An open thread where, at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
First!
(Seems to be the thing to say)
It was the best of times, it was the first of times …
Damn.
Why on earth has Beattie persisted with the Council amalgamations in the year of a Federal election? These amalagamations are making a lot of people in Queensland very unhappy and some of those will not vote Labor as a result. Queensland is critical to Rudd’s chances and if Howard wins yet again at the end of the year this will be seen as a key factor in why Labor could not pick up the necessary seats.
One possible explanation is that Beattie (a) doesn’t like Rudd and (b) is not all that fussed about whether or not there is a Federal Labor government – if Labor gains power federally, State Labor governments will become more vulnerable.
Any thoughts on this?
Mark U you might have a look at this post.
Possibly because the country has been over governed for years and 750 less local lawmakers could just cut down on the number of petty laws being enacted ad nauseum so people don’t become overwhelmed.
It could also be that many of the councils are too small to be financially viable.
It could also be that the coucil boundaries are based on how far a horse can walk in a day and a more appropriate set of boundaries are needed.
It could also be that they were asked to amalgamate voluntarily and they weren’t even capable of doing that.
It could be that he is sick of the waste of public funds for overseas trips etc. when they have a constituency of very few thousands to support their accustomed lifestyle.
As for the Federal Election, it will play a role in making conservatives vote conservative but it will have little impact compared to the stunts pulled by a desparate Howard.
I agree that amalgamations are long overdue. But the political impact could be potentially serious for Rudd if there is a big enough protest vote. Many voters put parochial issues way ahead of national issues and there are a lot of people very upset about the amalgamations – not just Coalition voters.
You may well be right, I really have no insight into it beyond anyone else but I personally won’t be getting too excited about it. Brisbane itself is an amalgamation of many councils.
Has anyone else around here had a look at the Habermas or public sphere entries on Wiki?
I read it online and it seemed horribly incoherent, but I figured it was just me being vague so I printed it out. Nup. It’s just as incoherent in print.
Made me wonder – academics routinely tell students Wiki is unreliable, but why don’t academic experts take it upon themselves to fix these things?
But why should they? There are plenty of reliable sources of information around, and surely the great task of academia is to guide students to existing reliable sources rather than attempt to correct the vast host of unreliable sources.
That and academic in-fighting has nothing on the sheer bloodymindedness of a wiki edit war…
Where’s Kim gorn?
“Where’s Kim gorn?”
She’s been swapped for Liam.
Just bought Police Squad! on DVD. Hilarity ensues.
Cigarette?
Yes I Know.
That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say about academics for a long time, L.
The big electoral buy back has now started. How easily are you bought? We are about to find out.
What tigtog said. Goes with the other thread about MSM’s problems with bloggers and unrestrained access to information. Provide links to the truth.
On holidays!
tigtog – err speaking as an academic a lot of us do encourage the use of wikis! A lot of us do spend a lot of time making sure that they are right.
Does anyone here have a further insight to that which is in Wired Magazine about Bin Laden videos!?If the Americans do not clear this up..personally I am at wits end.I just dont want to think,we have to tolerate the clown U.S.A. government for another day.Perhaps even a strike ,of all and everything U.S.A. consumer,work,information sources,unless they are already hopping mad.World scale.
“That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say about academics for a long time, L.”
Lol, genevieve, but true for me also.
“tigtog – err speaking as an academic a lot of us do encourage the use of wikis! A lot of us do spend a lot of time making sure that they are right.”
I support both courses of action: encouraging students to find more reliable sources – at the same time developing research skills – as well as correcting material on wikis, or generally trying to improve the quality of what’s readily available. I tend to err on the side of encouraging students to improve their own research processes, and evaluate their sources.
Now that Barack Obama has spelt out his support for the Howard line about the rightness of a pre-emptive attack to counter terrorism ( to wit Pakistan) will the rodent now re-enter the domestic US presidential race with a thumbs up for the black senator. Will someone from the msm ask him?
The Rodent’s mob would sell their children given the opportunity. How intelligent is it to put MORE weapons into the Middle East?
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pm-sets-sights-on-arms-deals-with-gulf/2007/08/04/1185648208809.html
1984 has nothing on this outfit.
Here’s his opportunity. Now the Real Estate Institutes are urging a massive lifting in the first Home Owners Grant Scam as a buffer against very painful interest rate rises from Howards economic mismanagement.
Here’s the chance you’ve always wanted:
“Internet users will be able to directly address questions to Mr Howard from tomorrow, through Yahoo!7′s online research site, Answers (Yahoo7.com.au/Answers).
The Prime Minister will then select five of the expected thousands of questions for a personalised video response.”
An odd vehicle for a man who refused to engage with myspace because “he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation.” – yahoo7 is not a commercial organisation?
You’ll need a yahoo identity and have done a yahoo7 answers participation signup to get a look in. You’d think they could have given the great yahoo7 unwashed a bit more notice, or is the idea actually to avoid having JHo swamped by curly q’s, and only having Liberatchiks in on it, asking e-DorothyDixers?
On the other hand , say they haven’t got their s. together, there’s the delicious prospect of the public being given the opportunity to engage with JHo, and nobody taking him up on it. Now that would be funny.
Onyas
Once upon a time there was just a Green Zone.
Now there’s a Brown Zone.
