verging_on_random

South Africa comes of age

Remember protesting against apartheid? I was politically unaware in those days. I just wished the dopey hippies would piss off and let me watch the rugby.

But today is the day that brings home the bacon. Instead of having to listen to crap pop singers going on and on about Soweto, we can celebrate today as the day when black South Africa joined the first world.

Giant Soweto shopping mall opens

Yes as of today, South Africans in Soweto can go to Williams the Shoemen and Baker’s Delight and Target and Sanity Music and if they’re really lucky, Hollister and Cold Stone and American Eagle stores. Visiting the mall to, like, buy stuff can take its rightful place as the principal hobby of the black South African middle class. They can now look forward to listening to Christmas carols any time they want for the next three months, and to using state-of-the-art stainless steel trolleys to cart more useless crap to their cars than they can fit in the boot.

All the things that distinguish white culture, that the poor bastards were denied by arseholes like Piet Botha, are now available equally to blacks.

I hope they feel that the journey was worthwhile. Can I tempt you with a five kilogram block of Cadbury’s milk chocolate to celebrate? Available on special from K-Mart, while stocks last.

The best Christmas present money can’t buy

I got my first Christmas catalogue in the mail on Friday. That’s a record I think - usually the retailers wait until after the Labour Day weekend. Which is this weekend of course, for the benefit of any Queenslanders reading, so expect to see the decorations go up in K-Mart this week.

Now John Howard, in the great conservative tradition of small government, has announced that the government will sponsor a Christmas parade in Sydney … on 25 November. He’s copying the Americans again, if you needed to be told.

Prime Minister John Howard has announced that the Federal Government will provide $1 million in funding for an inaugural Christmas parade to be held in Sydney.

The parade will be similar to Thanksgiving and Christmas parades held annually in America and will be held on November 25 this year.

In a statement, Mr Howard says that the parade aims to “strengthen a sense of community by encouraging people to join together to celebrate the holiday season.”

I don’t know what Sydney’s done to deserve this gift but maybe he intends to announce similar measures all around Australia.

Quite why people need any encouragement to ‘celebrate the holiday season’ a full month before Christmas Day escapes me. The retailers will love him but a few other employers might wish he’d defer the holiday celebrations for a few weeks. But the choice of date intrigued me, given that the prime-minister-in-waiting has hinted strongly that the election would be held the day before.

It would be delicious irony if Howard ends up paying for a victory parade for the ALP. Certainly if the polls are to be believed, there would be a lot of spontaneous joy and dancing in the streets if Sunday 25 November dawns on a Howard-free Australia. People won’t need Christmas as a reason to celebrate.

Will Philip Ruddock be on a float as the ghost of Liberal Christmas yet to come, along with a few detainees allowed out from Villawood for the day? Maybe Billy Bunter can broadcast a message of Christmas cheer to the Christian community in Iraq … oh wait, it’s pretty much ceased to exist post-invasion. And of course the parade wouldn’t be complete without Brendan Nelson riding on a tank, wearing reindeer antlers.

They should sign up Joe Hockey to play Santa. It will be a sight to behold should he have lost his seat to a television weatherman the night before.

Private wealth and public squalor

The NSW Minister for Health has announced that in response to rumoured stories of alleged customer service shortcomings in the Royal North Shore Hospital’s emergency ward, the government has conducted a thorough inquiry, engaging in wide-ranging consultations with Australia’s acknowledged best practice customer service organisations including Centrelink, Telstra and all the major banks. The following notice will be handed to all customers attending the ward as of 1 October.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PATRONS

Welcome to the Royal North Shore Hospital emergency ward, where our mission is to be the number one provider of emergency service in the developed nations of the world.

Unfortunately all our customer service operators are occupied right now due to higher-than-normal demand. You have been placed in a queue and you will be served by the first available staff member.

Your visit may be monitored by an experienced medical practitioner (although frankly it’s unlikely). Please advise the attending customer service operator if you do not want your visit to be monitored.

To help us serve you better, please select a seat in the emergency ward after reading the following menu:

• If you are here for a medical certificate to get a day off work or an extension on a university assignment, fill in the details on the screen next to the entrance and take a RED chair. Your name will be called when your certificate is ready. You might want to get a few more for next month to reduce demand on our staff.
• If you are here for a work-related illness or injury for which we can bill a workers’ compensation insurer, take a GREEN seat.
• If you have private health insurance, you are in the wrong place! Follow the signs to the Golden Stethoscope Lounge where you may enjoy light refreshments and the latest release movies while you wait.
• If you have an injury incurred while playing sport, we strongly recommend that you go consult your club doctor instead of hanging around here. Speed is often important in treating sports injuries.
• If you are in serious pain or discomfort likely to cause moaning or screaming, please show consideration for our other customers by taking a BLUE seat in the soundproof room in the western annex of the ward.
• If you are in imminent danger of dying, please take a BLACK seat under the skull-and-crossbones banner adjacent to the morgue.
• If all seats are already occupied, you may care to visit one of our sister emergency wards at Hornsby or Westmead.

