Itemisation

Oh hey. Hi there.

Wossup in da hood?

Me + inspiration right now = Hah!

Still. One must battle on irregardless.

I think lack of holidays over the last three years is starting to catch up with me. The good news? Holidays are on the way. Yesiree - I am off to far flung and exciting lands of exoticness mid April for a whole month of holitags - barely three weeks away.

WOOT I tell you!

I've been trying to summon the energy to write about David Hicks and why John Howard is going to win the next election (see voter 'care fatigue' and incumbency - I'll get there eventually) but it's too depressing. All I really want to do right now is sit on the couch and watch old seasons of the West Wing. DON'T JUDGE ME! I can't maintain the rage every day of the freakin' year.

Not sure about youse, but the daylight savings changeover has buggered me around. I'm still getting up and going to bed far too early. Oh well, if it means I can take photos like this


and this


more often, then maybe mornings are a good thing after all.

Peace out y'all.

I imagine many of you read or are at least aware of Larvatus Prodeo, the Australian group blog founded by Mark Bahnisch from Griffith University.

Though I rarely comment on LP (or anywhere for that matter), I'm a regular reader and often enjoy the stoushes in the comments.

As you will know if you're an Itemisation regular, education policy (particularly in history) and the Culture Wars are pet interests of mine.

In short, the conservative line for the last ten years or so is that the education system in Australia has been taken over by filthy 'leftists' who are injecting TEH CHILDS with all sorts of nasty Marxist ideas. It is a line frequently peddled by all the usual polemicists on the right, but the cheerleader for conservative education reform is Dr Kevin Donnelly.

Dr Donnelly is an 'educational consultant' who (among other things) first came to prominence as an adviser to the Kennett Government Education Minister Don Hayward. I first noticed him in the mid nineties after he published a typical polemic in The Age attacking Arts Faculties in various Australian Universities for some of the topics they chose to teach.

His method is standard. Broad-sweeping commentary packaged in neat bite-sized statements, easily digestible, yet almost entirely lacking in detail. He has made a living criticising teachers and (Labor) education departments, is published regularly in many of the major newspapers in this country and has worked for governments in Australia and New Zealand.
Donnelly's recent work Dumbing Down has received scathing criticism from Stuart Macintyre (Professor of History at Melbourne University and President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia among other things) in The Australian. If you have five minutes, it's worth a read.

All this brings me back to Larvatus Prodeo. Being one of the foremost political blogs in the country, it receives its fair share of high profile readers and commentors. A little over a month ago, Mark Bahnsich wrote a post about education policy and 'teacher bashing' and who should turn up in the comments? None other than Dr D himself.

Read as he bravely and condescendingly weighs into the fray and is promptly shot down by LP regular Pavlov's Cat.

I love clever people.

About this.

Could it be cricket's Escobar?




This on the other hand...

Talk to anyone who knows anything about the speed of the interwebs in this country and you'll discover that we are rapidly becoming a stagnant backwater in things technological. With no plan whatsoever to rectify this situation coming from the surplus-obsessed Liberals, could it be that the "Future Fund" may actually be turned to something useful under KRudd?

I like the cut of his item.

Last night I went to a concert at a church in Camberwell to listen to 16th century choral works by Byrd, Morley and Weelkes to name a few.

*ignores puzzled faces*

One of the performers was my dear Papa and before the show, he discovered something very odd.

Under a park bench in the quiet, manicured gardens of the basilica, sitting side by side, he found two gold rings. One a plain gold band with an engraving on the inside, the other more ornate and filigreed. They looked very much like the wedding rings of a single couple.

Pondering the strangeness of the find, Dad picked them up to examine them further and it became even stranger: the engraving on the man's ring was marked with the date of my Father's first birthday.



...



Why were they there?

The engraved date speaks of a wedding during the Second World War, maybe a romance blossoming during time on leave, or convalescence. In Australia or Europe, Africa or the Americas there is no indication. Perhaps the bands of a couple escaping the horrors of war, or the mark of a more mundane, but still 60 year-long relationship.

Possibly they are the rings of two lovers never able to speak or openly recognise their love - a lifetime of regret and sadness laid out on sacred ground.

Maybe death has finally caught the ring bearers and the gesture is that of a relative gently setting them free. Or perhaps it is the mark of a divorce, the breakdown of a family, the end of a lifetime's era.

I have no true idea as to why those rings were there, but the possibilities are endless and most likely tinged with sadness. I hope the owners of them approve and that the rings find their way into hands that will care for them.

