Saturday, August 30, 2008
Don't Waste Men
I have written for newmatilda on the man drought. Please, be careful with your man-use. Try to save men at every opportunity. Don't let your unwanted men wash down the drain.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
In the Bendigo Advertiser, Mary-Anne Pool of Strathfieldsaye writes:
"Hands up all you Victorians out there who think the practice of child sacrifice to foreign gods is abhorrent.
Yep, that ’s what I thought. No one in this great state of ours would condone the slaughter of children as a sacrifice to the gods.
And yet, is not abortion the sacrifice of an unborn child to the gods of convenience and selfishness?"
....
Uh...
No, Mary-Anne, no it's not. Sorry, you...
FAIL
However, it may be true that letters to the editor of the Bendigo Advertiser are sort of like sacrifices to the gods of idiots.
"Hands up all you Victorians out there who think the practice of child sacrifice to foreign gods is abhorrent.
Yep, that ’s what I thought. No one in this great state of ours would condone the slaughter of children as a sacrifice to the gods.
And yet, is not abortion the sacrifice of an unborn child to the gods of convenience and selfishness?"
....
Uh...
No, Mary-Anne, no it's not. Sorry, you...
FAIL
However, it may be true that letters to the editor of the Bendigo Advertiser are sort of like sacrifices to the gods of idiots.
Issues - Think About It
Rounding up some opinions today:
Sticking it to private schools - good for the soul.
Also, you probably won't die from terrorism, but the government is screwing you.
And if you're in the mood for a laugh, see how an article about Australians' inability to take any criticism in the sphere of culture and the arts, inspired by the comments of a British music journalist, turns, in the comments, into a vicious and abusive bitchfight about Israel.
Sticking it to private schools - good for the soul.
Also, you probably won't die from terrorism, but the government is screwing you.
And if you're in the mood for a laugh, see how an article about Australians' inability to take any criticism in the sphere of culture and the arts, inspired by the comments of a British music journalist, turns, in the comments, into a vicious and abusive bitchfight about Israel.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Gather Up Your Bombs
So the Victorian government will probably legalise abortion sometime soon. The Bill has been put forward, it's being debated, and the odds look to be - just - with the pro-choice side.
Of course I mean "legalise" in the sense of "remove from the Crimes Act", rather than the sense of "allow to happen with no repercussions for those involved", since that's what happens already and has done for years.
This is, naturally, controversial, with the usual noises about baby-killing from the usual people, like Bill Muehlenberg, who is himself an excellent counter-argument to the "what if Beethoven had been aborted?" argument. And of course Mirko Bagaric has weighed in, saying abortion should be completely criminalised and nevr allowed under any circumstances; given his previous forays into public life, most likely he is worried that if we abort too many people, there won't be enough left to torture. Or maybe he is thinking, what if Tony Mokbel had been aborted? Then Mirko would have nobody to pay him large amounts of money to try to avoid the justice system. Oh, Mirko, how terrible that would be, and what a moral giant you truly are.
Pro-lifers are wheeling out the usual schtick: zygotes are people too, if something looks a bit like a baby it is one, culture of death, God God God etc.
The funny one is the argument that more people will have abortions now. Imagine all those girls, desperate for the fun and excitement of an abortion, who are prevented from having one now by the fact there is a never-enforced law against it. The minute it's no longer a crime they will rush out and fulfil their perverted abortionary lusts. Why wouldn't they? Abortion is something these kids do for kicks! So we mustn't make it legal. Let's keep things as they are, with abortion being available pretty much anytime anyone wants it, rather than changing things to make abortion available pretty much anytime anyone wants it. Otherwise the abortion rate will surely skyrocket!
It's sometimes hard, when I write, to decide whether to make jokes about a situation or simply put down the stream of bellowed obscenities running through my head when I listen to pro-lifers like Bill "Feel the Love" Muehlenberg.
This is the curious thing: here are people who believe the government is sanctioning murder. They think the aborted foetuses are in fact fully-fledged people. They think thousands upon thousands of children are being slaughtered every year. Wow, that's pretty awful. It's like Rwanda or something. Right here in our country. Better do something about it, right?
