Tuesday, October 30 2007, 22:54

Welcome back to MoTown

The mo is back. There isn't much of it yet, but it's back. Movember has started again, and I'm again risking ridicule and itching to raise cash for some worthy men's charities. I'm slightly cheating this year by not starting clean shaven on November 1, but that's because I want a big, bushy, Magnum PI-style Selleck 'tache at the end of the month. Fat chance, but I'll give it a go. Obviously, only you can make it worth while, so lend me your support, but give me your cash! :) And just to make life even easier, you can do it all online without having to bother with real money, just use your credit cards (after all, it's not actually YOUR money anyway...)

So thanks in advance. I'll keep you posted/hassle you for money as the month progresses!

Show me the money!

Saturday, November 10 2007, 0:15

It started again

Last weekend was scorchingly hot weather, so we took advantage of it and went down to look at the Sculptures By The Sea between Bondi Beach and Tamarama. I even got two pictures before my camera battery died! Blue skies, some great pieces of art, bezillions of people, blazing sun, hot dogs... what more could you ask for? Sunburn - that's what. Yet again, I have a couple of patches of skin that I missed with the SPF 30...

But I wasn't referring to good weather when I said, it started again. I meant Christmas. Last weekend was the first weekend in November, and Tim and I looked at each other in disbelief when we saw The Polar Express was on tv. John came home from getting groceries this week and complained that Silent Night was playing in our local shopping centre. And I note that the biggest Christmas tree in the southern hemisphere gets lit on the 22nd of this month! Oh well. If I start listening to A Spaceman Came Travelling and Band Aid: Feed the World now, I might get into the spirit in time to feel festive on the beach in New Zealand ;)

Meanwhile, in case you were wondering, my moustache is coming along nicely. You've still got plenty of time to sponsor me before it gets big and bushy (will that ever happen?)...

Thursday, November 22 2007, 0:53

Callooh! Callay! Oh frabjous day!

I can barely believe it. Eleven years after I signed up for not one, not two, but three student bank accounts with accompanying credit cards and overdrafts, and embarked upon a four year spree of sucking up student loans and lovely free government grants in equal measure, I have finally finished paying off my student debt. Admittedly, this could have been achieved a lot earlier if I hadn't voraciously compounded said owings with an insatiable binge of fun here in Australia in 2003 (largely unsupported by gainful employment) and then gone travelling around, willy nilly, on my return to London.

Anyway. It's done. And if that's not a good reason to quote Jabberwocky, I don't know what is! The only thing left owing is fifteen quid on my mastercard, and I'm sure I can manage that in fairly short order :)

Sunday, November 25 2007, 0:56

The fat lady's singing

She's singing somewhere, and maybe she's Janette Howard. It looks like John Howard will be the second prime minister in Australian history to lose his seat in a general election - quite a kicking apart from losing the election in the first place. It's been quite interesting to watch this election from my Brit point of view. They do some smart things down here - like having polling day on the weekend, which means if you stay up to watch the election results, you don't have to go into work bleary-eyed the following day. But even if it was on a Thursday, like in the UK, Australians stop voting at 6pm, and counting starts before polling closes, so it was pretty much a done deal by 10pm tonight; in fact, if you're voting in Western Australia, you could be seeing the results coming in from the Eastern States before you'd placed your own vote, thanks to the three hour time difference. For those watching on tv, the constituencies feed back their results as they're counting, so we saw figures from one seat where they'd only counted 52 votes!

So it seems that election campaigns here are as uninspiring here as they are back home, although I think Australia wins hands-down on negative advertising: both Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition have spent most of their ad cash on slagging the other party off rather than putting forward some positive policies, but on the whole, John Howard's crew seemed to be calling, "say no to change!" Doesn't sound much like a campaign for the future, does it?

It's hard to imagine who I'd vote for, if Australia extended its franchise to people from the Motherland, just as we generous Brits extend the franchise to Aussies back home; both of the main parties are more right wing than I'd care to support, and as I write, the other parties have zero seats in parliament and aren't likely to get any either - it really is a two horse race, or was, since it's over now. We'll just have to wait and see if Howard's predictions that the raving unionists will "stuff the economy" prove to be true, and we'll have to see what happens to the Coalition now that they don't have any power in any state or territory government or federally. At least John won't have to think too hard about which of his election promises he re-brands as "non-core" before he ditches them...

Monday, November 26 2007, 17:22

Lowering the tone

This weekend saw the conclusion of a struggle that has polarised this country for what seems like forever to me. In case you didn't know, Natalie won Australian Idol. But the inevitable post-mortem of the other contest has begun, as journalists and commentators pick over the remains of the Liberal Party and the various other issues and episodes that have coloured this election. I raised an eyebrow this morning while reading in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald words that remind me that things are very different here. Apparently a senior Liberal advisor was quoted as blaming "the fucking Chinese" for the humiliating loss of John Howard's own seat, a reference to the fact that so many Asians are now encompassed by the redrawn electoral boundaries of the PM's seat of Bennelong. Later on in the article, another anonymous Liberal comments on the recent activities of Liberal Party leadership candidate, Malcolm Turnbull: "He's fucked himself over in the election campaign good and proper".

What outstandingly juicy quotes for a journalist to get their hands on! The industrious folks at The Sun and The Mirror would pawn their own grandmothers for a chance to catch Westminster MPs and their staff using such language: "Tory battleaxe, Ann Widdecombe, furiously raged at the Party Conference that David Cameron would have to "get his fucking thumb out of his arse if he expects to lead the party to victory at the next election'", or,"Lib Dem leadership hopeful, Chris Huhne, privately admitted that 'if this party's willing to fall in line behind that pisshead, Charlie Kennedy, and that dried-up old fart, Campbell, they can fucking well give me a go'", or maybe "on hearing the EU Trade Commissioner's comments, PM Gordon Brown asked, 'why can't that sneaking bastard Mandelson keep his opinions to himself for a change?'".

Sadly, we're unlikely to ever get such a Punch and Judy show in the UK. While the House of Commons often sounds like a bunch of rowdy public schoolboys shouting at each other, the swearing is limited to the swearing in of MPs, and name-calling never happens. Not so here in Australia. 'Pollies' (as politicians are known) are, according to a recent survey, held in higher regard than the general disgust they have earned in the UK, but that regard doesn't exist between MPs. Wilson Tuckey famously told future PM, Paul Keating in Parliament, "You are an idiot, you are a hopeless nong", to which Keating (hysterically?) retorted, "Shut up! Sit down and shut up, you pig... Why do you not shut up, you clown?... This man has a criminal intellect... this clown continues to interject in perpetuity.". Listeners and viewers following Parliamentary hi-jinks sometimes call up the ABC to complain about the level of insults, obstructionism, and general low standard of debate in the chamber, with the result that the Speaker will tell the members to lift their game!

We got a brief glimpse of this political irreverence during the election coverage on Channel 9 on Saturday. Some wag had come up with a very graphic way of showing us which MPs had lost their seats - a picture of each would slide onto the screen and get a big X crossed through it before being fed into a shredder (watch it on youtube!). You could hear the cheers from the audience as the PM got shredded! And who says Australia doesn't have enjoyable tv?

Thursday, November 29 2007, 22:46

Another great read

Just finished reading Armistead Maupin's return to San Francisco, Michael Tolliver Lives. I haven't laughed out loud in so many public places while reading in ages! And I finished the book with a slight whimper as well. :') Now I need to go back and re-read all the Tales of the City books. Coincidentally, Vicki had a look at my Movember photos and decided my moustache is very Michael 'Mouse' Tolliver... Now I have to rent the dvds and see if this is an insult or a compliment ;)