Should you be about to do something gross like miscarry or have a seizure, please make use of the toilets that have been considerately supplied off the eastern hallway.
Please note that customers are responsible for cleaning up their own blood, vomit and other bodily fluids before being attended to by one of our highly trained customer service staff.
Your attention to these simple guidelines will ensure that the emergency ward is a pleasant place for everyone! Remember that your visit is important to us and we look forward to serving you again in future, should you survive the experience this time.

Iranians choosing the straight lifestyle

Poor old President Ahmadinejad can’t take a trick in the USA. Now they’re all making fun of him because he said there are no homosexuals in Iran.

I guess I can understand why godless lefties laugh at this but the most derisive laughter seems to be coming from the extreme right … you know, the ones who want to bomb the crap out of Iran tomorrow if not sooner, while they praise the baby Jesus and sing onward Christian soldiers.

Thing is, these are the same people who keep telling us (random link, there are thousands of others) that us fags chose to be gay as a lifestyle choice:

The evidence is screaming that each of us, personally, come to a verdict. If anyone reading this now is considering CHOOSING to enter or remain in the Gay lifestyle - and the truth is that it IS a choice - you are doing so even though you’ve just been exposed to the truth. That’s what it’s all about: believing TRUTH or falling for the LIES our society presents to you.

These folks should be rejoicing that each Iranian, personally, has come to a verdict that they’ll CHOOSE to be straight. Amen brothers and sisters, hallelujah! So why aren’t they happy? Why aren’t they embracing their brother in straightness Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Why are they insinuating that his claim that there are no Iranian gays is a lie?

There’s just no pleasing these people.

Bringing god’s gift of freedom to Iraq

There are blogs written from within Iraq by people embedded in the US occupation forces, from whence they cheer on the inevitable eventual victory interspersed with occasional solemn stories of heroic soldiers giving their all for the sake of the American way of life. Oh, plus the odd heart-warming yarn involving Iraqi children or puppies.

‘Inside Iraq’ is not one of them. It’s one of many insightful blogs written by people who are actually living what passes for normal civilian life in Iraq. It’s decidedly non-flashy, just ordinary Iraqis writing about their day-to-day lives. Such blogs are an excellent corrective to the relentless propaganda we get served up by those who continue to talk of a ‘war’ and ‘victory’ and ‘not giving in to the terrorists’. They remind us that we have been accomplices in bringing death and destruction on an unimaginable scale to a country that never threatened us and which we had no legitimate reason to help invade and occupy.

These blogs give us some slight feel for what life is actually like in the nation we have so comprehensively helped to screw over. Not just in the big things, like people being shot and kidnapped and fleeing to other countries, though god knows there’s more than enough of that too, but in the everyday things like being stuck in stinking hot houses without electricity for hours on end, too afraid to go out because the streets are unsafe after dark. Things like not being employed, and having to take an hour long detour to get home because troops have blocked off your street.

Today there’s a post that describes how more than 40 years ago, women in Iraq gained a measure of equality that was highly unusual in the Middle East.

It gave the women of Iraq the most progressive of all Arab and Islamic women’s rights legislation until this very day. No discrimination in salaries, no discrimination in uniforms, the separated Mums get to keep the home until the children are of age, and so many other items that made the female community of Iraq one of the most progressive female communities within the Arab, Islamic and regional states – from that time … until we got “liberated”.

The new Iraqi government, however - the one supported by the USA and Australia because it is ‘democratic’, because it will introduce ‘freedom’ and other wonderful Western values - has applied a different approach to gender equality.

Now it’s not safe for a girl to step outside her home unless fully covered.

How much more liberated can you get??

Girls used to be free to drive their cars in safety all over the city to all appropriate hours. Now it has suddenly become shameful for them to do so.

Why??

Why have we lost our rights?

For what have we been pushed back into the dark ages?

Well as far as I can make out (it’s hard to keep up because the answer keeps changing), John Howard says it’s ‘because it would be terrible if the global prestige of the USA suffered any damage as a result of being defeated in Iraq’. Happy? So put your hijab on like a good girl and go do some housework. And stop whining about losing equal pay. There aren’t any jobs anyway.