"Let's write a letter to the Herald Sun! That is LITERALLY how angry the issue makes me!"
Seriously? You think this is mass infanticide and you're writing letters? You're asking for Medicare funding to be withdrawn? Some of you, like Mirko, would even allow exceptions for victims of rape or incest and so forth.
Doesn't seem very moral of you, Mirko. You're willing to let children be killed because their mother was raped? That's terrible!
Imagine if people were taking their children to the doctors to have them killed. One-year-old, five-year-old, ten-year-old children. Imagine if this was approved by the government. Imagine if this happened thousands of times a year.
Horrible, yes?
This is what pro-lifers think is happening now. According to them, anyway. They say that's what it's all about: killing children who have as much right to life as any of us. Killing people. It's not, they say, about wanting to control women, or about wanting to punish those nasty sluts who get themselves pregnant because they can't keep their legs together. According to them, they believe that government-sanctioned homicide is occurring daily.
And they write letters and opinion pieces and have civilised debates about it, and argue over government funding, and how to "reduce the rate", and talk about the psychological effect on the woman, and say maybe it's OK to murder kids if mum got pregnant in an unpleasant way.
Seriously? If you think this is a slaughter of the innocents, you should be taking to the streets, screaming it long and loud, getting violent, doing everything you physically can to prevent the little kiddies being killed.
How can you sleep at night, pro-lifers, when you think of all the children being murdered and all you did to stop it was a fifty-word email? How do you sleep? Hey, you know it's happening; it's not going on a thousand miles away in the Third World. It's right here in your town. You can go down to the clinic, you can block the doorways, you can grab those potential pregnant murderers, take them away at gunpoint and hold them till they deliver. You can have a go at taking out the politicians who allow this with a sniper rifle. Sure, you could get hurt, you could get arrested, but don't you have to try?
In short, pro-lifers, blow up a clinic, or shut the fuck up.
Of course I mean "legalise" in the sense of "remove from the Crimes Act", rather than the sense of "allow to happen with no repercussions for those involved", since that's what happens already and has done for years.
This is, naturally, controversial, with the usual noises about baby-killing from the usual people, like Bill Muehlenberg, who is himself an excellent counter-argument to the "what if Beethoven had been aborted?" argument. And of course Mirko Bagaric has weighed in, saying abortion should be completely criminalised and nevr allowed under any circumstances; given his previous forays into public life, most likely he is worried that if we abort too many people, there won't be enough left to torture. Or maybe he is thinking, what if Tony Mokbel had been aborted? Then Mirko would have nobody to pay him large amounts of money to try to avoid the justice system. Oh, Mirko, how terrible that would be, and what a moral giant you truly are.
Pro-lifers are wheeling out the usual schtick: zygotes are people too, if something looks a bit like a baby it is one, culture of death, God God God etc.
The funny one is the argument that more people will have abortions now. Imagine all those girls, desperate for the fun and excitement of an abortion, who are prevented from having one now by the fact there is a never-enforced law against it. The minute it's no longer a crime they will rush out and fulfil their perverted abortionary lusts. Why wouldn't they? Abortion is something these kids do for kicks! So we mustn't make it legal. Let's keep things as they are, with abortion being available pretty much anytime anyone wants it, rather than changing things to make abortion available pretty much anytime anyone wants it. Otherwise the abortion rate will surely skyrocket!
It's sometimes hard, when I write, to decide whether to make jokes about a situation or simply put down the stream of bellowed obscenities running through my head when I listen to pro-lifers like Bill "Feel the Love" Muehlenberg.
This is the curious thing: here are people who believe the government is sanctioning murder. They think the aborted foetuses are in fact fully-fledged people. They think thousands upon thousands of children are being slaughtered every year. Wow, that's pretty awful. It's like Rwanda or something. Right here in our country. Better do something about it, right?
"Let's write a letter to the Herald Sun! That is LITERALLY how angry the issue makes me!"
