I am trying very hard at the moment not to be optimistic about the election. As I've mentioned previously, I'm convinced that if I get my hopes up they'll inevitably be crushed like a bug.
But I've been thinking a little about this approach and while the lid is not yet off, I think those of us who have suffered under John Howard for the past 11 years have every right to enjoy ourselves at the moment.
Look at it this way. If one stays pessimistic about the whole thing, convinced a disaster is on the horizon and the Libs win, well - it's not really going to make us feel any better about things. If it happens, it will be a disaster whether we prepared in advance or not.
On the other hand, things have been going so delightfully of late (Exhibit A: Tony Abbott's meltdown yesterday), that I think we should just enjoy the ride.
It's a bit like jumping out of a plane - once you're out you may as well enjoy yourself because either your parachute will open (in which case you're home and hosed), or it won't (in which case you're entirely screwed) and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. So get into it kids!
Why so perky you may ask?
Well, there's just been a few things of late that have made me feel better about the way the election is heading, mainly to do with the wonderful Possum. Considering for a moment that today is the first of November and that before the month is out, the election will have come and gone, this post is enormously encouraging. A graphic representation of it can be found here on Antony Green's election calculator.
On top of that, a Possum comment from earlier in the week sent me scurrying to Wikipedia. He said that if Labor can score a primary vote of 46% they cannot lose. It was then pointed out that since Kevin Rudd came to lead the party, the ALP primary, despite the various fluctuations in the polls, has not dropped below 46%. Even the latest Newspoll that the hyenas at The Oz leapt upon has the ALP primary at 48% - business as usual (as Possum would say).
To put that into context have a look at some historical figures. These are the final primary votes for the last four elections (remembering that in 1998 Labor actually had over 50% of the vote and still lost):
2004
Coalition: 46.36%
ALP: 37.64%
2001
Coalition: 42.69%
ALP: 37.84%
1998
Coalition: 39.18%
ALP: 40.10%
1996
Coalition: 46.9%
ALP: 38.75%
So I'm going to remain content as long as the primary stays up there. Once it drops below 46% I'll start to get worried again...
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
"The Heart of the Nation"
Ooh, the Australian is really warming to it's election campaign task today.
In their rotating commentary headlines at the top of the page we have:
"The Rorts of Chairman Rudd" by "Jack the Insider". An Hil-AR-ious piece about Kevin Rudd being an admirer of China (hence a Communist).
Includes such pithy remarks as:
Oh stop it you wag! You're killing me with your wit! Kruddster! ROFLMAO!!
"Labor sees the light on next Kyoto phase" by that terribly well balanced Editor-at-Large Paul Kelly.
"Activist Judiciary a looming menace" by the delightful Janet Albrechtson about how the female (!!) lawyers in the Labor Party threaten our future!!
FFS!
"Kevin feels the heat over Kyoto" by Dennis "Psepho" Shanahan. Seriously - another one? Do these guys think to compare notes at the start of the day?
What a disgraceful rag the Australian has become. If they barracked any harder or more obviously - well, I don't actually think they could.
Good on you guys. You keep pushing that barrow!
In their rotating commentary headlines at the top of the page we have:
"The Rorts of Chairman Rudd" by "Jack the Insider". An Hil-AR-ious piece about Kevin Rudd being an admirer of China (hence a Communist).
Includes such pithy remarks as:
"The Kruddster spoke in Mandarin to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao but it’s never been clearly reported in the media what he actually said. The Kruddster was trying to welcome Premier Hu to Australia. The Kruddster got through that bit. It was only when he tried to wish Premier Hu a long and prosperous life that things went awry. If my Mandarin is anything to go by, the Kruddtser professed a deep admiration for Hu’s lower colon and wished that his children be covered in hair."
Oh stop it you wag! You're killing me with your wit! Kruddster! ROFLMAO!!
"Labor sees the light on next Kyoto phase" by that terribly well balanced Editor-at-Large Paul Kelly.
"Having spent 10 years of worship at the symbolic altar of Kyoto, Labor is suddenly selling a very different message. It is the opposite message: Kyoto has become conditional. Its sanctification is coming to an end."
"Activist Judiciary a looming menace" by the delightful Janet Albrechtson about how the female (!!) lawyers in the Labor Party threaten our future!!
"FRANKLY, there may be more to fear from Labor’s lady lawyers than from the union blokes who run the Labor Party. Astute Labor lawyers in a future Rudd government, women such as Julia Gillard, Nicola Roxon and Penny Wong, will surely have their eyes on the real prize: leaving a legacy that will outlast a term or two in government. That legacy may be an activist judiciary. A Rudd government may come and go, but the judges it appoints are there to stay."
FFS!
"Kevin feels the heat over Kyoto" by Dennis "Psepho" Shanahan. Seriously - another one? Do these guys think to compare notes at the start of the day?
