verging_on_random

The real terrorist menace

Generally I’m a placid kinda guy. There aren’t many living creatures I hate. Sure I despise most of the Howard cabinet but that’s different to hating them. They’re a bit like a dog turd you step in and mutter under your breath while you wipe it off with rolled up newspaper … it nearly makes you vomit but you don’t actually hate it. It’s just what turds do, whether they come from dogs or the Liberal Party.

But there is one mongrel bastard piece of shit animal that I hate with a passion. It’s the Australian native bird called the noisy mynah (or miner, or minor, depending which university you went to). It’s evil made flesh to dwell among us. The grubby little flying scumbag that manages to embody every single unattractive human characteristic in its scrawny grey body.

Take a look at the vermin.

Did you ever see such a mixture of greed, cunning, stupidity and sheer malice on the face of anything outside a horror movie?

These bastards are quickly taking over every bit of cleared land where I live … which is pretty much all of it, given that land clearing is the area’s growth industry. The locals call these avian arseholes ‘mickey birds’ which is way too cute to my way of thinking. It doesn’t go close to conveying the sheer thuggish brutality of the little pricks. At least ‘noisy mynah’ is accurate in one respect … they make a godawful racket.

The chicks start yipping when they’re about three days out of the egg. They keep it up for about six months, getting progressively shriller and louder. They yip about every three seconds, slightly off key, with a piercing intensity that can be heard hundreds of metres away. I defy anyone to work when a noisy mynah chick is perched within five metres of where they are sitting. Not only are they loud and unmusical but greed shrieks out of every discordant yip. The fucking things breed like rabbits so it’s normal to find two or even three chicks squatting like feathered cane toads yipping for food, and when one of the adult birds approaches the siblings break out into such a competitive squealing of hysterical “Me me me memememememe!!!!!” caterwauling that you realise hyenas are actually quite kind and selfless animals.

The noise that these little shits make is bad enough but their true evil is evidenced in their philosophy, which can best be summed up in two words: locals only. Locals, in this context, meaning noisy mynahs from their immediate family. Any and every other living creature is to be driven from the vicinity and if possible, killed in the process. Thus in areas dominated by these winged street gangs you will look in vain for other birds that are smaller or even of a similar size. The mynahs kill them all, forming packs of 10 or 15 or sometimes several dozen to attack them until the victims are exhausted and can be despatched by an endless rain of tiny vindictive pecks.

If a bird smaller than a magpie is dumb enough to nest in noisy mynah territory, the chicks will be lucky to survive 24 hours after they hatch. I’ve watched the genocidal mongrels do their stuff several times. Once the other species is roosting on the nest, one or more mynahs is always in attendance, watching from a few metres away. Once the eggs hatch, they go and get a few mates. Eventually the poor bloody mother bird has to go and find food from somewhere and that’s it. The chicks are dead within minutes.

If an animal is too big for them to kill the mynahs torment it relentlessly. They’ve mastered the art of gutless bullying through pack tactics. Even crows, currawongs and kookaburras eventually give up and get driven off. Grounded creatures aren’t spared - I once watched a flock of them dive bombing a rabbit. Maybe they thought it was going to climb a tree and eat their babies.

This brings me to the sheer malice that these despicable birds exhibit. There’s no method in the hostility they display to other animals. They are obsessively selfish, killing and persecuting other birds that might possible compete with them for insects or nectar. But they don’t stop there. They also aggressively pursue other birds like seed-eating doves that don’t compete for food, and kill basically anything they can, for fun presumably. They’re psychopaths, the Pol Pots of the animal kingdom. If they were big enough, they’d cheerfully wipe out every other animal species on earth, just for the hell of it.

I declared war on the bastards years ago. The racket the chicks make is a huge weakness that in any rational world would have led to their extinction thousands of years ago. What is wrong with predators these days, can’t they use their ears to find a helpless baby mynah when you can hear the fucking thing yipping three blocks away? Maybe they don’t just act like turds, they taste like them too. Anyway once I started to wage my one man war I’d listen for the early bleatings and wait until they chicks were nearly ready to leave the nest. Then when the neighbours were out - it defies rational explanation but there are people who are still prepared to do the “Leave the poor little things alone” bullshit, it’s like listening to someone defend Adolf Hitler - it was a simple matter to knock the nest down and put the chicks in the compost where they could do some good.

The adult mynahs are smart and I only had to do this two or three times before they adopted a two-pronged defence strategy. One was to gather in a large flock and shriek abuse and dive bomb me whenever they saw me. Ha! Like that bothered a bloke who worked in industrial relations in the building industry for 20 years. The second arm of the strategy was to build their nests ever higher, out of my reach. But they reckoned without human ingenuity in the shape of ladders, and eventually a fishing rod with a light plastic rod attached that must have been six metres long.