Seriously? You think this is mass infanticide and you're writing letters? You're asking for Medicare funding to be withdrawn? Some of you, like Mirko, would even allow exceptions for victims of rape or incest and so forth.
Doesn't seem very moral of you, Mirko. You're willing to let children be killed because their mother was raped? That's terrible!
Imagine if people were taking their children to the doctors to have them killed. One-year-old, five-year-old, ten-year-old children. Imagine if this was approved by the government. Imagine if this happened thousands of times a year.
Horrible, yes?
This is what pro-lifers think is happening now. According to them, anyway. They say that's what it's all about: killing children who have as much right to life as any of us. Killing people. It's not, they say, about wanting to control women, or about wanting to punish those nasty sluts who get themselves pregnant because they can't keep their legs together. According to them, they believe that government-sanctioned homicide is occurring daily.
And they write letters and opinion pieces and have civilised debates about it, and argue over government funding, and how to "reduce the rate", and talk about the psychological effect on the woman, and say maybe it's OK to murder kids if mum got pregnant in an unpleasant way.
Seriously? If you think this is a slaughter of the innocents, you should be taking to the streets, screaming it long and loud, getting violent, doing everything you physically can to prevent the little kiddies being killed.
How can you sleep at night, pro-lifers, when you think of all the children being murdered and all you did to stop it was a fifty-word email? How do you sleep? Hey, you know it's happening; it's not going on a thousand miles away in the Third World. It's right here in your town. You can go down to the clinic, you can block the doorways, you can grab those potential pregnant murderers, take them away at gunpoint and hold them till they deliver. You can have a go at taking out the politicians who allow this with a sniper rifle. Sure, you could get hurt, you could get arrested, but don't you have to try?
In short, pro-lifers, blow up a clinic, or shut the fuck up.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Ah, student rebellion, you've come so far.
Remember when uni students were always getting crazy and standing up to the man and mocking the institutions of our society?
Macquarie University's student services organisation, U@MQ, has driven the editors of the uni's student newspaper to resignation by interfering with editorial decisions, sanitising stories and objecting to satire.
Hey, U@MQ, why you gotta be such dicks?
"Deirdre Anderson, the chief executive of U@MQ, said students were never forbidden to publish anything, but they were asked on several occasions to reconsider articles that some students might not appreciate."
Oh dear yes, Deirdre. Please continue on your ceaseless quest to prevent anyone not appreciating things.
I shall be starting a new charity, Humour Guides For Humanity.
HGFH's quest will be to provide all humourless folk across the land with their own Humour Guide, who will accompany them in public and point out to them when humour is being deployed, so that they do not suffer the embarrassment of looking like a complete Deirdre when they fail to recognise that something is a joke or satire. The Guides will also run group classes, where the afflicted can learn about humour and why it is a good thing to try to "get".
Give generously. It's not too late to save Macquarie Uni.
Macquarie University's student services organisation, U@MQ, has driven the editors of the uni's student newspaper to resignation by interfering with editorial decisions, sanitising stories and objecting to satire.
Hey, U@MQ, why you gotta be such dicks?
"Deirdre Anderson, the chief executive of U@MQ, said students were never forbidden to publish anything, but they were asked on several occasions to reconsider articles that some students might not appreciate."
Oh dear yes, Deirdre. Please continue on your ceaseless quest to prevent anyone not appreciating things.
I shall be starting a new charity, Humour Guides For Humanity.
HGFH's quest will be to provide all humourless folk across the land with their own Humour Guide, who will accompany them in public and point out to them when humour is being deployed, so that they do not suffer the embarrassment of looking like a complete Deirdre when they fail to recognise that something is a joke or satire. The Guides will also run group classes, where the afflicted can learn about humour and why it is a good thing to try to "get".
Give generously. It's not too late to save Macquarie Uni.
Deep Thoughts
Just a quick plug for a clever fellow. One should check him out if one is interested in thinking deeply about theology and philosophy and such.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Thangs
Incidentally, for those of you of a Victorian persuasion, I'll be performing at Thangs Cafe, 502 Lygon Street, East Brunswick, from 8pm on Thursday August 21. Also an open mic section for aspiring poets.