"Labor’s attachment to the symbolism, and not the substance, of the Kyoto Protocol has been exposed, as has the party’s appreciation of where the international debate, and politics of, climate change is going."
What a disgraceful rag the Australian has become. If they barracked any harder or more obviously - well, I don't actually think they could.
Good on you guys. You keep pushing that barrow!
Monday, 8 October 2007
Last Friday night at about 8:30pm as Snooze and I sat watching the second season of The Wire and the thunder rumbled outside, my last remaining grandparent slipped quietly away in St Vincent's Hospital. She was 84.
Over the past five weeks she has been fighting a battle, harder than any of us expected, against a lifetime of three-packs-a-day smoking, plural plaque and mesothelioma in her lungs contracted by washing the asbestos out her husband's clothes every day after work. He died of mesothelioma in 1980 when I was three and she just 61. 13 years ago she lost her daughter, my mother. My Uncle is the last one of that family left and he's not yet 60.
Mercifully, she was was healthy up to the moment she was not. It was the flu that got her - attacked her lungs - the one part that simply couldn't fight back.
She was never a 'nice old lady'. She had an acid tongue and a particular flair for passive aggression, often beautifully pointed. But the grandkids loved her unconditionally and she loved us back, though sometimes it took a second visit to remember.
I saw her almost every day of the five weeks she was in hospital. It was a fascinating and humbling thing. There were peaks and troughs from week to week, but each time the troughs were longer and the peaks lower. Without her grandmotherly veneer, I was able to see her as a wonderful, strong but exhausted woman, terrified of what was coming, yet resigned to the inevitable.
We got SMS updates every morning from my Uncle letting us know how she'd slept. One morning she was being shown some photos and came across one of her husband. The message came through: "we looked at some some photos. She said "hello my beautiful man" to my dad". On another occasion she told us she already knew about Hawthorn winning the Semi-final by five points - she'd found out "yesterday".
The next time I saw her, I had been to a concert the night before. It was a choral thing in a church: "Songs of the Sea". I spent many years of my younger life around this music and the performance brought back the most extraordinarily powerful memories. Thinking my Grandmother might like to hear about it, I told her that my sisters and I had been. She looked at me and said: "Do you think, when I'm gone, I could be taken to things like that?" I was (as often happened) taken aback. "I think that's a great idea" I said. And then, to my dismay, her little face crumpled and she burst into tears. It was too hard, it hurt too much, she had nothing left.
As I left the hospital, the music and words of an anthem by Edgar Bainton resounded in my head. I had heard it for the first time in 15 years at the concert the night before and I had never felt it so intensely:
Over the past five weeks she has been fighting a battle, harder than any of us expected, against a lifetime of three-packs-a-day smoking, plural plaque and mesothelioma in her lungs contracted by washing the asbestos out her husband's clothes every day after work. He died of mesothelioma in 1980 when I was three and she just 61. 13 years ago she lost her daughter, my mother. My Uncle is the last one of that family left and he's not yet 60.
Mercifully, she was was healthy up to the moment she was not. It was the flu that got her - attacked her lungs - the one part that simply couldn't fight back.
She was never a 'nice old lady'. She had an acid tongue and a particular flair for passive aggression, often beautifully pointed. But the grandkids loved her unconditionally and she loved us back, though sometimes it took a second visit to remember.
I saw her almost every day of the five weeks she was in hospital. It was a fascinating and humbling thing. There were peaks and troughs from week to week, but each time the troughs were longer and the peaks lower. Without her grandmotherly veneer, I was able to see her as a wonderful, strong but exhausted woman, terrified of what was coming, yet resigned to the inevitable.
We got SMS updates every morning from my Uncle letting us know how she'd slept. One morning she was being shown some photos and came across one of her husband. The message came through: "we looked at some some photos. She said "hello my beautiful man" to my dad". On another occasion she told us she already knew about Hawthorn winning the Semi-final by five points - she'd found out "yesterday".
The next time I saw her, I had been to a concert the night before. It was a choral thing in a church: "Songs of the Sea". I spent many years of my younger life around this music and the performance brought back the most extraordinarily powerful memories. Thinking my Grandmother might like to hear about it, I told her that my sisters and I had been. She looked at me and said: "Do you think, when I'm gone, I could be taken to things like that?" I was (as often happened) taken aback. "I think that's a great idea" I said. And then, to my dismay, her little face crumpled and she burst into tears. It was too hard, it hurt too much, she had nothing left.
As I left the hospital, the music and words of an anthem by Edgar Bainton resounded in my head. I had heard it for the first time in 15 years at the concert the night before and I had never felt it so intensely:
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
neither shall there be any more pain:
for the former things are passed away.
