Dum de dum

Oh hey. Hi there.

Wossup in da hood?

Me + inspiration right now = Hah!

Still. One must battle on irregardless.

I think lack of holidays over the last three years is starting to catch up with me. The good news? Holidays are on the way. Yesiree - I am off to far flung and exciting lands of exoticness mid April for a whole month of holitags - barely three weeks away.

WOOT I tell you!

I've been trying to summon the energy to write about David Hicks and why John Howard is going to win the next election (see voter 'care fatigue' and incumbency - I'll get there eventually) but it's too depressing. All I really want to do right now is sit on the couch and watch old seasons of the West Wing. DON'T JUDGE ME! I can't maintain the rage every day of the freakin' year.

Not sure about youse, but the daylight savings changeover has buggered me around. I'm still getting up and going to bed far too early. Oh well, if it means I can take photos like this


and this


more often, then maybe mornings are a good thing after all.

Peace out y'all.

Cleverness wins (again)

I imagine many of you read or are at least aware of Larvatus Prodeo, the Australian group blog founded by Mark Bahnisch from Griffith University.

Though I rarely comment on LP (or anywhere for that matter), I'm a regular reader and often enjoy the stoushes in the comments.

As you will know if you're an Itemisation regular, education policy (particularly in history) and the Culture Wars are pet interests of mine.

In short, the conservative line for the last ten years or so is that the education system in Australia has been taken over by filthy 'leftists' who are injecting TEH CHILDS with all sorts of nasty Marxist ideas. It is a line frequently peddled by all the usual polemicists on the right, but the cheerleader for conservative education reform is Dr Kevin Donnelly.

Dr Donnelly is an 'educational consultant' who (among other things) first came to prominence as an adviser to the Kennett Government Education Minister Don Hayward. I first noticed him in the mid nineties after he published a typical polemic in The Age attacking Arts Faculties in various Australian Universities for some of the topics they chose to teach.

His method is standard. Broad-sweeping commentary packaged in neat bite-sized statements, easily digestible, yet almost entirely lacking in detail. He has made a living criticising teachers and (Labor) education departments, is published regularly in many of the major newspapers in this country and has worked for governments in Australia and New Zealand.
Donnelly's recent work Dumbing Down has received scathing criticism from Stuart Macintyre (Professor of History at Melbourne University and President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia among other things) in The Australian. If you have five minutes, it's worth a read.

All this brings me back to Larvatus Prodeo. Being one of the foremost political blogs in the country, it receives its fair share of high profile readers and commentors. A little over a month ago, Mark Bahnsich wrote a post about education policy and 'teacher bashing' and who should turn up in the comments? None other than Dr D himself.

Read as he bravely and condescendingly weighs into the fray and is promptly shot down by LP regular Pavlov's Cat.

I love clever people.

Can't say I'm surprised

About this.

Could it be cricket's Escobar?




This on the other hand...

Talk to anyone who knows anything about the speed of the interwebs in this country and you'll discover that we are rapidly becoming a stagnant backwater in things technological. With no plan whatsoever to rectify this situation coming from the surplus-obsessed Liberals, could it be that the "Future Fund" may actually be turned to something useful under KRudd?

I like the cut of his item.

Mystery

Last night I went to a concert at a church in Camberwell to listen to 16th century choral works by Byrd, Morley and Weelkes to name a few.

*ignores puzzled faces*

One of the performers was my dear Papa and before the show, he discovered something very odd.

Under a park bench in the quiet, manicured gardens of the basilica, sitting side by side, he found two gold rings. One a plain gold band with an engraving on the inside, the other more ornate and filigreed. They looked very much like the wedding rings of a single couple.

Pondering the strangeness of the find, Dad picked them up to examine them further and it became even stranger: the engraving on the man's ring was marked with the date of my Father's first birthday.



...



Why were they there?

The engraved date speaks of a wedding during the Second World War, maybe a romance blossoming during time on leave, or convalescence. In Australia or Europe, Africa or the Americas there is no indication. Perhaps the bands of a couple escaping the horrors of war, or the mark of a more mundane, but still 60 year-long relationship.

Possibly they are the rings of two lovers never able to speak or openly recognise their love - a lifetime of regret and sadness laid out on sacred ground.

Maybe death has finally caught the ring bearers and the gesture is that of a relative gently setting them free. Or perhaps it is the mark of a divorce, the breakdown of a family, the end of a lifetime's era.

I have no true idea as to why those rings were there, but the possibilities are endless and most likely tinged with sadness. I hope the owners of them approve and that the rings find their way into hands that will care for them.

Hollow victory

So it turns out one of the first inmates at Guantanamo Bay to be tried under the military commissions, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was responsible for pretty much everything bad that has happened in the last ten or fifteen years.

According to numerous news outlets, Mohammed has confessed to being behind the attacks on September 11, the Bali bombing, the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993 and having personally beheaded Daniel Pearl, an American journalist. But it doesn't end there, he admits to plotting to kill all sorts of people, from Bill Clinton to the Pope and an intention to blow up a whole lot of other stuff like US embassies, the Panama Canal and Big Ben to name a few. All up, according to the Pentagon, a total of 31 terror attacks either planned or executed.

