Category: News and Events

New Year, Same Fear

Happy new year folks!

I’ve been working on a number of projects lately (should be ready to reveal one in a few weeks) and as such have been neglecting the Wyrmlog a bit. But I figured I should jump on and let people know I’m still alive.

So let’s see…

Trump has invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president. I have reached the point where I am no longer surprised by anything the maniac in the Whitehouse does – each new atrocity just makes me feel even more tired and even more sad. Maybe the mid-terms will castrate the orange monstrosity, or maybe we’ll be stuck with him wielding absolute power until 2029, who knows?

The Bondi terrorist attack. Appalling. Just fucking appalling. And what’s worse is all sides of politics jumping on board to exploit the hell out of it. I think it’s fair to say that Albanese has made a major fumble by not calling a Royal Commission and has now been painted into a corner where the opposition can tear him to shreds for resisting a Commission, or tear him to shreds for ‘flip-flopping’ if he does call a Commission. Zionists and pro-Israel Fascists are jumping on the attack to label any criticism of Israel or support for Palestine as antisemitic, while the genuine antisemites are cackling with glee over dead kids and shattered families. And the Jewish population are caught in the middle and living in fear. The whole thing is utterly fucked, which is of course why the unspeakable scum that carried out the attack did it.

(For the record. Disliking Israel because they’re Jewish – antisemitism. Disliking Israel because they’re behaving like a bunch of cunts – not antisemitism.)

On less serious matters, a major storm swept through Perth (on the Sunday of the attack as it happens) and knocked out power to huge areas of the state, and the city, including my complex. I was standing at my window just after 4:00 in the afternoon watching the horizontal rain switch back and forth when the power went out. I didn’t mind so much at first as it had been a disgustingly hot day and the storm pulled the temperature right down. The initial estimate for restoration (checked on my phone) was only a few hours so I did some reading, then got the bus over to Morley (which still had power) and had dinner at Varsity. I then decided to kill even more time by walking home.

Walking through the suburbs as it got darker and darker, with fallen branches and occasional uprooted trees everywhere was distinctly eerie (I tried to capture the mood with some photos but my stupid phone lightened them all). The weirdest bit was when I passed a guy doing some work in his yard by the light of LED lamps mounted on his ute. I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to go and sit in the light to get relief from the oppressive darkness – a feeling I suspect dates back 2 million years to the African Savannah when we’d huddle around the fires to stay safe from the lions and hyenas.

By the time I got home they’d revised the time to restore power until the early hours of the morning, so I went to bed and without my fan and CPAP machine slept extremely poorly. I eventually crawled out of bed at around 5:00am, and on noting there was still no power had a cold sponge-bath and caught the bus into work.

Power was restored mid-morning, but my fridge had been off for about 18 hours, so I had to throw out a whole load of food I’d only just bought on Saturday. Thankfully I was able to claim $120 from the power company for it, so all’s well that ends more-or-less well.

Oh, and the rather lovely tree that the council spent so much money moving from the train station to the library to save it from redevelopment was snapped clean off at the base, so that’s sad.

On another matter it has come to my attention that the Wyrmlog has lost all styling. This is what happens when you modify a Theme directly rather than creating a child theme (because you have no idea what you’re doing) and then maybe ten years later absentmindedly turn on automatic Theme updates, causing your changes to be overwritten. I will get everything re-styled when I have a minute, which could be any time between today and the Unix Timestamp Epoch (did I mention that I have been semi-officially diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD?).

The second season of Fallout has dropped and I’m very much enjoying it. So far it’s not quite as good as the first season, but it would be insanely difficult for it to be (in my opinion the first season is just about the greatest TV series ever made). I can’t help wondering if the two Mr Houses are a way to keep Mr House alive after the events of New Vegas – the Courier may well have killed a Mr House but did they kill the Mr House? Time will tell…

I have voted in the Hottest 100. Expect a post about my choices soon.

That’s about it I guess. Go make your own entertainment!

The Spey Bridge Disaster

A historic former railway bridge has been cordoned off by police after a section of it collapsed into the River Spey in Moray. The Spey Viaduct, an iron girder structure near Garmouth, was completed in 1886 and while no longer used for trains, was popular with cyclists and walkers.
— BBC News

Oh, the fair Railway Viaduct ‘tween Garmouth and Spey!
Has fallen in the river, I am very sad to say,
On the thirteenth of December in the year twenty twenty five
And any person caught on it would have been lucky to survive!
For many years it carried goods and persons on its rails,
And today it is part of many important trails,
But sadly done is all of that if some strong repairs,
Cannot be made swiftly, to ease the people’s cares,
Did the Moray Council carry out their duty,
To maintain the Garmouth Viaduct of such usefulness and beauty?
Propriety demands a full investigation,
And all I pray should join in righteous indignation,
Should signs be found of malfeasance or prestidigitation,
Or any other such things as would dismay the nation,
If necessary maintenance the Council did not carry out,
And let the noble viaduct fall into ruin and into rout,
They must resolve a remedy, for this we all do pray,
And quickly repair the viaduct without doubt or dismay,
For a bridge across a river that does not fully span,
Is of no use to beast and is neither of use to man,
And such a bridge, I’m sure that none would judge it petty,
Is much less like a bridge, and much more like a jetty,
So Moray Council hurry, to fix the broken span,
And restore the viaduct just as fast as you possibly can,
To rejoin the sundered communities of Garmouth and Spey,
So they can again communicate in their habitual way,
Oh, the fair Railway Viaduct ‘tween Garmouth and Spey!
Has fallen in the river, I am very sad to say,
On the thirteenth of December in the year twenty twenty five,
And any person caught on it would have been lucky to survive!

