The Concatenate

Now here’s an interesting thing.

The ABC (joined by the comrades from Fairfax) has its knickers in a twist over videos on YouTube of people enjoying smoking.

So let’s see what YouTube brings up under Smoking.

Hmmm, looks like a rather balanced debate.

Interestingly the highest number of views you’re looking at there are under the 30,000 mark.

So not exactly a threat to society really is it? If I *was* a tobacco company looking to get a message out I’d have a Chinese sweatshop clicking away to raise the rank of the video.

By way of comparison, a YouTube video I made about a hailstorm in Canberra has had 30,598 at this time, but it does have a killer soundtrack.

So a slideshow of ice in Canberra is out-performing a secret marketing conspiracy of huge global companies? Seems unlikely doesn’t it?

On the other hand Governments are seizing on this to justify censoring the internet (having failed to get the public as upset about dirty pictures as they’d like).

And once they’ve put in place the facility to filter public health bete noires from the internet (for the children of course) where do you think they’ll stop?

Well it’s no surprise to The Concatenate that the ALP candidate for Boothby, Nicole Cornes, has turned into a large embarrassment to the ALP.

We covered her travails here, and here in May of last year.

The ABC has amusing coverage of her latest total inability to handle policy detail, this time not on something obscure, but the ALP lynchpin of IR.

So the 16 seats Kevin needed to win just became 17. (relatively speaking).

Another couple of thousand feet on top of Everest?

It turns out a nice dye job, looking good in high cut pants and being married to a famous footballer isn’t all you need to succeed in federal politics?

Well who’da thunk that???

Well the PM has found a home for a big chunk of his budget surplus.

$700 million is going to be splurged around keeping unviable farmers scratching around in the dirt and maintaining the agrarian gerrymander which keeps conservatives in power when times are tough.

More interesting was hearing the PM interviewed today saying that anyone who thought the timing of this announcement so close to an election was political is… wait for it… “just pathetic”.

I’ve been called that before, but never by the PM.

UPDATED: Hurrah! The transcript has passed the focus group and been released to the plebs. Here’s the relevant passage:

JOURNALIST:

Back on the drought, are you worried that the cynics in the electorate might see this as an attempt of the Howard Government to try and buy the Liberal vote?

PRIME MINISTER:

No. You would have to be incredibly cynical to think this was some kind of stage-managed thing. Have you been to a rural area and had a look at what it’s really like, have you been to the Murray-Darling Basin? You will know that every dollar of this assistance is needed and anybody who thinks that this is a pre-election ploy is pathetic.

Interestingly he was heavy with language like “sympathetic” and “empathetic” before labelling all who question his timing and motives.

Also there is a lot in the package to help farmers get off the land, but not until after they’ve re-elected John Winston Howard for the last time.

World Cup? What world cup?

For rugby fans the Australian Rugby Championship has been delivering everything that could have been asked of it.

Despite the best efforts of the Sydney rugby establishment to see off anything that might have upset the leather-patched tweed of their ancient and asthmatic club competition, the ARC has been going from strength to strength.

The new rules have lead to the ball staying in play for massively longer periods, the competition has been wildly unpredictable, new talent has been able shine, and I’ve had rugby to watch on Saturdays and Sundays.

It’s even given me a reason to watch ABC2, other than old Red Dwarf repeats.

I’m a fan.

The SMH has a revoltingly piss weak tribute to the late Senator Bob Collins who was facing a mountain of child sex abuse charges.

Instead we’re told how the former Labor Transport Minister was a passionate advocate of the Northern Territory and devoted family man.

It will be very interesting to see who turns up for his funeral.

The Age has representative coverage of the barney surrounding Kevin Rudd’s health.

Certainly sentences like this raise my eyebrows:

He received an aortic valve transplant in his mid-30s following a childhood bout of rheumatic fever.

Following it by what? 20 years???

Moving on…

Aside from getting in a huff that anyone was taking notes when he told the Sunrise program about his heart a few years ago Kevin made an interesting comparison.

“I had done to me what I gather was done to Arnold Schwarzenegger 10 years ago when he had the same procedure”

So Kevin, your heart is in as good nick as a hard living, cigar smoking, 60 year old, former steroid abuser?

Watching politicians trying to make pop cultural references is a little bit like watching a dog try to dance, all good fun until someone takes it seriously.

They just don’t have the kind of free time to really soak up the zeitgeist.

I guess the only thing that really matters is how the chaser spins it.

John Howard on the other hand looks younger today than he did in 1978, do you think he keeps the ageing portrait in the attic at Kirribilli or the Lodge?

Wow!

No seriously. Wow!

Let’s ease in here. The soundtrack is like a cross between Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Carribean and, well, guess where the rest of the movie ends up?

It’s based on a Neil Gaiman novel and having fallen in love with the book the movie actually lives up to my expectations.

Sure they had to leave things out, it’s a movie and there isn’t time.

On the other hand the movie can show so much where Gaiman’s book relied on exposition.

And fellas, you can finally treat your long suffering partner to a movie she’ll really, really like while you get to enjoy some surprisingly solid fight scenes.

Nerds will gripe about the Babylon Candle working on our side of the wall but aside from that there’s not that much to complain about.

A literally star-studded cast tear up the scenery with gay abandon (Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Ricky Gervais, Peter O’Toole for god’s sake).

And yet throughout it’s as whimsical, wistful and charming as the book it’s based on.

So, couples, get thee down to the cinema to hold hands and oooh & aaah.