It is also rumoured that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was behind the JFK assassination and if you play the episode of the Simpsons where Monty Burns gets shot backwards at 9 minutes, 11 seconds, Mohammed can clearly be seen handing Maggie Simpson a gun.

Cheap shots aside, this is precisely the sort of result that will raise more questions about the handling of Guantanamo prisoners (sorry, "unlawful enemy combatants" - no "prisoners" at Guantanamo) by US authorities than it will satisfy the general public. Already, there is considerable scepticism surrounding these reports.

See THIS is where rendition, ghost flights, "vigorous" interrogation techniques, questionable military commissions and general aresholery leads. Sure they've got a confession, but who is going to believe for a second that this individual was personally responsible for all of those events? Not after he has been in custody for six years. Not after his written accounts have been hit with the big black censor's texta, most notably in places where claims of torture seem to be made.

If he really DID do all these things and signed a confession, then why not put him in front of a legitimate court. Imagine how much greater the victory would be if they could place him in front of an impartial judge and gain a conviction using the laws of evidence, without hearsay and with confessions under dubious circumstances struck from the record. A conviction in a court of law would be a far more convincing demonstration that they have not only got their man, but that he actually did commit the acts he has apparently confessed to.

But no. This confession comes in a place where the law does not extend, where the rules of the Geneva convention are barely recognised and when they are, new terms are invented to circumvent them.

If it's a victory at all, it's a pretty hollow one.

How to act

If you didn't see Extras last night, you missed this. Oh how I laffed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Ian McKellan.

A very folkie weekend

So on the weekend, I lurched into my fourth decade.

The last few days have been spent with my dearest friends in the largely loving arms of the Port Fairy Folk Festival.

Heading down to stay in Airey's Inlet on Wednesday last week, we arrived at Port Fairy at lunchtime on Thursday and staked out a big spot in anticipation of the 20 or so people and 7 or 8 tents that were still to come.



As anyone who has ever camped at the Port Fairy Folk Festival will be able to testify, this is no mean feat. By the Saturday morning the campsite is so full that tents get parked in the most precarious of places. New arrivals stalk the camping area searching desperately for the smallest plot to plonk their shelter and we had to work hard to keep the space for friends arriving on Friday night.

Nonetheless, success was had.

There were many highlights of the weekend, but among the more amusing had to be seeing Lior get almost pulled off the stage by drunk 14 year-old girls, a very boozed and very dear friend and diminutive lady blogger (who will most definitely remain nameless but who will likely kill me for writing this regardless) punching someone in the back on the dance floor without the punchee registering the hit and then another friend following her lead, being sprung by the punchee's companion before contact had been made, and then pretending to look for something lost on the ground to escape recriminations.

For five minutes.

Did I mention the punchee was also a drunk 14 year-old girl?

G.O.L.D.



I saw many worthy acts including these people, this person, this person, these guys, that chick and numerous others, was wished happy birthday by Luka Bloom, swam in the sea, got quite sunburnt, drunk and tired, ate a lot of sausages, laughed a lot and had Happy Birthday sung to me by about 200 people on Fiddler's Green.



All in all, a pretty righteous birthday (in the non-Godly sense of the word).

And to cap it all off I was given the most awesomest birthday present evs. It is, in a word, fuckenunreal. Expect to see many more photgraphics appearing shortly.

So what with a weekend like that, time off work, presents, booze, sun, sea, wind, music, friends, John Howard sinking ever further in the polls and a trip to exotic locales in the very near furture, 30 is looking pretty bloody good right now.

Itemisizzle

This is unreal!

Gizoogle any webpage you like, sit back and enjoy the results.

Here is Itemisation Gizoogled

"I reckon it M-to-tha-izzight have sum-m sum-m ta do wit tha alcohol escap'n whizzay tha bottle was opened allow'n tha wizzle inside ta freeze rapidly - but that's pizzy poorly-educated speculizzles."

Why is it so?

Something odd happened last night.

*cue X-Files music*

Snooze and I were just settling down to dinner when we opened a bottle of wine. It had been in the freezer for maybe two hours because it was essentially room temperature when we got it home.

When it came out of the freezer, we could clearly see some little bits of ice floating in it, but only a couple of bits.

But here's the weird part.

Snooze pulled the cork and within seconds the whole thing froze solid in front of us. So quick was the process that Snooze actually put it back down on the bench and backed off fearing some kind of winey explosion (not of the Andrew Bolt kind - ZING).

It settled down to just a solid block of ice and no explosions were had, but it was very bizarre.

I reckon it might have something to do with the alcohol escaping when the bottle was opened allowing the wine inside to freeze rapidly - but that's pure poorly-educated speculation.

Any science nerds want to have a crack at solving this one?

Where's Julius Sumner Miller when you need him?