Australia: loves watersports
And so, what can we learn from the Olympics thus far? Australia currently sits on 11 gold medals, one behind Great Britain, but most of their medals don't actually count because they were won in silly meaningless sports like cycling and "49ers", which is a special kind of sailing where everybody gets in boats and travels back in time to the California goldrush. On the other hand, Australia has been winning medals in muscular, robust sports like "two person dinghy", where two people row a small wooden boat around and around in circles in a duck pond for several hours; and triathlon, a sport where small sinewy women put on big sunglasses and throw water on themselves.
The funny thing is, Australia has so far won all its gold medals in sports involving water, although Tamsyn Lewis has failed to make the 800m final despite looking a lot like a fish.
Most importantly, we have learnt from the media a valuable lesson in how to deal with a complete failure of conscious thought processes. When your neurons misfire and you literally cannot think of anything useful to say, the default "out" for the enterprising idiot is to simply blurt out any sentence beginning with the words "if Michael Phelps was a country".
"If Michael Phelps was a country he'd be fifth on the medals table"
"If Michael Phelps was a country he'd be well ahead of Australia, Canada and New Zealand"
"If Michael Phelps was a country he'd have lush green fields and a thriving agrarian economy"
"If Michael Phelps was a country he would strike quickly to secure the town of Gori"
Interestingly enough, if Tamsyn Lewis was a country she'd be dead last on the medal table and crippled by fire blight. And most of her citizens would be unemployed and clinically depressed.
Perhaps the most interesting element of the media coverage has been watching the press gradually come to the realisation that there are not as many good puns on Stephanie Rice's name as it seemed at first.
"Steaming Rice"..."Rice crackers"...er...."hot Rice?"
Seriously, "hot Rice?" That's not even a pun; ANYTHING can be hot! If "hot Rice" can be legitimately used as a pun, where will it end? Hot Diamond? Hot Callus? Hot Tomkins? That's just pathetic.
Thank God for Usain Bolt, who has allowed the sub-editors to move on from stupid rice puns and take up stupid bolt puns. "Nuts about Bolt"; "Bolt from the blue"; "Hot Bolt" etc.
Just wait till the Kookaburras hockey team takes gold. See how often "laughing kookaburras" are mentioned.
So let's all cheer for Sally McLellan in the hurdles, because I really want to see what sort of puns can be made on "McLellan".
The funny thing is, Australia has so far won all its gold medals in sports involving water, although Tamsyn Lewis has failed to make the 800m final despite looking a lot like a fish.
Most importantly, we have learnt from the media a valuable lesson in how to deal with a complete failure of conscious thought processes. When your neurons misfire and you literally cannot think of anything useful to say, the default "out" for the enterprising idiot is to simply blurt out any sentence beginning with the words "if Michael Phelps was a country".
"If Michael Phelps was a country he'd be fifth on the medals table"
"If Michael Phelps was a country he'd be well ahead of Australia, Canada and New Zealand"
"If Michael Phelps was a country he'd have lush green fields and a thriving agrarian economy"
"If Michael Phelps was a country he would strike quickly to secure the town of Gori"
Interestingly enough, if Tamsyn Lewis was a country she'd be dead last on the medal table and crippled by fire blight. And most of her citizens would be unemployed and clinically depressed.
Perhaps the most interesting element of the media coverage has been watching the press gradually come to the realisation that there are not as many good puns on Stephanie Rice's name as it seemed at first.
"Steaming Rice"..."Rice crackers"...er...."hot Rice?"
Seriously, "hot Rice?" That's not even a pun; ANYTHING can be hot! If "hot Rice" can be legitimately used as a pun, where will it end? Hot Diamond? Hot Callus? Hot Tomkins? That's just pathetic.
Thank God for Usain Bolt, who has allowed the sub-editors to move on from stupid rice puns and take up stupid bolt puns. "Nuts about Bolt"; "Bolt from the blue"; "Hot Bolt" etc.
