The Concatenate

FHM are unveiling their list of the “sexiest women in the world 2008″ as spammed by those women’s publicists and to a lesser extent voted for by the trogs who read FHM. Fairfax blog The Vine have picked up the list.

Realising that I had no idea who a worrying percentage of these women are I have endeavoured to collect their pictures and some career highlights with which to justify why you should care.

Email readers may care to click the story link to appreciate the images.

And the winners are:

10. Kate Beckinsale

A posh English bint who studied languages at Oxford, got into the movies via Shakespeare and hit the big time in Pearl Harbour. She seems to have a thing for vampire movies these days. It’s rather hard not to like her.

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A great deal of blood and treasure seems to be being spent on trying to pacify Afghanistan.

History appears to teach us that the Afghanis have no desire to be pacified.

So why are we bothering?

We invaded to twonk those involved in the 9/11 attacks (but we left the Saudi regime intact).

Mission accomplished. Now if we want the remaining bad boys to come out from under their rocks (and stop de-stabilising neighbouring Pakistan) we should let them form a government.

Once they’re installed in their presidential palace and driving around in limos it will be relatively simple for a couple of missile laden drone aircraft to keep the fear of Allah in them.

In the event they step out of line and decapitation fails to do the job just round up the latest crop of unhappy warlords, give them some air support and keep changing the Government until we get one we like, or at least can co-exist with.

This may sound cruel and callous but compared to a permanent occupation it’s positively humane and much cheaper.

The ALP is building a fine tradition of pedophilia with the likes of Bob Collins and Milton Orkopoulos reaching ministerial rank. It makes you shudder to think who hasn’t been found out.

But somehow the Liberals manage to seem creepier.

The SMH reports on the latest eruption with the WA Liberal leader Troy Buswell denying and then admitting his penchant for sniffing the chairs of his female staff.

Once the branch stackers take over the party all the human beings flee and this is what we get for leadership.

The term genocide gets tossed around with gay abandon these days. So an act which is actually going to kill thousands of the world’s poorest people might not even qualify compared to the horrors of a new Taco Bell being suffered to open.

The SMH reports that Penny Wong is going to spend $3 billion buying water entitlements that could be used to grow food and instead watch that water flow into the sea.

This at a time when a tonne of rice is selling for more than a tonne of steel and the hungry third world is rioting in the streets. The Washington Post has an excellent feature on the global food woes.

Australia has been able to distract the world from our water mis-management for a while now by blaming the broader drought conditions.

We do need to sort out the mess of water allocation in this country. But it’s hard to make the case for environmental flows against saving lives.

You wonder for how long the rest of the world is going to idly watch agricultural land being removed from production?

With all the war reminiscence going on this ANZAC day weekend I’ve decided to indulge myself with a brief(ish) bit of war history for an (in my opinion) under-recognised piece of history, HMS Warspite.

Email readers are advised you’d best click on the story link because you’ll need the pictures.

This is HMS Warspite in 1947 aground off the coast of Cornwall.

And this is Warspite still on the rocks in 1949.

And still there in 1952.

All up it took seven years to finally dismantle the strongest warship ever built, even after the Attlee government stripped her of her guns and her crew.

With 15 battle honours Warspite was the most decorated ship in the history of the RN. In WWII she fired more shells at the enemy than any other ship. At Jutland she absorbed more shells than any other ship in the RN. To this day she holds the record of the longest distance unguided hit from a moving platform to a moving target (and, as it happened, on to the bridge of the Italian flagship in the opening engagement of the war in the Mediterranean). And it was Warspite which re-lit the flame of the west when all the ships off the coast of Normandy waited for her to start the D-Day landing bombardment.

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It hasn’t taken long but already the Rudd Government looks a lot like Labor in NSW.

They lie through their teeth, they govern by the sound bite and make policy decisions based on potential media exposure. Other than that they seem to drift along on inherited policy settings in areas which may be important but are not photogenic.

And they get by because the so-called “opposition” are a creepy bunch of jerks.

But with Australia’s most famous binge drinker since Bob Hawke in the lodge it seems Heavy Kevvy wants to be eye catching when he beats up on the kids.