Farewell Pete, We Wish We Hardly Knew Ye

Opposition Leader Job Seeker Peter Dutton

So, Labor won the election in a total landslide, and Peter Dutton became the first opposition leader in Australian history to lose his seat. I would have much preferred the Greens to hold on to their seats, but this is an outcome I can live with.

I spent most of the day ignoring the election (having voted early on Friday) and turned over to the ABC just in time to see Antony Green call it for Labor. Then, maybe a half hour later, he declared that Peter was out and the panel turned to their Liberal representative (James McGrath I believe) for a comment on this “massive repudiation” of Dutton’s policies. He stared, frozen, at the camera with his mouth hanging open for what seemed like a full five seconds before stuttering to life. It was glorious! (Schadenfreude is undignified, but by god it’s delicious!)

It would be nice to imagine that the Libs will now realise that Australians don’t want nuclear power and don’t react well to American-style identity politics, but I won’t be holding my breath.

It also looks like Clive Palmer and his inane “Trumpet of Patriots” party won’t get a seat in either house, and not only has Clive stated that he would have got a better result if he’d stuck with the “Palmer United” name, he now claims to be too old for politics and won’t bother any more. This is fantastic news for every right thinking person. Personally I numbered all of the 50+ boxes on the Senate ballot paper simply so I could put Clive last, so this pleases me immensely. Piss off, Clive!

It is a good day to be alive in Australia.

Pooches and Popes

On Monday (Australian time) the Pope died. So did my parent’s dachshund Rudy who managed to make it to 21, which is not just extremely good going for any dog but pretty close to the longest recorded lifespan for any dachshund.

Rudy was a good boy, but what about Pope Francis?

In my personal opinion Francis was one of the better Pontiffs of recent times – keeping in mind that the bar for Papal decency is simultaneously pretty low and disturbingly difficult for so many of them to reach. He made some good statements and implemented some good policies, while not being outstandingly horrible to the Vatican’s usual punching bags. With an institution as ancient, hidebound and prejudiced as the Catholic Church that’s about the best you can hope for.

So now the race is on for a new Pope. Unfortunately the prophecies of Saint Malachy have now run out, so we can no longer have fun speculating on which Cardinal best fits whatever nonsensical aphorism he (or a 16th century forger more likely) scrawled down. The big question is whether a progressive (for the Papacy of course) like Francis will make the cut, or if there’ll be a conservative backlash and we end up with someone only slightly to the left of Attila the Hun. There’s also the increasingly traditional speculation over whether they’ll choose someone from the global south, or go with yet another European.

Time will tell I guess. However the dice fall, as long as they don’t elect anyone named Peter the wider world will probably be alright.

Anyway, here’s the song I always think of whenever a Papal conclave rolls around.

Eat Me, Bobby!

“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.” — RFK Junior on autistic people

There once was a moron named Bobby,
The CDC he liked to lobby,
Already insane,
When a worm ate his brain,
He spreads medical lies as a hobby,

RFK Jr.’s quite yappy,
He lacks the good sense of his pappy,
If you do as he bids,
You’ll kill millions of kids,
But the worm in his brain will be happy,

Anti-vax RFK teaches,
Raw water and milk’s what he preaches,
Before very long,
If we let this go on,
We’ll all be relying on leeches,

Stick that in your all natural crack pipe Bobby!

Why Peter Dutton is Just Crazy About Nuclear!

Peter Dutton and His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition. Yes, it’s an old joke, but it works damnit!

It’s election season here in Australia with voters shortly to choose between the currently incumbent Labor Party under Anthony Albanese and the Liberal-National Coalition under Peter Dutton (there are plenty of other parties but the odds of any of them winning enough seats to form government are so tiny as to be laughable). Good old Pete has been campaigning for quite some time on dealing with climate change by building nuclear power stations, which is something so out of left field for Australian politics that it has a lot of people wondering what’s in the water in the Liberal party room. Well, read on and all shall be revealed!

(Note for Americans and other aliens: The Australian Liberal Party is Australia’s major conservative party, with the Nationals their hillbilly cousins. This causes all kinds of problems, most notably when the sarcastic hashtag #imvotingliberalbecause escaped Aussie Twitter some years back and utterly baffled the poor Americans)

Reason 1: The Liberals have spent the better part of the last 30 years arguing that climate change is a hoax, and renewable energy is a scam. The majority of Australians now know that neither of these things are true and are demanding action on climate, but years of denial have painted the Libs into a corner where they can’t embrace renewables without handing the Left a massive propaganda coup. So they’ve grabbed on to nuclear as an alternate ‘clean’ energy source that won’t make them look like they’re caving to the progressives.

Reason 2: Renewable energy – rooftop solar in particular – has massive potential to take energy generation out of the hands of big corporations and put it into the hands of individuals. This is a nightmare for said big corporations, who will see their profits plunge as people switch to making and using their own power. Nuclear keeps power generation in the hands of big business, which is where the Liberals’ corporate donors/masters want it!

Reason 3: Every non-partisan expert says that it will take at least 30 years to get nuclear power up and running in this country. Dutton denies this with vague hand-waving about ‘breakthroughs’, but from the Liberal viewpoint a big delay is a feature, not a bug. The longer it takes for nuclear to come online the longer the Liberal Party’s big business mates can keep on turning a profit from coal, oil and gas. Dutton’s dream reactor is the one that starts operating in the infinite tomorrow – the tomorrow that ticks over a day every day at midnight.

So there you have it, the three reasons Peter Dutton and the Liberal-National Coalition are suddenly crazy for a nuclear future. What a shower of dicks.