Eventually they retreated to the topmost branches of a big gum tree where I couldn’t have reached them without a cherry picker. I was still trying to work out an excuse why I wanted to hire one in the caravan park when nature came to my rescue in the shape of the kookaburras and currawongs, who found the nest and reminded the arsehole mynahs why they were genetically programmed not to nest up high in the first place.

So that was my little bit of territory secured but it didn’t protect me from invasion from outside, and I couldn’t think of a credible strategy to go climbing all the neighbours’ trees at regular intervals. Still, I had some victories. Chicks that haven’t been out of the nest for long are suckers for the hose treatment. They sit there getting satched until finally they fall down. Heh heh. And I got a few with well thrown bits of wood. I used to have little piles stored outside in strategic locations, ready for instant use when the opportunity arose.

Perhaps my greatest triumph was a purely spontaneous gesture years ago, when I rounded a corner and saw a young mynah yipping at 120 decibels in a tree out the back, and I took off a thong and scored a direct hit. That was one mynah who’d never yip again.

The only qualms of guilt I had about massacring these pests arose when someone suggested they helped control insects. But I watched them for a while and it’s bullshit. They don’t eat insects, they eat spiders. I’d be super pleased that I had a thriving herd of St George’s Cross spiders in my vege patch and within a couple of days, they’d all have disappeared. Or a couple of those magic orb spiders would create huge webs and next day there’d be a ragged hole where the spiders had been. Mynahs. They spend hours a day looking for spiders. And since every spider kills well over its body weight in insects every week or month or something - IDK, look it up if you’re interested, I remember it’s a very impressive number - mynahs actually help insects survive and reproduce by killing their natural predators.

They reckon Mao fixed the common housefly problem in China by encouraging every person in China to kill a few flies every day. I reckon we should have a similar campaign in Australia - $5 bounty for every noisy mynah corpse brought to a control centre. Because mark my words, if we don’t have a war on them soon, we’ll find out that al Qaeda was the least of our worries.

PS: the little flapping Nazis are probably a protected species or it’s illegal to hurt them or something, so I should make it clear that this post is creative fiction and does not constitute an admission of wrong-doing in any court of competent jurisdiction. Thank you.

Justifiable homicide

Ramones manager beaten to death

Somebody heard ‘Sheena is a punk rocker’ one too many times I guess, and red homicidal rage took over. I know exactly how they felt.

Aesop’s election fables

I really don’t understand what comes over the Australian adult populace come election time. On one side we have politicians making up the most fantastic nonsense … plucking figures out of the air, making extravagant promises that bear no relationship whatever to reality, guaranteeing that they can fix problems that nobody’s been able to tackle for 30 years; and on the other side we have the voting public, gazing at this spectacle with varying degrees of interest or cynicism or innocent belief. But hardly anywhere do we see people standing up and making a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, which would run something like this:

Stop telling such fucking stupid lies you arseholes! How about you stop treating us like gullible idiots and tell the truth for once you contemptible pricks!

I confess I shout this at the television screen two or three times a day, and think it almost constantly while reading the news feeds online. Yet for some peculiar reason it’s still considered bad form to say it to a politician’s face … or at least our journalists seem to think so.

Latest trigger for my neurotic behaviour is the release yesterday of some details of both the Liberal* and Labor health policies. Here are some juicy morsels:

Mr Howard said that under the Coalition plan, up to 800,000 Medicare-funded visits a year would be made by nurses to people aged over 65, veterans and people too frail to visit a doctor.

That’s over 2,000 visits a day, 365 days a year! How cool is that? If he guarantees that there’ll be some hot male nurses by the time I get frail, I’ll vote for him no worries. But wait, there’s more:

Under the plan the number of medical graduates would more than double from 1300 in 2004 to nearly 3000 by 2012.

The number of general practitioner training places would be increased by 50 per cent and the number of places for junior doctors to train in GP surgeries would be increased by 80 per cent.

A further 300 training places would be created for specialists in private hospitals and surgeries.

Now look, seriously, this is just awesome. As far as I know it takes five years to do a basic medical degree and Howard’s gunna double the number of graduates within five years … which presumably means more than doubling next year’s university intake. Hot stuff! See how easy it is to solve problems once you put your mind to it? Likewise all those extra nurses and GP places, it’s like all Howard has to do is state a policy and pooff!! They appear. It really does show how slack the states have been all these years.

What about Kevin, how’s his performance? Well unfortunately he hasn’t yet learnt that you can say any old nonsense you like on the campaign trail. He’s contented himself with using public hospitals to create new jobs for form-filler-outers:

He said the report cards would be used to drive his plan to provide $600 million to state governments to tackle waiting lists. “We will not be extending to the states a blank cheque,” he said.

What is the purpose of making doctors and nurses fill out forms? Well apart from making them earn their generous salaries by doing some proper work:

They would allow the performance of hospitals to be monitored by requiring them to report publicly on the proportion of patients waiting longer than the recommended times for their surgery.

