Buried boat

Someone seems to have buried an entire boat at Frenchmans bay, much to the amusement of the children at the beach today.

Rock snot

Just say no.

Threefold Inaccurate Catholics

I do hope that the same courtesies being extended to the Catholic Church will be extended to the World gathering of Pastafari that I propose takes place in Sydney next year. As a devout Pastafarian I will expect the city to be shut down, helicopters to hover constantly overhead and Spaghetti Carbonara to be available on every street corner. I believe it is everyone’s right to believe in the omnipotent supernatural being of their choice with as little evidence as they like and disrupt the lives of millions of others accordingly.

There are many things that I find innately annoying about World Youth Day, starting with the arrogant inaccuracy of the name:

1. World; amazingly not everyone is a Catholic. The name may mean universal but there are an awful lot of Indonesians, Indians, Chinese and pretty well the whole Middle and Far East to whom this really doesn’t apply. There’s quite a few Anglicans too, they used to burn Catholics…
2. Youth; it is a matter of record that unaccompanied minors and catholic clergy should not mix. In fact The German Shepherd himself is going to apologise for this very thing whilst he is here. This means that the city is filled with the only thing worse than devout children; the kind of devout adult who would volunteer to take them to WYD08
3. Day; day! It goes on for at least a week of rubbernecking pious bastardry.

Those attending WYD08 are known as ‘Pilgrims’ which I also cannot stand as it makes me adopt a John Wayne voice as I shove them out of the way (and sometimes into the harbour, I only wanted to see if they could walk on water…). Also in the age of cheaply available air travel is the word Pilgrim really appropriate? Surely the whole idea of pilgrimage is that it was meant to be hard, you were meant to go on foot and you were meant to discover things about the world around you and about yourself. What do I discover when I travel by air?

1. I don’t like most people
2. I don’t like airports
3. I don’t like aeroplanes
4. I do like a glass of wine and a decent movie

These are all things I could have discovered by travelling to my local shopping mall to pick up a DVD and a bottle of plonk, not travelling halfway round the world for a glimpse of the pope and to chant halleluiah tunelessly in another country.

The effect thousands of additional people in a city they don’t know very well has had a less than positive impact on the public transport system. The events in the city are supposedly timed not to coincide with the morning rush-hour. Unfortunately if you are pious enough and jet-lagged enough there’s no real way of predicting just how early you will get up do a little God-bothering sightseeing.

At least the propensity to wear the flag of their nation of origin and brightly coloured clothing and accessories makes them very easy to see through a rifle scope.

Beware, pole!

Can you guess what colour Sydney busses are? I don't quite know why I've started collecting signposts, possibly because I see so many every day.

Premium Economy

There is a new service level on airlines and it is Premium Economy. These are not two words that sit well together and I suspect that the phenomeneon may be symptomatic of a greater sociological ill; we want it all but we're damned if we'll pay for it. Air travel should be expensive, it brutalises the planet and creates/supports an enormous number of jobs. From personal experience Ryan Air I can tell you that if you pay peanuts someone charges you for the monkeys.

So far I have discovered Premium Economy on Quantas, Thai Airways and Virgin Blue (who the hell thought up the brand name Virgin Blue for heaven's sake, it sounds like a dodgy website).

Just a quick note to the airlines; putting a contaminated sharps bin in the airoplane toilet might be very right-on but it doesn't send a great message about your cabin-mates. Just thought I'd mention it.

Whalesharks!

After a year's gap and at about the third attempt we finally managed to swim with whalesharks this time last week. I'll put some pics up when I have them developed and'or I can work out how to pinch stills from a DVD.

Also I am not dead, I was merely on holiday. That is all.

Beginners travel for free

Being an advanced passenger I'd already bribed the skipper for a quicker journey.

Get your Johnson out

Oh I say, how utterly ludicrous

3 Years ago, almost to the day, I left London:

Goodbye London, look after yourself!

We will Tom, have fun in Australia

A few months pass, and then:

KABOOM screams etc.

Er, what was that?

