My ex-girlfriend's sister had one of Jamie Durie's g-strings

In these days of trepidation regarding climate change and global warming, a thought occurred to me the other day which strikes fear into my heart.
First let me qualify this particular thought by saying that the last lifestyle program that I had much time for was Torque in the seventies (Couldn't find a link.). However, having been exposed to a few episodes of shows that involve gardening and in particular, makeovers of people's backyards, I have noticed something disturbing. Nobody has a Hill's Hoist. Or if they do, the correct course of action is to remove it. They don't even replace it with one of those reel in and out doovies.

Nup, it's carbon- emission central for this people. Maybe they think that because they have planted callistemons and bromeliads and stuff, that makes them carbon-neutral. I have, of course, written this post out of concern for the planet and not as an excuse to post a photo of Jody Rigby, whom I admire for her horticultural skill, work ethic and ability to drive a bobcat and not for her droolworthiness.

The new stealth model from Ducati:
Featuring Australia's next World Champeen (If Chris Vermuelen doesn't beat him to it, which seems likely, given his times in off-season testing.) Note his angle of lean, then look where his back tyre is, he's having a bit of a go. And yes, I realise that the picture has been edited for effect, but not very much.
Also, funny what a difference a colour makes, isn't it?
This photo is of the GP7 in stealth trim, so that camera waves bounce off it and they can do their testing in secret.

This photo is of the GP6 in full dress regalia. Basically the same as far as bodywork goes (Which is to say "Far and away the sexiest of the current crop of racing bikes." Like 'em or loathe 'em, Ducati always brings the pretty. Except the Paso. The Paso is the ugly one who stays at home baking cookies.) The GP6 looks far more angular and New Millennium than the GP7, which is almost John Player Norton-ish by comparison. I'd still ride it, though.

Probably only to about halfway around the first corner, but it would be good fun trying.

As an added extra bonus limited edition feature, here is the dash of the GP6.

Belinda Emmett

Let me begin by saying that until recently I was blissfully unaware of the existence of Ms. Emmett. I have no particular feelings regarding her personally one way or the other. She conducted herself with great dignity throughout her ordeal and for that she is to be congratulated. Rove is as funny as a toothache and as charismatic as a tax office auditor. Be that as it may, he too has carried himself in an exemplary manner and his marriage to a terminally ill woman is to be much admired. Indeed, I think his conduct could be held up to the entertainment industry in general as an example of how people of strong character behave in times of personal crisis.

They buried Belinda Emmett yesterday. The funeral appears to have been slightly more showbiz in orientation, with glossy pamphlets and things, but hey, they were only disposing of a corpse and I don't care what they do at my funeral, so I have no right to be judgmental about anybody else's. However, to commemorate her passing, radio stations around the country were given copies of a song entitled Less Than Perfect, recorded by Emmett* in 2003 for an unreleased solo album.

Yesterday, whilst raping the planet in my tractor** and listening to the ABC, one of only two radio stations we receive out here (The other one being 2WEB, which was playing John "When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you" Laws.) I had the opportunity to listen to Ms. Emmett's song. There is a reason that album remains unreleased.

That song is truly, unrelentingly awful. It is the most painful gash that has assaulted my eardrums in many a long year. I would rather listen to an album of failed Australian Idol auditions. The scariest thing is the probability of this album being released as a fundraiser for the Belinda Emmett Foundation.

I don't know if the Belinda Emmett Foundation exists, but if it doesn't then it soon will because every dead celebrity - and most live ones - have a foundation, it being a well known fact that the only way to contribute to a cause is to duplicate services, multiply the combined admin costs and write it off on your taxes. Which has absolutely nothing to do with self-aggrandisement, furthering your career or trying to cover your greed and wealth in a coating of nobility.

* Is it disrespectful to refer to a dead person by their surname?

** Raping the planet = leveling ground that I earlier cleared with a bulldozer.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet....

Is it just me, or is depression becoming more common? Not that I'm depressed, but I seem to be seeing more reports of it in the papers. Now Marcus Trescothick is going home.

Bugger.