So it turns out one of the first inmates at Guantanamo Bay to be tried under the military commissions, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was responsible for pretty much everything bad that has happened in the last ten or fifteen years.

According to numerous news outlets, Mohammed has confessed to being behind the attacks on September 11, the Bali bombing, the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993 and having personally beheaded Daniel Pearl, an American journalist. But it doesn't end there, he admits to plotting to kill all sorts of people, from Bill Clinton to the Pope and an intention to blow up a whole lot of other stuff like US embassies, the Panama Canal and Big Ben to name a few. All up, according to the Pentagon, a total of 31 terror attacks either planned or executed.

It is also rumoured that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was behind the JFK assassination and if you play the episode of the Simpsons where Monty Burns gets shot backwards at 9 minutes, 11 seconds, Mohammed can clearly be seen handing Maggie Simpson a gun.

Cheap shots aside, this is precisely the sort of result that will raise more questions about the handling of Guantanamo prisoners (sorry, "unlawful enemy combatants" - no "prisoners" at Guantanamo) by US authorities than it will satisfy the general public. Already, there is considerable scepticism surrounding these reports.

See THIS is where rendition, ghost flights, "vigorous" interrogation techniques, questionable military commissions and general aresholery leads. Sure they've got a confession, but who is going to believe for a second that this individual was personally responsible for all of those events? Not after he has been in custody for six years. Not after his written accounts have been hit with the big black censor's texta, most notably in places where claims of torture seem to be made.

If he really DID do all these things and signed a confession, then why not put him in front of a legitimate court. Imagine how much greater the victory would be if they could place him in front of an impartial judge and gain a conviction using the laws of evidence, without hearsay and with confessions under dubious circumstances struck from the record. A conviction in a court of law would be a far more convincing demonstration that they have not only got their man, but that he actually did commit the acts he has apparently confessed to.

But no. This confession comes in a place where the law does not extend, where the rules of the Geneva convention are barely recognised and when they are, new terms are invented to circumvent them.

If it's a victory at all, it's a pretty hollow one.

If you didn't see Extras last night, you missed this. Oh how I laffed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Ian McKellan.

So on the weekend, I lurched into my fourth decade.

The last few days have been spent with my dearest friends in the largely loving arms of the Port Fairy Folk Festival.

Heading down to stay in Airey's Inlet on Wednesday last week, we arrived at Port Fairy at lunchtime on Thursday and staked out a big spot in anticipation of the 20 or so people and 7 or 8 tents that were still to come.



As anyone who has ever camped at the Port Fairy Folk Festival will be able to testify, this is no mean feat. By the Saturday morning the campsite is so full that tents get parked in the most precarious of places. New arrivals stalk the camping area searching desperately for the smallest plot to plonk their shelter and we had to work hard to keep the space for friends arriving on Friday night.

Nonetheless, success was had.

There were many highlights of the weekend, but among the more amusing had to be seeing Lior get almost pulled off the stage by drunk 14 year-old girls, a very boozed and very dear friend and diminutive lady blogger (who will most definitely remain nameless but who will likely kill me for writing this regardless) punching someone in the back on the dance floor without the punchee registering the hit and then another friend following her lead, being sprung by the punchee's companion before contact had been made, and then pretending to look for something lost on the ground to escape recriminations.

For five minutes.

Did I mention the punchee was also a drunk 14 year-old girl?

G.O.L.D.



I saw many worthy acts including these people, this person, this person, these guys, that chick and numerous others, was wished happy birthday by Luka Bloom, swam in the sea, got quite sunburnt, drunk and tired, ate a lot of sausages, laughed a lot and had Happy Birthday sung to me by about 200 people on Fiddler's Green.



All in all, a pretty righteous birthday (in the non-Godly sense of the word).

And to cap it all off I was given the most awesomest birthday present evs. It is, in a word, fuckenunreal. Expect to see many more photgraphics appearing shortly.

So what with a weekend like that, time off work, presents, booze, sun, sea, wind, music, friends, John Howard sinking ever further in the polls and a trip to exotic locales in the very near furture, 30 is looking pretty bloody good right now.

This is unreal!

Gizoogle any webpage you like, sit back and enjoy the results.

Here is Itemisation Gizoogled

"I reckon it M-to-tha-izzight have sum-m sum-m ta do wit tha alcohol escap'n whizzay tha bottle was opened allow'n tha wizzle inside ta freeze rapidly - but that's pizzy poorly-educated speculizzles."

Something odd happened last night.