9/11 changed everything

Hard though it might be to credit, US politicians appear even more prepared than their Australian counterparts to shift public positions in response to the perceived wishes of an audience.

Take Rudy Giuliani, ex-Mayor of New York, now running for President. Back in his crime-fighting mayoral days, Rudy was really strong on gun control, ’saying in a 1995 interview that the NRA’s “defense of assault weapons, and their unwillingness to deal with some of the realities here that we face in our cities is a terrible, terrible mistake.”‘

Nevertheless in giving a wannabe-president speech to the self-same National Rifle Association the other day, Rudy suggested that “there are some major intervening events — September 11, which cast somewhat of a different light on the Second Amendment [the right to bear arms provision in the US Constitution]”.

I get it. Americans now need to carry assault rifles so that any time they see an approaching hijacked airliner they can shoot the bastard out of the sky before it hits the skyscraper.

Makes perfect sense.

Labor Bitches

Well a week ago I sent out a slew of friend requests on MySpace. It took a while but by Wednesday I was friends with Bob Brown, and Malcolm Turnbull. And Joe Hockey. And Kevin07 of course. Thanks for the add guys!

Peter Garrett, for some inexplicable reason, declined the request. Way to get popular Peter! Maybe he didn’t like the fact that I had bands like Octopus Project and Explosions in the Sky as friends. I still like the Oils though Pete, honest! Or was it my age that turned him off? Anyway screw you, asshole.

But Maxine McKew hasn’t responded at all. Lucky I’m not a Bennelong voter or I’d be really pissed off.

Nor has Julia Gillard . She and Maxine don’t say yes and they don’t say no. Are they just stringing me along do you reckon?

If the pollies wanna play on MySpace they need to learn MySpace etiquette … and leaving friend requests hanging for a week sends a very clear message of . Which is not really the message you want to give to potential voters I wouldn’t have thought. If a Swedish band can take the time to thank me for my friend request and make a clever comment on my site, a bloody politician can surely organise for a junior staff member to respond to MySpace stuff at least every couple of days.

The other interesting point is that I’ve yet to receive a single bulletin from any of my political friends, except for one from Kevin07 telling me to check out the new ALP election slogan. It was pretty good I thought. But nothing from Joe, nothing from Malcolm, nothing from Bob Brown. WTF is the point of them having a MySpace if they don’t use it to communicate? If they imagine that all their friends will check out their sites every few days just to see if they’ve missed anything they’re in for a rude awakening.

Oh and no I haven’t asked John Howard or the Liberal Party to add me as a friend. I have some standards.

Where are the Mandelas when you need them?

President Dubya has expressed a yearning for some Mandelas in Iraq. Apparently Saddam killed them all, which is why the Iraqi people are taking so long to get a grip and it’s nothing whatsoever to do with being occupied by a foreign power with all their infrastructure messed up and a sixth of their population either dead or maimed or refugees in another country. All these minor inconveniences would be sorted in no time if only they had a few Mandelas.

Not much of a vote of confidence in the current Iraqi government but I guess Nouri al-Maliki and Dubya can square things in their weekly Skype hook-up.

Anyway if you don’t know what I’m talking about there’s a funny thread over at Larvatus Prodeo which has all the links and stuff and I’m buggered if I’m going to repeat it all here. But it prompted me to refresh my recollection about the relationship between Dubya and the real Nelson Mandela, as opposed to all the hypothetical ones murdered by Saddam.

Back in 2002, Mandela expressed a refreshingly frank opinion of Dubya and his policies regarding Iraq. It seems that back in those days, Dubya didn’t have such a high regard for Mandela; in fact, he refused to take his phone calls:

What Mandela believes is wrong with the world is not difficult to fathom. He is annoyed at how the US is exploiting its overwhelming military might. Earlier this month, after President Bush would not take his calls, he spoke to secretary of state Colin Powell and then the president’s father, asking the latter to discourage his son from attacking Iraq.

“What right has Bush to say that Iraq’s offer is not genuine?” he asked on Monday. “We must condemn that very strongly. No country, however strong, is entitled to comment adversely in the way the US has done. They think they’re the only power in the world. They’re not and they’re following a dangerous policy. One country wants to bully the world.”

Having supported the bombing of Afghanistan, he cannot be dismissed as a peacenik. But his assessment of the current phase of Bush’s war on terror is as damning as anything coming out of the Arab world. “If you look at these matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace.”

Oops.

The following year, in 2003, Mandela made some equally forthright statements:

“What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.”

He was talking about you and the USA, George.