Apparently pate is sometimes known as forcemeat

OK, it's four in the morning, I can't sleep and there is nothing to read in the paper. I got nuthin' to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. When I was going to school, I found that this wasn't a good thing as far as productivity was concerned. If the teacher told the class to write a story without giving us the subject matter then I was cactus. By the end of the period I'd have nothing. Too many ideas swimming around in my head and too little time to choose. Apparently this is why a lot of prey animals swarm; it confuses the hell out of predators, who find themselves spoilt for choice and so keep missing targets.
If, on the hand, my teacher told the class to write a story about..., then by the end of the period I would have knocked out a ground-breaking novel about..., and would be considering offers from rival publishers whilst at the same time deciding whether to go with the screen adaptation by Peter Jackson or the Henry Crawford mini series.
One problem I have is that I don't use the Steven King method, mainly because it requires dedication, diligence and a faith in your abilities. King's method is pretty simple really, he sits down at a specific time each day and writes for a set period of time. I don't have the discipline or the desire to 'further my craft'. Another part of his method - the part that requires faith in your abilities - is that he doesn't start with a story in mind, he starts with a situation and sees what happens.
What would happen if a car was haunted? What would happen if a social outcast had telekinetic powers? What would happen if you discovered a spaceship in your backyard, etc. ?
I would never be game enough to start a story without a finale in mind. Writing is too difficult for me at the best of times, it would frustrate the hell out of me to discover after slaving away in my garrett for an unseemly period of time that the only person who can rescue the damsel was eaten by a dragon in chapter three.
Which is all fairly bothersome as I have had an idea going around in my head since 1992 for the Great Australian Novel™. Something of a mix of Camus's The Outsider, Orwell's 1984, and a little bit of Thomas the Tank Engine, given that it was inspired by the placement of the stations on the Frankston railway line. Trouble is, I can only think it about halfway through in my head and I don't have the talent necessary to realise this somewhat grandiose idea.

Also, there are no tits, bums, graphic violence or car chases. I wouldn't read if somebody else wrote it.

Later gators, I'm going to work.

Tit rot, knacker lackers and fire in the hole

After reading this post over at Adrian's I have a couple of things to say:
First, I fucking hate theme events; I don't even like fancy dress parties - unless they have a 'topless girlies with perky boobies' theme. I don't like Red Nose Day, Pink Ribbon Day, Shave For a Cure or even the MS readathon. All of them are noble causes - all of which I have been affected by - none of which I donate to. At least, not during the aforementioned themed events. I am aware of these causes and contribute to them accordingly based on the merit of their case, not because people are willing to humiliate themselves in order to glorify their own self-image as public benefactors. Which is not to lump Adrian's young bloke in with those knuckle fuckers who think that getting their hair spray painted makes them into paragons of virtue.
Secondly, this is a better than average cause which, as a card-carrying misogynist, lights my fire. There has been a lot of talk about this cervical cancer vaccine being put on the PBS - and rightly so. I don't care how much it is going to cost, three jabs will save a lot of lives and a lot of money in the future, too. Twenty two female MPs signed a letter demanding that the PBS listing be expedited. How many of these women would have gone to the trouble of drafting and signing a letter if the vaccine were for prostate cancer? Prostate cancer killed 2718 bonzer Aussies in 2001. Source: Cancer in Australia 2001,( AIHW & AACR, 2004) (Via Australian institute of Health and Welfare. This is slightly more than 1000% of the number of women who died of cervical cancer in the same period (ibid*) and 124 more than died of breast cancer (ibid, again.).

How much money gets poured into women's health compared to men' health? Women live longer already^, they are less likely to contract just about any form of cancer than men (Specialised girly bits excepted, although 26 men died of tit rot in 2001.); the only gender neutral cancers in which women are markedly more represented in the statistics are Thyroid cancer and cancers related to alcohol consumption - although the mortality rate for thes second group is actually higher among men than women, females were more likely to be diagnosed.

Some of the discrepancies in levels of what would appear to be gender neutral diseases can be attributed to the cause rather than the site: Four times as many men as women contracted mesothelioma. Blue Sky Mine, anyone? (That would be Wittenoom for the uneducated.)

Five times as many men contracted Karposi's Sarcoma. This is one of the diagnostic indicators for HIV. Not for nothing in the politically incorrect eighties did we call AIDS the Anally Injected Death Syndrome. Although bum cancers don't appear to be biased toward men much more than other cancers.

So what's my Point?

I forget.

^You know why old married men die younger than old married women?

They want to.

* I jist put ibid in cos I no wot it meens.

Oh yeah, I remember one point. Breast cancer and Cervical cancer research is so well-funded compared to Prostate cancer, Testicular cancer, etc., because women are much more vocal about their perceived injustices than men - and because men like boobies. As for the Cervix, let me quote L.J. Hooker - "Location, location, location."

For trees are jolly good fellows...