The SMH informs of the latest measure which jacks up the excise on pre-mixed drinks.

The Howard Government’s now maligned decision eight years ago to drop the excise was almost certainly motivated by the influence of the Honan family. Their Manildra ethanol production not only makes crappy additives to petrol, but the same hooch also goes into the Australian made pre-mixed drinks.

On the other hand why should the excise be different on beer or wine just because in the distant past they reached their alcohol somewhat organically. All mass market booze is massively manipulated. The distinction just on pre-mixed drinks is really just vindictive governance against one (admittedly partisan) family.

Oh but it will stop binge drinking?

Take a look at Modern Drunkard Magazine’s pruno shootout to get an idea of the revolting efforts people will go to for a drink.

I have no doubt that if the price rises high enough kids will realise that soda water and fruity white wine is both cheap and much like what they’ve developed a taste for.

And then there’s the social aspect of this attempt at social engineering. It’s OK for rich kids to binge but we just want to lock the povs out of the party?

Don’t believe the hype. This is all about the Honans and setting the platform for more social experiments.

That and capturing today’s media cycle.

[First posted: April 24, 2008 @ 17:27]

China Daily is telling its people and the world how swimmingly the torch relay went in Canberra today.

Over on RiotACT there’s a different story.

What appears to have happened from this distance is the full weight of the Australian’s Government’s power was deployed against its own people to ensure a foreign power could parade through our own nation’s capital.

While our police protected the Chinese torch gangs of Chinese roamed the streets beating up anyone they disagreed with.

This is apparently a successful outcome. Also a demonstration of the Olympic spirit.

Don’t forget.

UPDATED 1:01am 25 April I’ve now added a TV Mashup of the day’s reportage. On my first stab at encoding the video the following comment was left on the video:

“Please Australian don’t angry with all chinese! China embassy tell us to go to Canberra. If we don’t go - our family in china have big problems. Not all Chinese students are communists - but most are.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Via the YouTube account I’ve received the following message:

You are a f*cken idiot! There are 15000 Chinese there and you call them thuggish? You dumb fuck. I will smash your face if you say that in person in front of me.

So add illiterate and foul mouthed to thuggish then.

So in all the coverage of the torch relay protests in Canberra there was one symbol vying with the Chinese red flags, as in this picture from the channel 9 reportage.

Now let’s take a look at the flag of Tibet.

Not the same thing is it? In fact what we were seeing was the flag of the Republic of South Vietnam.

Here’s another look.

Anyone fit to comment on national affairs would know that the South Vietnamese in Australia are the most venomously anti-communist group in Australia. They’re a bit like Palestinians on the subject of Israel.

What they’re lousy at is communicating to the English language media. I had a run-in with them a couple of years ago for RiotACT so it’s not like they’re off the radar.

From all the media I have consumed it would appear that no-one in Australian media is fit to comment on national affairs.

In the SMH Annabel Crabb has a terrifying story on Kevin Rudd’s idea of fair.

Charging his own cabinet ministers $1,300 a year for the sandwich plates laid out at their meetings.

Parliamentary catering is decent, but it isn’t spectacular (John Howard’s beloved deep fried camenbert being a possible exception).

This is serious official business, not chipping in for pizza at a party!

If this sort of thinking gets applied to the rest of the nation it’s going to be a miserable time all round.

The New York Times reports that the interminable civil war in the US Democratic Party is set to stumble on to more rounds following a strong victory for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania.

This now means Obama, still ahead but not decisively, has failed to win any of the big states except his own Illinois.

It also means the contest is almost certainly going to the floor of the party conference where the arm-twisting of the super-delegates will be the terror of the earth.

We all got excited, but now we’re bored and it’s going to get a lot more boring still.

Just what John McCain did to get this kind of luck doesn’t bear thinking about.

The SMH is reporting on reports in the UK media about claims being made in a documentary.

A little tenuous sure. But then the claim is that the late Australian mogul Kerry Packer was a “sugar daddy” to Heather Mills (recent ex of Paul McCartney) during her alleged career as a high priced call girl.

Which makes us wonder who else Packer will turn out to have been linked to. We certainly didn’t see this coming.

