Sunday, September 30, 2007
CHRIS MAINWARING
Sky News is reporting that former West Coast Eagle Chris Mainwaring has died. No further details.
Former West Coast Eagles premiership player Chris Mainwaring died suddenly in Perth today. Mainwaring, 41, was rushed to hospital by ambulance at midnight after collapsing at home.
UPDATE II. This is weird:
The dual AFL Premiership player died after being rushed from his Cottesloe home to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in the early hours of this morning.
Police say officers had been called to Haining Avenue about 11.30pm after complaints Mainwaring had been yelling in the street.
When police arrived, he was calm and refused treatment from St John Ambulance.
MAN LURED BY FOOD, SOMEHOW
Lefty blogger and café owner Caroline greets a celebrity customer:
My other visitor was the marvellous Phillip Adams and daughter Rory, who came looking for some antiquey-type something next door and called in to say g’day, drink coffee, milkshakes and eat brownies. I’ve been corresponding with Phillip for many, many, years, (he never fails to reply) and while I’ve had the opportunity to meet him a couple of times, I’ve procrastinated and/or had attacks of shyness ...
Fortunately it had been a quiet Sunday and so he didn’t walk into a huge mess and me in stressed-out-wreck mode. Of all the things to talk about, I wasn’t really quite sure what to do say ...
Perhaps Phillip and Caroline could have discussed their shared interest in borrowing. At Caroline’s site, you’ll find this banner quote:
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
Written by Jack Handey. Uncredited, in the Adams tradition.
MAYBE SID HAD A SPY
Beats me how Sid Blumenthal is so certain Karl Rove masterminded Rathergate; after all, Sid wasn’t invited to any of the meetings.
(Via The Virginian)
DEAD PLAY SHOWING
From success to success:
Like his 2006 play Honour Bound, about former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks, Jamieson says Dead Man Walking challenges as well as entertains.
Yep. Honour Bound sure entertained. Also on matters Hicksian, Edna Paris writes in Canada’s Globe and Mail:
David Hicks was to be the first person to undergo a military commission trial. But Australians were so outraged by the lack of democratic legal processes that high-level relations with the U.S. were directly threatened.
This is not true.
FOR THE PEOPLE
Achewood’s Chris Onstad on writing funny:
I never imagined that anything else could be better for people, or more beneficial to share, or more pleasing to produce.
Nailed it.
ROOF REPLACED, CHILD KEPT
Kids today:
Jim and Robyn Dahlin knew replacing the roof of their home in Greenbrae, Calif., would be expensive. But they hadn’t planned to spend an extra $15,000 on solar panels. For that, they have their 8-year-old son, Luke, to thank.
Thanks, Luke!
After Luke acted in a school play about global warming, he went on a campaign to get his parents to install the panels. He routinely lectured his dad from the backseat of the minivan about how reducing their energy consumption could help save the planet.
Do read on. If you’re captured by these junior Al Gore Jrs, it might serve to remind them of environmentalist views on children. For maximum impact, I’d advise reciting insane claims about the environmental damage wrought by population growth as your spouse calmly examines the kitchen’s knife inventory.
(Via David H.)
DICK CHENEY IS BEHIND YOU! HE'S BEHIND YOU!
John Pilger addresses Socialism 2007, an oxymoron held in Chicago. His audience behave like children at a pantomime, shrieking with glee when goodness is invoked and cackling in derision at mentions of badness.
Eventually even Pilger becomes embarrassed. Watch the first few minutes (you can’t miss the rapturous reaction to Pilger’s cop-fleeing tale) then zoom forward to the 8 min. 30 sec. mark.
MARK OF ANGER
Rammed out of the Japanese Grand Prix by German rookie Sebastian Vettel, Australian Mark Webber tells an audience of millions:
It’s just kids with no experience, they fuck everything up really.
Webber was in second place at the time, and a chance to win. Eventual victor Lewis Hamilton now has a 12-point title lead with just two races remaining.
LONELY PALMER
Seething soon-to-be-ex-Media Watch executive producer Tim Palmer, abusive and tense in recent dealings with The Australian, has a history of anxiety:
Thanks to stress, a three-year stint in Jerusalem, Tim Palmer has seen his blood pressure climb 20 point. And he’s gone from non-smoker to 30 a day. “During intifada my wife and I had this fantastic flat in Beirut but none of our friends from Australia came to visit us. Nobody.”
Can’t imagine why.
UPDATE. Mr Creosote comments:
Hey, go easy on poor Mr Palmer. Think of how rough it’s been for him.