Sunday, 7 October 2007
A Community Service Announcement
I've never been a big sun person. I mean, I love the beach and all, but I've never been one to bake myself brown with hours comatose on a towel, or with the use of *shudder* tanning oil.
Despite this, I've always been a bit anxious about skin cancer. I think this comes partly from a fairly (I think) healthy hypochondria. I'm sure it also has something to do with cancer not being a friend of my family.
A little while ago I noticed what I thought was a mole behaving badly. Well, not badly so much as oddly. It looked a bit unusual and seemed to hang around for quite a while (over a month).
Preferring to be on the safer side of sorry, I took myself along to my GP and asked her to have a look at the spot. She took one look and said "no, that ones fine". Phew, thought I. "But while I'm here I'll just have a look around".
So she poked and prodded and look at a few bits and pieces until she got to a spot right in the middle of my back.
"This one though...this one might be worth getting looked at".
Needless to say, this was not quite the reponse I was looking for. She explained that I had what's called a dysplastic mole on my back. Quite small, but a bit funny looking. A plastic surgeon was called and I was booked in to go and see the man (as opposed to The Man).
A couple of weeks later I went to see him, heart in mouth, expecting to be told that I had three weeks to live. He asked me stuff (as doctors do) and then had a look himself. He asked me some more stuff and then told me that there were two options. It looked a bit funny to him, but he didn't think it was melanoma (actual skin cancer). He said that we could do it the easy way (cutting it out asap and being rid of the thing), or he could measure it and I could return in 6 months to see if it had changed.
The second one sounded a little dicey to me, so I went for option A. He concurred.
I was back there in another couple of weeks for the 'procedure'. I wandered in and waited for a bit until I was called. His operating room was quite small - just a bed thing, a light and a few bits and pieces. Up I got, shirt off and he dosed me up with some local anaesthetic: "this is the worst bit". Then he did that thing that doctors do when anaesthetic's involved. "Can you feel this?", sharp stabbing pain, "ow!", "good" (bastard).
Despite the fact that he'd just stuck me with something that hurt, he then proceded to 'do stuff'. I couldn't tell what it was, but it sounded to me like there was snipping involved - I figured he was preparing scapels and needles and other sharp, unpleasant items. A minute (at the most) later, he said "right, all done". All done? WTF?
I don't know if he was just messing with me or what, but the anaesthetic had worked a treat. In barely two minutes from start to finish he had hacked a bit of my back out and stitched up the two centimentre incision with five stitches - and I didn't even think he'd started!
So for the last two weeks I've been getting about with stitches in the middle of my back. I've never had stitches before - it was surprisingly unpainful.
The spare bit of me was sent off to a Pathologist and I was booked in to have the stitches removed and to get back my results. That was last Friday.
Getting the stitches removed was considerably more painful than the initial procedure, but it was good to be rid of them.
And my results? Again, not quite what I'd hoped.
The doctor said that there was evidence of dysplasia. This essentially means that the cells were very (unusually) active. While it was not melanoma, dysplasia can often turn into cancerous cells. I asked him more about it. He told me that the difference between dysplasia and melanoma is what you see under a microscope and that's it's often very difficult to tell dysplasia from very early melanoma.
Ultimately, the verdict is that while no further treatment is required, I need to be particularly aware of the sun from now on and that if I see anything that looks remotely dodgey, I should have it looked at immediately and removed if there is any doubt.
Which is all a very long way around to saying that you should check out your skin. All of you. You need to look for unusual moles or freckles - particularly ones with dark centres - it's the dark centres that are the problem ones. Here are some examples of actual melanoma (these are not pretty, but you should look at them - you all need to know!), and these are "dysplastic nevi" (moles that are predisposed to melanoma), the ones that you should watch like a hawk or get checked out. You also need to have someone check your back - that's where most of them occur and where mine was so I didn't even know it was there. You should be doing this at least once every couple of months - particularly if you're a sun person (I'm looking at you Mingrid).
Seriously peoples, a melanoma the size of just 10mm can be fatal if not picked up early enough. The good news is that if it's found early and dealt with the chances of successful treatment are very good.
Do it today. Really.
Despite this, I've always been a bit anxious about skin cancer. I think this comes partly from a fairly (I think) healthy hypochondria. I'm sure it also has something to do with cancer not being a friend of my family.
A little while ago I noticed what I thought was a mole behaving badly. Well, not badly so much as oddly. It looked a bit unusual and seemed to hang around for quite a while (over a month).
Preferring to be on the safer side of sorry, I took myself along to my GP and asked her to have a look at the spot. She took one look and said "no, that ones fine". Phew, thought I. "But while I'm here I'll just have a look around".
So she poked and prodded and look at a few bits and pieces until she got to a spot right in the middle of my back.
"This one though...this one might be worth getting looked at".