*cue X-Files music*

Snooze and I were just settling down to dinner when we opened a bottle of wine. It had been in the freezer for maybe two hours because it was essentially room temperature when we got it home.

When it came out of the freezer, we could clearly see some little bits of ice floating in it, but only a couple of bits.

But here's the weird part.

Snooze pulled the cork and within seconds the whole thing froze solid in front of us. So quick was the process that Snooze actually put it back down on the bench and backed off fearing some kind of winey explosion (not of the Andrew Bolt kind - ZING).

It settled down to just a solid block of ice and no explosions were had, but it was very bizarre.

I reckon it might have something to do with the alcohol escaping when the bottle was opened allowing the wine inside to freeze rapidly - but that's pure poorly-educated speculation.

Any science nerds want to have a crack at solving this one?

Where's Julius Sumner Miller when you need him?

"Pets ditched for games" says the headline on the Hearld-Sun website, complete with a picture of a sad puppy.

The amusingly named Dr Seksel *snigger*, President of the Australian Veterinary Association, reports that changing lifestyles have seen a reduction in the number of pets in the last 15 years.

"Our style of living is different. We do tend to live in apartments and high rises more than we did 15 years ago," Dr Seksel said.

Fair enough.

"Modern suburban dwellings are much less likely to have a big backyard, which tends to restrict choices about pet ownership.

Reasonable point.

"Australian children these days are much more likely to be sitting inside playing video games than running around the backyard, which I think is a shame."

WTF!?

It's those lazy fat children that are to blame! They're bringing down society from within with their perfidious "computer games" and their "U-Tubes" and their "My-Spaces"! It's not a shame, it's a NATIONAL DISGRACE!!

How this stops people owning pets is not entirely clear to me, but that's the beauty of the Hearld-Sun, it doesn't have to make sense, as long as there's someone to blame. Hurrah!

For the first time in many years it's actually kind of fun to be a Lefty. Many of the appalling decisions that have been made on the wave of neoconservativism are starting to bite the hands that delivered them.

When John Kerry was defeated by George W in the 2004 US Federal elections, there was a level of despair among those who thought that we were seeing the end of the Bush White House. It was heartbreaking not just because "our side" had lost, but the way the loss came about.

Readers may remember a particularly charming group that formed during the campaign called the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth". A selling point for the Democrats was that John Kerry was a legitimate Vietnam War hero, having been decorated for his service in the swift boats - and an obvious counter to George W's own dubious miltary service.

SBVT took it upon themselves to viciously smear Kerry, accusing him of fabricating and exaggerating stories of his service in Vietnam to bolster his own image. Hiding under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, SBVT were able to publish a book and run television and print advertisments denouncing Kerry without being subject to the Federal Election Commission laws that would otherwise have prevented it.

Skip to February 2007. The President's nominee for the post of US Ambassodor to Belgium appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be essentially interviewed for the position. The nominee is Sam Fox, a Republican and benefactor of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who contributed US$50,000 to the group during the 2004 election. On the Senate Committee is none other than John Kerry.

A beautiful comeuppance.

You should read the full transcript here [link], or watch the footage here [link].

But here is a brief sample:

Kerry: So, again, I ask you the question, do you think now that you and others bear responsibility for thinking about where we put money in American politics? What we're saying, what we present to the American people -- is truth important or isn’t it?

Fox: Senator, if I had reason to believe and if I were convinced that the money was going to be used to, in any untruthful or false way, knowingly, I would not give.

Kerry: Well, sir, let me ask you this question: Did you or did you not in any of the public comments being made at the time, which I assume you were following, hear or read of any of the public statements at that point in time, with respect to the legitimacy of these charges and these smears?

Fox: Mr. Senator, I can say this…

Kerry: Did you miss this: In September of 2004, Vice Admiral Ruth, with the Navy Inspector General, wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy that was made public -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, every major newspaper in the country carried, saying their examination found that the existing documentation regarding my medals was legitimate.

Did you miss that too?

Fox: I don’t remember those, but I'm certain at the time I must have read them.

Kerry: Do you think this should matter to me?

Fox: I'm sorry?

Kerry: Do you think this should matter to me?

Fox: Yes, I do.

Kerry: Do you think this should matter to everyone here, as a Senator?

Fox: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, going back to the time when I said I was on record and was interviewed a number of times about campaign finance reform and about less money going in, I said one of the big reasons was not just the nastiness and so forth associated with it, but the abuse the candidates had to take to run for public office, I think it's disgraceful, I think it's terrible.

It could be a fun few months.