Terrorists, nothing new, as you were

3 years pass:

Oh Tom, we've decided to ditch one anachronistic old dinosaur of a mayor for another far more ridiculous one that will hugely damage our international reputation and make us the subject of stereotype ridicule for decades.

Never speak to me again.

Simplify

The person writing this sign knows the right word and thinks you should too.

5 % Bull

Previously she'd asked me, quite incredulously, did I know that five percent of greenhous gasses came from cattle farting. Yes, I said, I think I'd heard that before somewhere. But five percent, that's a lot.

Whilst lying in bed, starting to drift off:

Five percent?!That sounds like a load of bullshit.

We were helpless with laughter for the next 10 minutes.

Mister E Bunny

The concept of the Easter Bunny is just plain wrong. An extract from a recent interview:

Mr Bunny may I congratulate you on another successful Easter. How long is it now that you've been hiding chocolate eggs for children to find?

Eggs, yeah. Chocolate, right. You're...er... still eating those, right?

Oh yes, and most delicious they are too.

Oh yeah, go-on enjoy it. Let it melt on your tongue.

Er, Mr Bunny are you okay? Your tail is twitching in a most alarming manner.

Tail? Oh, yeah right "tail". (laughs) You still haven't got it have you? Oh yes, smear it up your face. Oh God, look it's sticking to your teeth!

Of course it could just be my twisted imagination that reacts badly to the idea of a rabbit hiding "chocolate" eggs with treats in for children but it does sound a bit suspicious. Doesn't it?

I had to ask...

My reaction to Authur C Clarke's death was:

John Peel, Hunter S Thompson, Authur C Clarke - who's next?

I had to ask. Sorry.

Maybe it's time to do something creative.

Anxiety

Symptoms:

• Waking up before the alarm and waiting for it, watching it, trying to anticipate it
• Peculiar and inexplicable skin complaints
• Drinking too much
• Dreams where I'm back at university and behind on my work (3 times this week)
• Arguing with bus drivers before 7am on a Saturday
• 2 to do lists and no idea where to start
  

Treatment:

• Holiday

I recognise this, this is stress isn't it? Thank Christ for that, I thought I was going nuts.

A note to cyclists

Clearly a fetish

I'm not talking here to the ride it to work and back kind of cyclists, but to the multi-coloured lycra clad type. What you do is not a sport. It closely resembles a sport but consider: you need specialised equipment and lubricants to participate, the classic version has obscure french terminology, there are various shapes of foam rubber involved which you - excuse me - sit on! It is commonly done in large groups where participants seem to spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of the person in front of them.

Any activity that requires you to dress up like a perverted clown to massage your prostate with a custom formed piece of latex is not a sport it is a fetish. Particularly if you if you get up early in the morning to do it and shout to each other outside my bedroom window before I am awake.

Mountain bikers can stop feeling smug at this point, you do all this in the mud and rain and have clothing brands with names like "Muddy Fox".

Whilst I'm at it I'm sure there are several other sports that are little more than an excuse to engage in otherwise suspect physical encounters and hang around in changing rooms:

• Wrestling - Putting on a leotard to grapple each other to the floor and hold each other down. This is quite obvioulsy a fetish and greco-roman wrestlers need to be reminded that these wrestlers originally used to be naked and oiled.
• Judo - Really this is a sub-set of wrestling that shows off the Japanese capacity for taking things a bit too far. This is wrestling that you need to put on pajamas to take part in and then grapple each-other to the ground in an attempt to hold one-another down with your faces in each-other's armpits. Clearly a fetish.


Oooh chase me, chase me!

• Rugby - Using a funny shaped ball as an excuse to chase each-other around and wrestle each-other to the ground, in the mud! Until recently this was done in practical hard-wearing clothing. Now it seems to be done in skin-tight Lycra.
• Climbing - Uncomfortable harness that is particularly tight around the groin area, rope, silly little rubber shoes and again skin-tight bloody Lycra.
• Speed skating - This is a really weird one, a fetish where people with huge thighs to dress up in what amounts to a skin-tight Lycra gimp suit to chase each other around on ice. Bizarre.