Needless to say, this was not quite the reponse I was looking for. She explained that I had what's called a dysplastic mole on my back. Quite small, but a bit funny looking. A plastic surgeon was called and I was booked in to go and see the man (as opposed to The Man).
A couple of weeks later I went to see him, heart in mouth, expecting to be told that I had three weeks to live. He asked me stuff (as doctors do) and then had a look himself. He asked me some more stuff and then told me that there were two options. It looked a bit funny to him, but he didn't think it was melanoma (actual skin cancer). He said that we could do it the easy way (cutting it out asap and being rid of the thing), or he could measure it and I could return in 6 months to see if it had changed.
The second one sounded a little dicey to me, so I went for option A. He concurred.
I was back there in another couple of weeks for the 'procedure'. I wandered in and waited for a bit until I was called. His operating room was quite small - just a bed thing, a light and a few bits and pieces. Up I got, shirt off and he dosed me up with some local anaesthetic: "this is the worst bit". Then he did that thing that doctors do when anaesthetic's involved. "Can you feel this?", sharp stabbing pain, "ow!", "good" (bastard).
Despite the fact that he'd just stuck me with something that hurt, he then proceded to 'do stuff'. I couldn't tell what it was, but it sounded to me like there was snipping involved - I figured he was preparing scapels and needles and other sharp, unpleasant items. A minute (at the most) later, he said "right, all done". All done? WTF?
I don't know if he was just messing with me or what, but the anaesthetic had worked a treat. In barely two minutes from start to finish he had hacked a bit of my back out and stitched up the two centimentre incision with five stitches - and I didn't even think he'd started!
So for the last two weeks I've been getting about with stitches in the middle of my back. I've never had stitches before - it was surprisingly unpainful.
The spare bit of me was sent off to a Pathologist and I was booked in to have the stitches removed and to get back my results. That was last Friday.
Getting the stitches removed was considerably more painful than the initial procedure, but it was good to be rid of them.
And my results? Again, not quite what I'd hoped.
The doctor said that there was evidence of dysplasia. This essentially means that the cells were very (unusually) active. While it was not melanoma, dysplasia can often turn into cancerous cells. I asked him more about it. He told me that the difference between dysplasia and melanoma is what you see under a microscope and that's it's often very difficult to tell dysplasia from very early melanoma.
Ultimately, the verdict is that while no further treatment is required, I need to be particularly aware of the sun from now on and that if I see anything that looks remotely dodgey, I should have it looked at immediately and removed if there is any doubt.
Which is all a very long way around to saying that you should check out your skin. All of you. You need to look for unusual moles or freckles - particularly ones with dark centres - it's the dark centres that are the problem ones. Here are some examples of actual melanoma (these are not pretty, but you should look at them - you all need to know!), and these are "dysplastic nevi" (moles that are predisposed to melanoma), the ones that you should watch like a hawk or get checked out. You also need to have someone check your back - that's where most of them occur and where mine was so I didn't even know it was there. You should be doing this at least once every couple of months - particularly if you're a sun person (I'm looking at you Mingrid).
Seriously peoples, a melanoma the size of just 10mm can be fatal if not picked up early enough. The good news is that if it's found early and dealt with the chances of successful treatment are very good.
Do it today. Really.
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
Pell solves climate change, is brilliant
It's good to know that the Climate Change debate has been resolved thanks to the staggering scientific brilliance of Cardinal George Pell.
ZING!!
He then backed up that startingly insightful comment with this gem, demonstrating that not only is he in touch with the Big Fella Upstairs, but that he has "studied this a little bit" (!!!!):
Take THAT you filthy conspiracy theorists! Cower before him you so-called Climatologists! George Pell, as a layman (no less!), studies the scientific evidence rather than the press releases (?) !!! That's the last time you scare-mongering 'experts' will suggest we humans have something to do with global warming because you read it in a press release!!
Well done George Pell. Well done indeed.Muppet
I think I read somewhere the temperature has gone up 0.5 of a degree on Mars. Well, the industrial-military complex up on Mars can't be blamed for that.
ZING!!
He then backed up that startingly insightful comment with this gem, demonstrating that not only is he in touch with the Big Fella Upstairs, but that he has "studied this a little bit" (!!!!):
I have studied this a little bit and there's a whole history of differing estimates. Thirty or 40 years ago, actually, some of the same scientists were warning us about the dangers of an ice age, so I take all these things with a little bit of a grain of salt. They're matters for science and, as a layman, I study the scientific evidence rather than the press releases.
Take THAT you filthy conspiracy theorists! Cower before him you so-called Climatologists! George Pell, as a layman (no less!), studies the scientific evidence rather than the press releases (?) !!! That's the last time you scare-mongering 'experts' will suggest we humans have something to do with global warming because you read it in a press release!!
Well done George Pell. Well done indeed.
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