Imagine spending years working in a job where the place is governed by warlords and the only daily certainty is the unfathomable, byzantine struggle between factions and ever-shifting alliances. Ancient hatreds flow beneath you like a subterranean river. Hatreds so old, no one can remember what started it all. The place is awash with rumours, lies, revenge, envy, lust, deceit. Everyone is on the make and desperate to leave.
The government is hopeless, essential services are breaking down and every driver on the roads is trying to kill you.
The Jews control everything. A dastardly foreign power is thought by many to really control the country, deposing obstreperous Prime Ministers at will.
The locals continually treat you with mistrust. Some outright hate you. You spend all your time in the company of those that fawn over your ever word.
Vast holes scar the city centre where buildings once stood. Ethnic minorities have formed enclaves, and armed gangs roam the streets, looting and raping at will. The police are lazy, corrupt and never to be seen. Aircraft are heard overhead at all hours of the day and night.
Then one day, his boss calls him in and tells him he is being transferred from Sydney to Beirut. That must have been terribly traumatic and stressful.
RACIAL CONVERSIONS NOW POSSIBLE
Ray Martin thinks Muslims are a race. Presumably he believes our shameful treatment of David Hicks was racially motivated.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
WEEKEND QUIZ
Guess the source of this doomstruck Gaian fantasy:
Southern Britain is drowning. Torrential rain has been hammering down for days, floodwaters saturate road networks and BBC News 24 is back-to-backing footage of families being airlifted from their homes. It feels like the end of the world, an apocalyptic payback for all those pillaged oil reserves and raped rainforests and X5s parked at school gates when our obese children could have staggered home.
And perhaps it is. Maybe Al Gore’s worst case scenario isn’t so far from the inconvenient truth; that we really are deep into a vicious cycle of melting ice caps and brooding, vengeful weather systems. Maybe there’s already no way back ...
Google won’t help you; this was a print-only deal. Commence guessing. Answer in a few hours.
ANSWER: It’s the introduction to a lavish 13-page Ben Barry piece in the October edition of Britain’s CAR magazine, comparing a £94,280 Porsche with a £152,000 Lamborghini. Coverline: “HARDCORE LAMBO & 911 GT3 RS. Head-to-head.”
I used to read CAR quite often. Not so much these days.
FANS FOUND
John Pilger has a fan in Melbourne ... and Robert Fisk has a fan in India:
It’s ironic that ‘fisking’, the blogger’s verb for aggressive or hostile fact-checking, is named after Robert Fisk, Britain’s most distinguished foreign correspondent, who has lived in and reported from the Middle East for the past quarter of a century ...
That a great journalist who has survived danger and risked death to live in the region he reports from, whose reportage has made him the doyen of Middle-Eastern reporting, should become the blogosphere’s measure of unreliability, tells us something about the frictionless sterility of the blogger’s online world.
Or it might tell us something about Fisk’s unreliability. (Incidentally, reports of Fisk’s retirement seem to have been premature.)
WARMENING SOLVED
MONTH OF DAYS
“Your list of rich hypocrites is entertaining,” writes Steve S., of Hemet, California, “but Walk To Work Day is
not the weirdest day.” By way of proof, Steve forwards this list, with days specific to just next month:
• October 1 is World Vegetarian Day
• October 2 is Name Your Car Day
• October 3 is Virus Appreciation Day
• October 6 is Come and Take It Day
• October 9 is Moldy Cheese Day
• October 12 is International Moment Of Frustration Scream Day
• October 18 is No Beard Day
• October 19 is Evaluate Your Life Day
• October 21 is Babbling Day
• October 22 is National Nut Day
• October 23 is National Mole Day
• October 26 is Mule Day
• October 27 is Sylvia Plath Day
And October 31 is Increase Your Psychic Powers Day. But you already knew that.
YEAR OF THE CAT
Among delirious Geelong fans tonight will be childhood pal Stephen Stoios - we menaced Werribee together from ages 5 to 18 - who hadn’t even been born the last time Geelong won a flag.
If you’re reading this, mate, please keep the looting to a minimum. There is no limit on pillaging, however.
UPDATE. Avoid Federation Square.
UPDATE II. Also avoid central Geelong.
UPDATE III. Ria doesn’t know what to do:
It’s happened: Geelong have won the AFL premiership for the first time in 44 years! I just...honestly, I just don’t know what to do. I know what to do when we lose a Grand Final (that is, cry like a baby), but a win...I thought we would but now that it’s here, I am just sort of shocked, really. Dumbfounded.