Woohoo, check me out; two posts in one day! What a gun. To celebrate the occasion, I've decided to show you some trees; because you are urban types and don't know what trees are. On your left you will see a photo. You may notice than in the centre(ish) of this photo is an organism of irregular structure and colouring. This is a tree. Trees don't give up easily.




Trees are also quite friendly. They have been known to respond well to hugs. If they can't find greenie hippy scum to hug them, they will quite often hug themselves.








Of course the similarities with people don't
end there. Just as people (Women, anyway.*) are pretty much useless once they reach a certain age and should be pulped, the same goes for trees. And just like people (Women, anyway.*), we tend to let trees hang on too long.






And just like people (Women, anyway.* Still.), trees
have really crap skin when they get old.









Of course, not all trees are what they seem. This one is obviously a bloke.
It started life as a fencepost. (If you don't count the fact that the fencepost was cut from a pre-existing tree.) Not content with having led a productive life once, it has decided to do it all over again.





*Blokes remain bonzer in perpetuity.

Like you'd know, anyway

Just a short note to offer advice to Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Martin Sheen, etc., but particularly the self-caricaturising Irish git Bono -

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

I respect your right to have an opinion on any subject.

I respect your right to air those opinions.

What I don't respect is the way that your opinions are given credibility. How does making a series of increasingly crap pop albums make you into an international authority on world economics?

It doesn't.

Shut up.

Fuck off.

And while you're at it, see if you can make a decent album. October was good, every album since has sucked harder than the one that preceded it.

It's all the fault of Cubbie Station

There is noise being made once again about the gummint buying Cubbie Station, or at least it's water rights. Fuckwits. Barnaby Joyce has said, quite rightly, that it makes more sense to buy properties which are already on the market, such as Clyde and Ballandool (Find yer own links). That is, it makes more sense if you are after some property.

Neither suggestion makes more sense if you are trying to alleviate this - or future droughts. Although there is an argument to be made about the environmental health of the system. More of that later, if I could be bothered. Do you know how much more water would be available to people downstream if Cubbie Station had closed down last Christmas?

The correct answer is none. Ditto Clyde and Ballandool. Despite the compulsory comparison between Cubbie's storage capacity and Sydney Harbour, they have no more right to pump water than anybody else.

As certified nob-jockey and chairman of Darling River Food and Fibre (Not to mention irrigator), Ian Cole points out, the Condamine-Balonne system is often dry, the Darling isn't, but the water allocation here is six times the water allocation there.

Using the same deceptive methods which have been used against the cotton industry for twenty years, he leaves the reader to assume that this occurs every year.

Bull fucking shit.

No water has been taken out of this system by irrigators in this district in this calendar year. At all. When this system flows, it really flows. When the system is in flood we will sometimes get 100% allocation. It has happened once in the last six years. Ian Cole is being misleading to the point of being dishonest and as an irrigator he should know better. The people around the Sunraysia will be looking at him and thinking "If it's good enough for him..."

I gotta go to work.

Fuggit.

Just a very short post with an inordinately long, uninformative title

The ringleader of the Catholicism cult is buggering off to Turkey. Dunno why; ringleaders do this sort of stuff all the time. There are a few little oddities about this particular jaunt, however. The boss of Turkey has decided that he is too busy to Pope it up and has more pressing business in Estonia, which, like, sure. Estonia? Come on Mr. Erdogan, are you the premier of Turkey or the Markko Martin fanclub?
Another oddity about the all expenses paid propaganda junket trip is the actions of Ibrahim Ak, who fired a gun in the air to protest at the Pope's visit. Not a well-balanced individual, our Mr. Ak. Not only is Mr. Ak quoted as saying in several of the news stories regarding the incident that he wanted to strangle the Pope, which is an understandable sentiment, but not a particularly easy task to carry out using a gun; he is also quoted as saying "I am happy to be a Muslim."

Not sure how this relates to the Lord of the Altar Boy Molesters. We have a boilermaker here from the Shaky Isles; I'm fairly chuffed about being Australian so I might egg his house.

Finally, of the sixty six news articles in papers around the world which Google News decided were related to this story, only the Jerusalem Post mentioned the word 'Muslim' in the headline.

More on global warming

I don't know if it exists or not. I know that we are in the middle of an extreme drought that doesn't look like breaking any time soon. The Bureau of Meteorology are predicting another El Nino for this summer, which means no rain. The doomsayers are now blaming this on climate change. This seems to be a bold statement. If the climate is changing that fast, then by about July the planet will be uninhabitable.

We have records of the local river flows going back to 1922. Nearly all of the highest flowing years have been in the last four decades.

Just sayin'.