So once upon a time there was this girl in London. And she broke my heart on my first birthday away from home and I walked home 10km in the cold January rain because I had no money. And normally that would have been the end of that. But a few months later she got back in touch with me and we met up again and then she got scared and broke my heart again. Wash, rinse, repeat for a few years.

It was a relationship with more endings than beginnings.

There was the teary phone call from a pay phone at Heathrow to my mobile in Canberra where pound coins being slammed into the slot to keep the call alive made a constant drumbeat. And even if I had found the right words to say it would have ended a few weeks later if history is any guide.

There was the time I got home from a big weekend around Valentines Day to be told by a slightly annoyed flatmate that some english girl had called three times for me.

When I called back someone called “Josh” answered the phone and a piece of me died forever.

In the years that followed I dated a string of women I hated figuring it would save time.

But one good thing out of that relationship was being introduced to a pile of music that only gets passed around between cool people, almost never getting airplay. The Levellers, New Model Army, Belle and Sebastian.

And, on one transcontinental mixed tape there was The Magnetic Fields, Get Lost.

On that crackly cassette I first heard the words to The Desperate Things You Made Me Do. On the next call I asked how she could understand her impact on me as expressed in the lyrics in the song:

“I’d like to beat you black and blue/
For all the agony you have put me through”

She was shocked and horrified.

It wasn’t all one way traffic. Somewhere around Oberon she announced that her cool friends thought the band Bush were arse. A few miles later I slipped on the 16 Stone album and she loved it enough to ask who it was. A long silence followed that revelation.

I also introduced her to NIN. Her parting gift to me was The Fragile double album. That and years of poisonous relationships.

Since then Steven Merritt (the Magnetic Fields’ core) shook the world with his 69 Love Songs album.

The band became moderately well known for beautiful melodies covering doleful lyrics. A particular twist of the band is Merritt’s homosexuality laid across catchy love songs. Sometimes they cover this with Shirley Simms vocals but even then the gender specific language can be jarring to the hetero audience.

This latest album is called “Distortion” and delivers it in spades. A homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain it never descends into that band’s completely unlistenable excess. More pertinent comparisons are The Pixies and Sonic Youth.

At its best the clanging guitars are more reminiscent of Tubular Bells than anything else and while the album demands you turn up the volume it also rewards careful listening.

The spite-ridden “California Girls” is worth the price of admission alone and gets done twice with both male and female vocals.

But for mine the standout is the ultimate pub-anthem “Too drunk to dream” with up-tempo lyrics such as:

“i gotta get too drunk to dream
because dreaming only makes me blue
i gotta get too drunk to dream
because i only dream of you

i gotta get too pissed to miss you
or i’ll never get to sleep
i gotta drink wine apt to pine for you
and god knows that ain’t cheap

If you like your music loud, dark, but with a melody, then this is not an album you want to leave out of your collection.

Four and a Half stars

The SMH informs us of efforts to bring some sanity to ANZAC day marches in NSW by banishing the non-veterans to the end of the march.

It’s sad that it upsets the likes of the SMH’s pictured Sarah Dawson who’s been marching to feel close to her departed grandad.

But the whole point of the exercise is to honour the ones who actually went to the wars; not act as therapy for a generation that was never called to service. And if we stay at peace for so long that there are no veterans left to march then that too will be a good thing. But with veterans coming home from Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor, action in the Persian Gulf and the Solomons today that time is a long way off.

And those recently returned veterans need their place in the march without having to compete for attention with the Megans and Sarahs carrying the medals of men who marched before.

Sorry guys, but you just haven’t earned it.

While doing some research for a paid article I came across an article from The Atlantic in 1997. It’s about Norman Borlaug and how he saved more lives than anyone else in history (and has the Nobel Peace Prize to prove it) despite being little known apart from a cute soliloquy in the second season of The West Wing.

The scariest thing about the article is the way Borlaug’s lifesaving efforts have been stymied in the name of the environment. This despite the environmental wrecking ball that is subsistence farming.

I’ve got a whole new respect for African grievance now that I know of the efforts to bar Africans from buying decent fertilisers for fear they might live.

Anyway read the article and discuss, trust me it’s well worth your time.