Just wait till the Kookaburras hockey team takes gold. See how often "laughing kookaburras" are mentioned.
So let's all cheer for Sally McLellan in the hurdles, because I really want to see what sort of puns can be made on "McLellan".
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Wet Hot Beijing Summer
And so the Olympic Games are finally upon us. Some highlights so far:
- Australian Michael Rogers bravely coming sixth in the men's road race behind some rather insipid and dishonest foreigners.
- Australian Michael Diamond bravely coming fourth in the men's trap shoot behind some unhinged and dangerous overseas types.
- Polish volleyballer Anna Podolec's shorts.
These highlights had varying aftermaths. Rogers took his agonising and frankly unfair defeat with good grace and humour, whereas Diamond climbed the Great Wall and began picking off tourists, killing eighteen before turning his gun on himself. Podolec's shorts, on the other hand, are unlikely to end well.
The BIGGEST news, of course, is Aussie "golden girl" Stephanie Rice, who overcame the handicap of having to fit a swimming cap over sixty kilograms of hair to break a world record and claim gold in the women's 400m individual medley. Touchingly, Rice says that her family and friends are "among the most important things for her". Which is nice.
Not THE most important thing of course. Just among them. Somewhere above underwear commercials, but a little below wearing sexy policewoman costumes, on the importance scale.
But in any case, she did marvellously well, as did Aussie "golden girl" Libby Trickett", nee Lenton, who managed to win the 100m butterfly without once hiding from photographers inside a tent. For her efforts, Trickett will receive an Order of Australia Medal and a fine wedge of Swiss cheese to gnaw on. She celebrated her victory by hitting the bars of Beijing, where she spent the night lifting cars above her head and tearing bouncers apart with her bare hands.
Other observations from the Olympics' first few days:
- It only takes about seven minutes for judo to go from "why am I watching these two idiots make feeble attempts to grab each other's sleeves?" to "oh no, quick, grab her sleeve she's going to trip you now throw her OH NO SHE GOT YOU DOWN WE LOST!"
- A volleyball team's libero makes not much sense even after you've looked it up on Wikipedia.
- The designers of the cycling road race route, in what seems an eminently sensible approach, are intent on killing as many cyclists as possible.
All this and still so much more to go. Will Michael Phelps achieve his goal of forty gold medals by winning every swimming event, the synchronised diving and the heptathlon? Can Aussie "golden girl" Liesel Jones achieve the gold medal that has eluded her for so many years, sparing the world another four years' sulking? Are the coxless pairs as amusing as they sound? I for one cannot look away.
- Australian Michael Rogers bravely coming sixth in the men's road race behind some rather insipid and dishonest foreigners.
- Australian Michael Diamond bravely coming fourth in the men's trap shoot behind some unhinged and dangerous overseas types.
- Polish volleyballer Anna Podolec's shorts.
These highlights had varying aftermaths. Rogers took his agonising and frankly unfair defeat with good grace and humour, whereas Diamond climbed the Great Wall and began picking off tourists, killing eighteen before turning his gun on himself. Podolec's shorts, on the other hand, are unlikely to end well.
The BIGGEST news, of course, is Aussie "golden girl" Stephanie Rice, who overcame the handicap of having to fit a swimming cap over sixty kilograms of hair to break a world record and claim gold in the women's 400m individual medley. Touchingly, Rice says that her family and friends are "among the most important things for her". Which is nice.
Not THE most important thing of course. Just among them. Somewhere above underwear commercials, but a little below wearing sexy policewoman costumes, on the importance scale.
But in any case, she did marvellously well, as did Aussie "golden girl" Libby Trickett", nee Lenton, who managed to win the 100m butterfly without once hiding from photographers inside a tent. For her efforts, Trickett will receive an Order of Australia Medal and a fine wedge of Swiss cheese to gnaw on. She celebrated her victory by hitting the bars of Beijing, where she spent the night lifting cars above her head and tearing bouncers apart with her bare hands.