Singles will want to wait for the DVD to come out so you can have a weep with a couple of bottles of red and a box of chocolates (yes even the blokes) with the dignity of privacy.

This is one of the rare movies that will make you feel better about the world without being afraid to acknowledge and confront the dark.

Like all good fairy tales.

Four and a half stars (I’m guessing a longer director’s cut will rate a five)

P.S. It’s worth checking out the stunningly beautiful website as long as you have good bandwidth and sound on your machine.

For quite a few years now a great many of us have been using the term “interweb” when we’ve been meaning to be ironically stupid.

You know, the sort of line inevitably delivered while talking too loud and trying to talk with an accent somewhat reminiscent of the Southern USA.

Well, sorry to say the fun is over after seeing the following shopfront this morning in NSW’s Sanctuary Point.

[Email readers will need to check out the image]

They even have a pretty respectable website

So now we know.

At 11.20 this morning the NSW Police media service sent out the following announcement:

Identification tag inquiry completed

18 September 2007

New South Wales Police Professional Standards Command has completed an investigation into some Operational Support Group (OSG) officers not wearing identification tags during recent APEC protests. Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said the review found there were real concerns and risks with pin-backed ID tags which could be used to compromise the safety of officers. Mr Scipione said there was no order approving the practice of not wearing ID and he rejected any notion that it was an attempt on behalf of individual officers to avoid identification. In future all New South Wales OSG Police officers rostered for protest operations will be issued with cloth identification tags, attached to their overalls by way of Velcro. Steps are now being taken to ensure supplies are available. “The wearing of identification tags is a requirement of the NSWPF and we have no issue with them being identified as they carry out their duties,” Mr Scipione said. “I want to again thank all of the police involved in making the police response to APEC such a success”.

So NSW Police broke the law in a widespread fashion but that’s OK because their issued equipment was substandard?

Frankly I’m relieved!

(Actually I’m not).

Should we expect anything else from a graduate of the FBI’s National Executive Institute (that would be Commissioner Scipione)?

Throughout APEC the NSW Government and police revealed themselves to be thugs with no regard for the rule of law, only their own power.

It’s a scary time.

But hey, That’s The Way We Do Business Now

We were all much younger when Robert Jordan started writing his “Wheel of Time” series.

Somewhere around the 8th 1,000 page tome I realised he was having a little joke on me as the recapitulation of the previous story snuck up around the 600th page.

It was around then that I decided I had better things to spend my time and money on than finding out what happens to Rand in the end.

Not a decision lightly come to after wading through 8,000+ pages of awkwardly drawn female characters and increasingly absurd story lines, to say nothing of the expense of buying all the books.

It seems my youthful judgment that the books would never be completed has been vindicated. Slashdot reports that James Oliver Rigney Jr (aka Robert Jordan) has passed away from cardiac amyloidosis aged 58.

While offering every condolence to his family, we can only hope that George RR Martin takes the damn hint and finishes off his “Song of Ice and Fire” before he passes away, or I do, or the universe ends, whichever comes first.

I needed an esky the other day.

And rather than doing what everyone else does and driving to the big box store down the highway I instead walked up to the local Mitre10 on the main street.

Walking in the door I was surprised to find myself surrounded by homewares and briefly wondered if the store hadn’t changed hands and decided to keep the original signage out the front in one of those quirky Gilmore Girlesque touches small towns feel obliged to put on these days.

Eventually I chanced upon an employee and inquired if they had eskies.

He lead me through a labyrinth eventually departing, cheshire cat like, with instructions to take the next left and wait for “one of the girls” to serve me.

(more…)

When my girlfriend brought this one home I saw Jessica Simpson’s top billing and groaned.

But thankfully the directors saw fit to minimise her role to a marginal love interest where mostly all she has to do is smile and look winsome.

This is a shame for feminists as the only female character in the movie departs for the sidelines to be a trophy, but a plus for anyone else watching the thing.

A story based entirely around life in a large retail store (think Wal-Mart, but Target or K-Mart here are close), it’s a retelling of a story as old as David and Goliath but in the more modern incarnation seminally embodied in Revenge of the Nerds.

(more…)

One positive, and you’d be brave to gamble it was not at least planned in part, of the last week’s turmoil in the Coalition is that they appear to have been forced to run as a team, rather than the presidential campaign favoured by party leaders.

The thing is that mostly it’s the leaders who have the presidential airs and graces and it remains to be seen if it’s a valid campaigning strategy in Australia.

Certainly many leaders have come to grief with it at State level.

Many have been wondering for a while now how the micro-managing control freak Rudd would cope with the pressures of a national election campaign.

Mark Latham came to pieces under the pressure.

With a whole Liberal “team” running all over the country, and a double act at the top of the bill, it’s certainly going to require a lot of self-discipline on Kevin’s part to not try and personally manage every issue. If he gets that wrong he’s going to fall apart on the road just like Mark Latham did.

But if he’s good enough to stand up to that test it’s probably a pretty good indicator of whether he’s fit to govern.

Having spent last week playing with their new Abrams tanks in front of the media in the top end the Army is now so confident in their new toys that they’ve got Brendan to announce they’re flogging off the old Leopard I tanks.

The 42 tonne German made monsters, complete with 105mm cannon, will be given away but sadly not just anyone can park one on their lawn (or better yet their neighbours).

“To be eligible for consideration organisations should be able to demonstrate that the tank will be of some historical or cultural significance to them”

Still, something to keep an eye open for out the front of the RSL.