Oh I'm comin' to getcha'

I'm sure there are more, I'll add them as I think of them.

Autumn

It is now Autumn in Australia, I can't say I noticed Spring or Summer, we seem to have skipped a year's supply of those and just had nine months of Winter. Oh well, it can't be sunny all the time.

I got through the second 29^th of February of a 6 year relationship without that question being asked. Is this a good or a bad thing? I'm not sure I know. What I do know is that Emily will be peeved that she forgot to terrify me by threatening with it all day long, hah!

Where does Guy live?

Good God, I've made a hairdressing joke. Sorry.

Finally

Well thank heavens that wasn’t a colossal pain in the arse, by which of course I mean that it was. Getting your house wired up to the internet seems to be as difficult as everything else in this country. It has taken me more than a month from buying the connection and the kit to get things working properly. However the effort looks like it has been worth it and I now have an internet connection at home.

Let’s hope it lasts!

Write it down

My [other] constant companion is my notebook. The poor thing is beginning to feel the strain. It contains all the general tasks of life, thoughts and ideas that I rush to capture before they evaporate. I always intend to organise them later.

My fear is that it has become an indicator of my mental state; a collection of disjointed scraps and notes associated only by virtue of their collection in a single location. Tattered and frayed, dog eared and overworked it threatens to give way at any moment. Missing pages are missing memories, whole days passed in a blur or torn out, deliberately put beyond recall.

You can see why I'm worried.

Time to consolidate, organise and rearrange. I might sort my notebook out too...

Sorry Day

13 February was been a big day for Australia. The Prime Minister officially apologised to the Stolen Generations. This term refers to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people forcibly removed from their parents and sent to live either with white foster parents or in camps governed by white people. This was a nationwide and state-by-state policy in Australia ostensibly to protect children at risk of harm but in fact enforced as a brutal piece of 'ethnic cleansing' and out and out racism as has been seen at any time in history. It lasted a hundred years or more.

Apologising for this atrocity has been a sticking point with governments ever since the idea was suggested. A large part of white Australia feels that it has nothing to apologise for; that Aboriginal people do nothing but drink, sniff petrol and laze around. Apologising to indigenous people for Australians of this viewpoint is feeding a victim mentality and validating the perceived lack of endeavour. This is, obviously to me, ignoring the fact that the parlous state of a lot of indigenous communities is a result of the interference of another culture.

This is not to ignore that child abuse, alcoholism and petrol sniffing are immense problems in many indigenous communities. These are symptoms of much bigger problems to do with poverty arising from the treatment of the indigenous population. A distributed hunter-gatherer culture had a concentrated capital economic white culture imposed on it that attempted to force its own values to the fore, removing autonomy and self-determination along the way. This was also done without providing a framework for development or progress – i.e. opportunity to access education and employment – without which many of these communities lapsed into third-world level poverty where they remain today. The average indigenous life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of the white population.

There are reasons for this too; many indigenous communities are very remote making it very difficult to provide these opportunities even when the impetus to do so is present (from either side of the equation). The traditional ways of living, which supported these communities in the past, had been devalued and eroded by the encroaching culture, hopelessness and an apathetic helpless inertia was the result.

It is against this background that one federal MP when asked whether he supported an apology commented on camera that there were places in Australia where he thought children should be removed from their parents (his emphasis).

Nice one Kev

The wording of the apology needed to be right. Australians of any background are straight talking honest people and any half-hearted effort would have rendered the exercise pointless for absolutely everyone. The word sorry was particularly important as an apology can be without regret and regret as well as recognition of the past ills are what was needed. In the photograph is Sally Pierce who was herself removed from her parents. For years she has worn a black tee shirt with the word Sorry on it, after the PM’s speech she changed it.

Below I’ve included a couple of things, some thinking on what the apology might mean from the Special Broadcasting Service, a video of the PM’s speech, the full text of it and some reactions to the speech again from SBS.

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Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

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Kiribili sunset