He said publication of the report cards would allow patients to move between nearby hospitals with shorter waiting times.

Heh heh nice one Kevin. I can just see it now … grey nomad convoys camped by the side of the highway, scrutinising the weekly hospital waiting lists. “Grafton’s got the number one spot this week!” the cry will go up and with screeching tyres the Winnebagos will all head north while the hip replacement patients toss on the daybeds in the back and grit their teeth.

In all seriousness … can anyone possibly take any of this bullshit seriously? If Howard’s mob gets re-elected there’s no way on god’s earth that we’ll have two and a half times as many medical graduates in 2012. There’ll be no nurses visiting the elderly and the frail in their homes, or at least not many more than are doing it already. And if Labor gets in they might well be successful in making hospitals fill in more forms, but it’s not going to make any significant improvement in waiting lists. How can I be so sure of all this? Well because state governments have been making empty promises about all these things for as long as I can remember, and if there’s one thing I know for a fact, the federal government is no better at public administration than state governments. Worse, probably.

Deep down I think most people know this. They don’t believe any of the silly ‘policies’ that get waved around at election time, partly because they’re not policies at all. They’re wish lists. And I think that provides the clue why people don’t laugh them at them and drive the pollies who make them into electoral oblivion. Election promises are a bit like the lists we used to give Santa when we were tiny tots. They let us join with the politicians, for a few weeks, in a fantasy world where we all imagine the kind of nation we would have if we could only make things be the way we want by waving a magic wand. We know it won’t really come true, but it’s fun to play ‘Let’s Pretend’.

The truth, as we know from the evidence of lots of elections, is that these fairy tales don’t actually influence many people’s votes, so while it’s entertaining to watch the pollies and the pundits in the media being so solemn about them all, it is important to keep a sense of proportion. As I’m sure Kevin Rudd and John Howard and all the professional journos do.

It would appear, however, that some ostensibly mature adults still take the pollies’ wish lists seriously, as if they sincerely believe that they represent something that will really happen should their preferred team win the big election cup. People like that are kind of cute, like a lil kid who believes he’s gunna get a pony for Christmas from Santa. Then again, they’re supposed to be grown-ups … so all-in-all they’re a bit of a worry.

* I refuse to give the National Party any credibility by using the ridiculous term ‘Coalition’. With any luck, this election will do at least one good turn for the country and eliminate the useless National Party as a political force forever.

Lawn rage

Water restrictions have claimed another victim.

A 66-year-old man has died after being attacked while watering his lawn in Sylvania, in Sydney’s south.

Police say the man was watering late Wednesday afternoon when he got into an argument with a 37-year-old man walking by the house at the time.

Sadly, it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen more and more often as global warming bites. Why only this morning, I saw a young woman jostled and abused in K-Mart because she bought a toy Humvee and demanded a plastic bag to carry it. It’s only a matter of time before anyone caught hosing their drive will risk being strung up to the nearest telegraph pole by an angry mob and left hanging in the wind as an example to others. That’s why I only wash my car in the dead of night in a thunderstorm.

Al Gore, you’ve inspired a whole new generation of urban eco-terrorists.

How about that FM radio!

There are all sorts of reasons why people under the age of … IDK, 30 to pick an arbitrary age … seem so disengaged with public policy discussion, but one of the chief reasons must surely be the extent to which public discourse is dominated by boring old farts over 50 (present company excluded, natch).

Media commentary on social and economic and political matters is almost exclusively the province of white Anglo-Saxon males who still remember Bob Menzies and the Whitlam Government like they happened just yesterday. The same applies to federal parliament except that they’ve let a few token women in, but half the time the pollies are doing nothing more than continuing the juvenile antics that started in student unions in the 1960s and 70s.

Every now and then one of the self-appointed punditocracy makes a remark that unwittingly reveals how their thinking is locked in another era. Snarky whinges about computers and VCRs are a dead giveaway … I mean how would you expect to get respect from anyone under 30 if you complain in public that you’re hopeless with computers?

There’s a typical example of what I’m talking about in today’s Australian newspaper. It’s by the political editor Dennis Shanahan:

The grey army has put the Coalition back to its level before Mr Rudd became Opposition Leader in December but the FM and iPod-listening crowd has flocked to Labor and stuck.

Mr Howard is now at an all-time low among 18- to 34-year-olds as preferred prime minister, on 30 per cent, and Mr Rudd is at a record high of 57 per cent.

Bloody hell, Dennis, FM radio has been around for what, 30 years? Yet he obviously regards it as cutting edge technology and a marker of where the young folks are at … I bet he and the other News Ltd fossils yuk it up in the tea room about how all the ‘hip kids’ listen to this new-fangled rock’n'roll.

I wonder which party the GPS-using motorists have flocked to? Maybe Dennis will tell us in his next column.