News and Events – Page 20

I’m An Authority! – Apparently

Hounded by the press…

So, I get home from work last night and find an email waiting for me from a journalist looking for information about Urban Exploration (I could name the journalist and say what organisation they work for, but I think it’d be a bit unfair to alert all the other journalists to what one particular journalist is doing until they’ve finished doing it – if you know what I mean).

As it turned out I couldn’t help much because (as I pretty much immediately deduced given the rather unfortunate incident in Sydney the other day) they were after information on draining, which is something I’ve never done and which isn’t very big here in Perth anyway because our sandy soils mean we don’t need the big drain networks they have in Sydney and Melbourne. But it’s nice to know that when it comes to Urban Exploration I’m the go to guy for the city’s press ;D

(Yeah, I’ll just keep telling myself that…)

Oh and Perth’s own Heath Ledger is dead. I’m not really bothered one way or the other to be honest.

…Later…

OK, this morning I said I wasn’t too fussed about Heath Ledger. Well that changed as soon as the over as that best ever argument for atheism, the Westboro Baptist Church, got involved.

You see, a few years back Heath starred in well known gay cowbow movie Brokeback Mountain. This – according to the Westboro pinheads – makes him some kind of “fag sympathiser”, who (because as they like to remind us all, “God hates fags”) is now burning in the flames of hell. Where he apparently belongs.

They also say they’re going to picket his funeral, which is something they really like doing. Just show them the funeral of a “fag” and they’ll turn up with a van full of hate-mongers and loudly remind everyone in the cemetery how much God hates the inhumee, and that they’re now burning in hell. Through the entire service (yes, these are nice people).

Thankfully I imagine Heath’s family will be bringing him back to Perth for burial, which means Fred Phelps and his crew of vile bigots should encounter some problems attending (“hate crimes” generally isn’t an acceptable reason for entering the country) but it still really boils my blood. I consider myself a pacifist, but I’d be extremely tempted to use some carefully calculated violence against the kind of creeps who harass mourning families at their loved ones’ funerals.

Neither am I the kind of person who takes it on themselves to judge others’ souls, but if there’s any kind of God, and any kind of afterlife, then Fred Phelps better try really hard for some remorse before he gets there.

The Evil Empire is Dead and we have their Booze!

Gloria! Gloria! (do do-do-do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do do-do-do) Gloria! Gloria! ect.

Well the results are in (enough of them at any rate) and Labor has well and truly won the election! Here ends John Howard’s evil reign of terror! Let Kevin Rudd’s evil reign of terror begin!

What’s more it looks like Howard may have lost his seat, which would make him only the second Prime Minister in Australian history to do so – the last being Bruce in the 1920s (by the way, isn’t it cool that one of our Prime Ministers was named ‘Bruce‘? 🙂

In addition there seems to have been quite a swing to the Greens here in Western Australia (at least that’s the impression I get from Kerry O’Brian – in between his snide comments about the behaviour of the press teams from the other networks). Not enough for them to get a seat of course, but it’s a start and might make some people sit up and take notice.

The only thing that could really make the night complete would be for the minor parties to get control of the Senate. It doesn’t seem very likely since the self destruction of the Democrats a few years back, but we can live in hope.

(Hmmm, iTunes just served up Handel’s Gloria and See the Conquering Hero Comes, and the New Pornographers’ The Laws Have Changed. Coincidence? 🙂

One More Day

One more day ’till revolution, if they don’t nip it in the bud, He went on Rove for all the schoolkids, so they’ll vote for Kevin Rudd

Well, tomorrow it’s the Federal Election when (with a bit of luck) we’ll finally get rid of Howard and the Coalition after ten long years. The polls are all suggesting a Labor landslide so my hopes are up, although I’m not going to tempt fate by calling it yet. Tomorrow’s going to be an interesting day for us all…

Of course I don’t expect that things will be any better under Labor – I’m not an idiot. But at least it’ll mean a new team in control of things. There was actually a very good essay on the subject of long serving governments in one of the papers yesterday. I can’t seem to find a copy of it but the basic point was that once a given party’s been in power for more than about eight years it tends to go nuts and think that it has some kind of God-given mandate to do whatever it likes – usually under the guise of “the will of the people” – and will do absolutely anything to hold onto power. So you need to make sure the government changes before that happens. Frankly that’s exactly what seems to have happened with the coalition over the last few years (Workchoices anyone?), so we desperately need to throw them out and start over.

Anyway one good thing about being this close to the election is that there’s no more political advertising on the TV or radio. Federal law or common sense or old charter or something prohibits it for two days before the actual election. Supposedly this is to allow the voters uninterrupted time to mull things over, but I suspect it’s to prevent politicians out on the hustings from being murdered by members of the public driven crazy by the incessant name-calling, shouting and propaganda flooding out of their screens. Not to mention the written and authorised by joe bloggs for the australian loonies party canberra gabbled out at breakneck speed at the end of each add. It’s been particularly bad this year – I’ve noticed that whenever the subject of the election has come up in conversation people aren’t discussing the issues, they just complain about the adds.

In any case the day is almost here and in terms of my own electorate there’s a good range of candidates standing. We’ve got Greens and Socialists, Christians and Independants, and even a contingent from the CEC, who I hoped might be the Centre for Elephant Conservation (they’d get my vote!), but turned out to be a bunch of conspiracy cranks led by Lyndon LaRouche who claim that anyone who criticises them is a tool of the Queen’s Privy Council (or at least that’s what Wikipedia implies, and why would they lie?). There’s also the usual fifty odd candidates for the Senate – I’ve got things to do tomorrow so I don’t think I’ll spend all morning numbering them individually below the line.

One more sleep and it’s all over (bar the counting, analysis and Chaser roundup). I have the strangest urge to hum One More Day 😀

I could be bound by a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space were it not that I dream of toasters…

Indulging in some Shakespearean/Sci-Fi celebrity spotting.

Just remembered – Over the weekend I happened to catch some of a documentary series on Shakespeare. Very interesting stuff (for a tragic history nerd such as myself) but what really grabbed my attention was a few scenes featuring a troupe of actors entertaining the tourist crowds at Stratford on Avon. They were doing a A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing it totally for laughs (which of course is how it would have been played originally) but – here’s the thing – I swear to God one of the actors was Gaius Baltar!*Or more properly James Callis. I suppose it makes sense – he’s British after all and presumably had to start acting somewhere, but it was still quite unexpected, and had me peering at the screen going “It’s not! Is it? It can’t be! It is! No it’s not! It has to be!” and so on for a good five minutes at least.

Oh, and in news from the Missing Racists department the police now believe Jack van Tongaran is on the run, rather than dead. Apparently he decided to make a break for it (allegedly) because he figured having to report in to the local police station every few days was part of a police plot to murder him (allegedly). There’s a nationwide alert out, so hopefully he and his also missing associate will be caught sooner rather than later. Last thing we need is white supremacists with paranoid delusions (allegedly) running around the place.