Other observations from the Olympics' first few days:
- It only takes about seven minutes for judo to go from "why am I watching these two idiots make feeble attempts to grab each other's sleeves?" to "oh no, quick, grab her sleeve she's going to trip you now throw her OH NO SHE GOT YOU DOWN WE LOST!"
- A volleyball team's libero makes not much sense even after you've looked it up on Wikipedia.
- The designers of the cycling road race route, in what seems an eminently sensible approach, are intent on killing as many cyclists as possible.
All this and still so much more to go. Will Michael Phelps achieve his goal of forty gold medals by winning every swimming event, the synchronised diving and the heptathlon? Can Aussie "golden girl" Liesel Jones achieve the gold medal that has eluded her for so many years, sparing the world another four years' sulking? Are the coxless pairs as amusing as they sound? I for one cannot look away.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The Burdens Of Office
I think possibly the most amusing thing about the current Collingwood footballers drink-driving saga - and there is plenty there to choose from - is that Eddie McGuire, when berating the playing group, told them that being president of Collingwood had cost him "four or five Gold Logies".
I suppose at this time we should take the opportunity to express our gratitude to the Collingwood Football Club for sparing us this.
He also apparently told Ben Johnson he was fat, which seems to me a little off-topic, like he became incoherent with rage and simply started spouting off random insults.
"You embarrassed me and you embarrassed the club and you're stupid and you've got to grow up and I just...I just...you're fat...you're fat and you're stupid and shut up and and and you smell and I HATE YOU!"
I suppose at this time we should take the opportunity to express our gratitude to the Collingwood Football Club for sparing us this.
He also apparently told Ben Johnson he was fat, which seems to me a little off-topic, like he became incoherent with rage and simply started spouting off random insults.
"You embarrassed me and you embarrassed the club and you're stupid and you've got to grow up and I just...I just...you're fat...you're fat and you're stupid and shut up and and and you smell and I HATE YOU!"
Saturday, August 2, 2008
The Measure of a Man
Here's a question: What do Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Ernest Hemingway and Sarah Bernhard have in common?
Answer: they all have their own Wikipedia page.
Another answer: they are all more famous than me.
These things, I can't help thinking, are connected.
Of course, I can't make my own Wikipedia page for two reasons:
1) it would make me look slightly more desperate than this blog post does, and
2) I don't really know much about myself.
With any luck somebody will write my Wikipedia page soon, including the unsubstantiated rumour about my sordid rendezvous with Holly Robinson. Who, incidentally, has her own Wikipedia page. Feel free to edit it to mention my sordid rendezvous with her.
With any luck, once this little matter is sorted out, I will quickly become as famous as Hitler, or at least as famous as this guy. My activities are not as dramatic as his, but they do often seem to have just as little justification.
Incidentally, those of a Melbourne persuasion might want to come to the Bat Slam at Bar Open, 317 Brunswick Street Fitzroy this Wednesday night. A poetry slam with a Batman theme, I shall be there getting a shamelessly low score from ignorant judges, and the marvellous Geoff Lemon will be the feature performer. Fun times.
Answer: they all have their own Wikipedia page.
Another answer: they are all more famous than me.
These things, I can't help thinking, are connected.
Of course, I can't make my own Wikipedia page for two reasons:
1) it would make me look slightly more desperate than this blog post does, and
2) I don't really know much about myself.
With any luck somebody will write my Wikipedia page soon, including the unsubstantiated rumour about my sordid rendezvous with Holly Robinson. Who, incidentally, has her own Wikipedia page. Feel free to edit it to mention my sordid rendezvous with her.
With any luck, once this little matter is sorted out, I will quickly become as famous as Hitler, or at least as famous as this guy. My activities are not as dramatic as his, but they do often seem to have just as little justification.
Incidentally, those of a Melbourne persuasion might want to come to the Bat Slam at Bar Open, 317 Brunswick Street Fitzroy this Wednesday night. A poetry slam with a Batman theme, I shall be there getting a shamelessly low score from ignorant judges, and the marvellous Geoff Lemon will be the feature performer. Fun times.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)