even shorter than a dog’s, that’s a lifetime. Yet this bloke writes about MySpace with wide-eyed wonderment. Gosh, did you know you can only make comments on someone’s page if you’ve registered as their friend? And that lots of profiles are not even displayed publicly? Lordy lordy, what won’t they think of next. I guess it’s a welcome change from the normal conservative line, which is to generate hysteria at the damage that MySpace is doing to the nation’s moral fibre.

The truly funny thing is that this innocent abroad claims he’s been retained by ‘the presidential contender I’ll be working for through a consulting company’ to set up a MySpace for a Republican who’s running for president. Given that tens of millions of Americans of voting age already have MySpace pages it’s a sensible move I suppose (and a really really good argument to close your MySpace and move over to Facebook). You’d just think a serious presidential candidate could find someone better quailfied to set up their MySpace page than a dude who only just worked out that some profiles are fakes.

Media observers in shock … story gets attention it deserves

So this guy got into a kayak to paddle to New Zealand. The experts told him it was dumb and not to do it, cos he might die. But he went anyway and he died.

So far, the media have resisted the temptation to deify the bloke as this month’s Steve Irwin, and they haven’t run a ‘THIS FOOL COST OUR BRAVE RESCUE SERVICES $2,322,874‘ story filled with shrill indignation.

Can the media possibly be growing up? Naaahh … must be another explanation.