Archive for September, 2002

turtleheads

Via abrightcolddayinapril comes a fantastic collection of posters. While not official Yanqui-doodle-dandy advice - they might as well be.

the game

I am a fanatic as far as Aussie Rules football goes. Today is the final day of the 2002 season and looks like being a typical footy day. Driving rain, hail, wind - the kind of weather that only the hardiest of fans would ever put up with.

Collingwood and Brisbane will fight for the cup today in front of 20 or 30 thousand club members. The other 60 or 70 thousand spectators will be nothing but passengers. MCC members, AFL members, corporate sponsors, radio station competition winners etc.

Besides not having enough money to join my favourite club this year (Richmond), I can’t see any point in joining my club ever again if I am facing slim hope of going to the one game that really counts for a club member - the Grand Final.

I’ve been telling many people that I’m joining a VFL club next year instead (The VFL is a local competition that feeds players into the AFL). I’d love to NOT do that, but the AFL is fast becoming an expensive game to follow. It doesn’t help that the competition is run by a mob of corrupt, money hungry dictators who don’t give a toss about real fans.

Patrick White has written an article today that sums up some of my concerns. It surprising that the AFL bosses actually allowed this article to appear on their website.

ps. even though it’s unlikely, I really hope Brisbane gets thrashed. A few oversized hailstones landing on Jason Akermanis during the game would make me happier.

mumified

Oh oh. My mum has found my rantings and made a comment on Tuesday’s post regarding the hiding of pornos and alcohol when I was 16 years old. Now there are no secrets. It had to happen I suppose.

I’ve often thought about stopping this weblog because some people might think I’m nutty (parents, good friends etc.). In the end I decided that I’d prefer people to know for certain that I’m nutty.

Ahh.

blargh

While the rest of the world grapples with the Iraq dilemna with evidence like this -

(Iraq has) Learnt how to conceal equipment and documentation from weapons inspectors (I learnt how to conceal cigarettes, cheap wine and pornos from my parents when I was 16)

Anyway, what was I typing, oh yeah. While the world worries about little countries with a few bombs, I am busy inventing the worlds most insidious weapon against rogue governments….THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR.

You probably already have one. Minimum requirements for building a BULLSHIT DETECTOR are

• One brain educated to high school level
• 30 minutes of ‘A Current Affair’ per day
• Exposure to tabloid press
• Internet access

Have I missed any? Please leave a comment below if you have more suggestions for requirements.

usurpa bin liner

It seems I’m getting on top of my University work. The most difficult task I’ve had is preparing a 15 minute oral presentation/discussion on the banning of Batasuna, a political party in Spain. What makes it difficult is that I have to present my facts and propose questions to my classmates in Spanish. Not very easy to do at a second year level of beginners Spanish.

I thought for a while that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Most students in my class have done a presentation on somewhere they had been, their last holiday in Mallorca or the 4 varieties of goldfish in their homemade aquarium at Mum and Dad’s house. My presentation is ready to go with overhead projector stuff and a booklet of web links for students wanting to know more.

Somehow I think I’ll lose them 1 minute into my talk. It might be too much for most of the class who happen to be spotty teens, 2 years out of high school.

baghdad bagman

I had a laugh when I read a Guardian article that explains how UK public servants invented around 1 million people after the last census.

Having lived in London for 2 years it’s pretty easy to understand why people don’t want to be counted. Each person has a price on their head - The Poll Tax.

black is black is black is black!

It’s time to dust off your bullshit detectors.

mr magoo has good hearing

This page won’t have very much added to it over the next couple of weeks. Uni assignments are piling up and I have little time for this weblog. Shame shame shame.

a picture contains….

Last night I watched an extremely good documentary on the happenings in New York a year ago. Putting aside from my fairly anti-american (government) views, you can’t help but wince at some of the photographs collected by an organisation called hereisnewyork.org.

The documentary dealt with the human side of the world trade center incident. It focussed on how a small shopfront appealed to people to donate their personal photographs of the disaster and the effect this had on the subjects in the photographs.

Some of the photographs taken from suburban New York/New Jersey are the most striking. Unless you’ve been there, you don’t realise how big those buildings really were.

bazookas and marigolds

Now I wish I had never got cable TV put on. I watched on in amazement as Axl Rose tried to sing his old songs live. In between panting for breath and attempting to run from one side of the stage to the other, he managed to confirm my long held view that good musicians should all die at the age of 27 so they can’t let down their fans later in their lives.

Yeah. I liked Guns ‘n Roses in 1989 (Hey, I was 17).

Guns ‘n Roses have a new guitarist who caught my eye. Buckethead. He wears a KFC bucket on his head. Cool.

it’s a gas

Kyoto is in the news again.

Apart from the fact that we should be abiding by Kyoto for our own sake, it’s good to see big companies starting to realise that the Kyoto Protocol is going to be a business opportunity.

I suppose that the only way to encourage environmental friendliness is to make it profitable. It’s a bit sad but if it works, why not try it?

cable for a brain

The lucrative contract for provision of communication services (telephone, cable tv and dial-up internet access) at my house has been won by Optus. I’ve decided to give my hard earned $$$ to the Singaporean government. Telstra have been giving me the shits with their price rises lately so I decided to jump ship.

So, now I’ve entered the the murky world of cable television. Instead of having 5 channels with nothing but crap, I now have 30 or so channels with nothing but different crap. Now I can watch endless Eminem specials on MTV. Great! If paying $50 a month to watch television has to be justified, I’d have to say that BBC World is worth every cent of it. Watching an Australia v New Zealand one day cricket match from Sri Lanka without Tony Greig commentating is also a big plus for having cable TV.

The thing I don’t get is that a man spent 6 hours cabling my house and all I end up paying is $29.95 for connection (Telstra charge $55 to do nothing). They also give me 100 free local calls every month (we average 130 calls a month). Margins must be being seriously squeezed. How can they make money?

I suppose Optus count on happy customers like me giving them ‘word of mouth’ promotion. What can I say?

Their niceness worked.