In fact, Dubya’s respect for Mandela seems to be a recent phenomenon. In 2003, he refused to meet him during a visit to South Africa - no doubt in an attempt to show that he could think as properly as the next man. Or maybe, as the story suggests, he was concerned that Mandela would snub him and therefore decided not to request a meeting on the time-honoured principle of ‘retaliate first’. It is after all a fundamental value of his foreign policy that one is either with him or against him.

So in expressing the wistful longing for some Iraqi Mandelas it’s not quite clear what Dubya was wishing for. But whatever it was, he should be careful. Revered national leaders saying things like “true democracy cannot be imposed. It must be homegrown and the product of consensus” might not be exactly what the Bushistas are looking for in Iraq right now.

Go pub Keno!

In one of its few attempts to grapple with important matters since regaining office - it might be the only one, I can’t think of any others off the top of my head - the Iemma Government has decided that it might let pubs run Keno, which is kind of a professional version of bingo.

Well good luck to them I say. I’m all for it, and the bleeding heart do-gooders like Tim Costello and Peter Holmes a Court should just butt out. If they want to do something nice for suffering humanity let them go rescue fallen women or beat up drug dealers or something. Just leave the gamblers alone.

I love gamblers. The misguided souls who volunteer to donate money to the government are my favourite people on earth. Every time I see them in their serried ranks at a club, or feverishly scratching another scratchie outside the newsagent, I’m comforted that I’m paying less tax than I otherwise would just because these nice folk are falling over themselves to contribute to Consolidated Revenue. Bless them all, says I.

Besides, gambling is a wonderful sociological device. It cuts through the crap and holds up a remorselessly revealing mirror to the Real Middle Australia. Many is the time I’ve looked at the old bitches lining up to have their Lotto cards run through the machine, thin-lipped and beady-eyed, greedily licking their lips and dreaming of winning a million dollars that will take them away from their drab boring lives and turn them into fairy princesses with a lovely home unit in Broadbeach and the biggest home theatre system you ever saw and a holiday in Phuket. Or the shaky old blokes desperate to engage anyone in conversation while they wait to see if they’ve finally cracked the big one where they can drink as much piss as they want all day long and finally achieve their dream of owning a Holden Statesman. Yes there they stand most mornings of the week, the aromas of envy and avarice and selfishness faintly nasty in the morning breeze, clutching their $50 notes which they are about to donate to the treasury while they exchange vicious humourless condemnations of dole bludgers and single mothers and public servants and all the other contemptible creatures who make life so hard for these fine upstanding Australians that they can barely find the odd $50 a week for a harmless flutter on Lotto.

Leave them alone, I repeat. Being subsidised by them is some small consolation for living with the knowledge that we are all part of the same human race.

I do however have one minor suggestion. Since newsagents became tax collectors for the state government it can take an inordinate amount of time to do something as simple as buy a newspaper. The Lotto addicts seem incapable of organising themselves even though they go through their irrational rituals twice a week, so invariably everyone has to stand and wait while some stupid bastard wants to check the figures once again, or query their change, or whatever else they can find to prolong the erotic business of trying to get a shitload of money which they have done nothing to earn.

My suggestion therefore is that the government ban Lotto but allow newsagents to have poker machines outside, on the footpath. Those forgotten heroes of our country as Amanda Vanstone famously called them, the self-funded retirees, could go and play the pokies to their heart’s content and the rest of us might be able to buy a newspaper again without having to take a cut lunch for the trip.

But please please please, let them go on giving to the taxman. Society is in their debt.

Snakes

I like snakes. We get lots of them up here. Green tree snakes come climbing all over the place. They are the most self-disciplined animals imaginable. Once they realise they’re in the presence of a big dangerous animal like me they go into the camouflage position and hold it until the danger moves away. One stood with its head in the air pretending to be a bit of lemongrass for the best part of a day once. For all I know it’s still doing it.

Last summer I had a resident one of these out the back.

Hope s/he’s still around. The only unpleasantness between us was when I’d get home from work late at night and s/he’d be curled up on the doorstep. Still it was nice to have it around - cheaper than Ratsak.

Thinking about snakes got me to contemplating some of the great names people have given to the dangerous ones. Vipers, and cobras, and death adders, and mambas, and cottonmouths (eew) and copperheads.

So what evocative names did they come up with for the two venomous snakes that infest the east coast?

Well there’s black snakes.

And brown snakes.

Brilliant. Obviously named by a committee of public servants.

PS Sorry if the picture freaked anyone out. I used to write another blog a few years ago … I ran some snake pics once and two regular readers point blank refused to come back until I promised never again to have any remotely snakeish images on the site. Big sheilas.