Good old Brendan is at it again.
The video, which has now been removed from the YouTube website, includes footage of someone dressed in the costume as well as men drinking beer from a tube at Robertson Barracks near Darwin.
Mr Nelson says the matter is being investigated and if there is any evidence of racist behaviour the people involved will be disciplined.
But he says Australian soldiers have a long history of irreverent behaviour.
“Let’s just wait until the Chief of the Army and the military have investigated the matter before we start jumping to conclusions and start to criticise the men who appear to have been involved,” he said.
“I suspect that a lot of it is letting off steam and a bit of larrikin irreverence, and I also suspect that some of it has crossed the line and is quite inappropriate.
“The Chief of the Army will deal with it appropriately, and I look forward to receiving his report.”
Showing his true colours I see
Pulled out my Shaun Micallef Season 3 DVDs last night. Comedy gold!
One particular monologue in Ep2 I thought you all might enjoy:
(paraphrased a little)
“Now, as this is pre-recorded I need to do a ‘topical’ monologue that won’t age. So:
How about that guy? Only in America! Petrol prices: how high…or low.. can they go? John Howard is a dickhead. (yeah, that never ages)”
m
Frank Calabrese:
Gone are the days when a Commanding Officer [or Officer Commanding] would simply say “Sergeant Major, put those stupid young Diggers on extra duties and tell them to wake up to themselves; if they do it again, put them on a fizzer and front them up to me”.
No. Now we have the Minister having to make statements about it. WTF!! And of course there will be the inevitable time-wasting inquiry. And then the inquiry into the inquiry.
Meanwhile, the terrorists will be killing themselves laughing at how the ADF allocates its resources.
Katz: “Once upon a time there was just a Green Zone. Now there’s a Brown Zone.”
Or maybe there’s just a No-Terrorist-Combatants-Habitually-Disguised-As-Iraqi-Civilians Zone, if you thought about it for more than half a bloomin’ minute. I know that’s asking rather a lot, and how much more comfy it is to push the auto-play El Racismo buttons on your remote control, but still…
brawk! TEH CRUDASES WERE TEH EVIL! brawk!
repeat as necessary, even if you fill up the entire hard disk…
I agree Graham. What they need is a damn good arse kicking followed by a almighty rocket along the lines of “Don’t ever do such a bloody stupid thing again and if you do, don’t bloody capture it on camera because everything always ends up on the internet,” and then a month of dunny duties.
Speaking of which JPZ does have a point above. It would be quite unnerving to go for a crap while worrying if you could literally get the shit blown out of you.
This comment has been brought to you by the word “scatological”.
Annals of the Bumpy Ride Dept. –
Well, the other night it was cinema night at Fortress Zenger, and for once it was a total fookin train wreck.
WARNING/ACHTUNG/AVISO: the rest of this post will be a lot of blather about old movies, so skip the whole thing if that sort of stuff bores you!
In honor of the passing of grandmaster Ingmar Bergman, we thought we’d screen some of his work. Herein lies a problem, though; upon which I shall now dilate. Everyone present had seen Bergman’s greatest hits many times, so there seemed little point to showing anything from his magical decade, roughly 1955-1966, which begins with the flawless “Smiles of a Summer Night” and concludes with the magisterial and fathomless “Persona”: Ingmar had his ups and downs, and he made sorta-good movies both before and after that period, but for that decade he lived within a magic circle, and everything he did was pretty much perfect. This wasn’t true about the rest of his career.
Which brings us to Cinema Night. Personally I don’t think Bergman’s genius really survived the switch from black and white to color: I think all of his utterly necessary, don’t-miss-this! sort of work was done in black and white, and even his best work in color is just sort of okay. I also don’t think he survived the switch in leading actors from the sublimely theatrical Gunnar Bjornstrand to the “meh” Erland Josephson.
All of which considerations we ignored, and decided to screen one of B’s that none of us had ever seen before: the much-praised (and somewhat notorious, to anyone who’s seen it) “Cries And Whispers” — or, as a South American grad student with a poor grasp of English once described it to me, “Screams and Whimpers.” I think she was on the right track, though.
Bad enough that one is forced to watch the luminous Harriet Andersson undone by time and sickness; but by 1972 or so, Bergman’s fixations had sort of ossified, and we all thought we were watching a bad Bergman parody. Color doesn’t do him any favors either, and by the time of the infamous mutilation scene, the movie was literally booed off the screen by a room full of Bergman fans.
As an antidote, we tried to pop in “Talladega Nights,” but that also got booed off the screen within 15 minutes. Next we unwisely chose Warren Beatty’s insufferable and interminable “REDS”. I recall going to see it on a hot date as a teenager (yeah, I was the kind of teen who thought THAT would make for a hot date); we spent the whole movie making out in the back row, and occasionally overhearing some platitude about how leftists were good and everyone else was evil. Yawn.
Should have learned the lesson from back then, but what’s even worse now is what appallingly bad acting there is in that dreck. Booed off screen within 40 minutes. Can’t say we didn’t give it a fighting chance.
After many arguments and bottles of wine, we finally settled down for a full screening of “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” In a way, it was a fitting tribute to the great Ingmar Bergman.
God bless the old fecker. They don’t make ‘em like that any more. Certainly not by the likes of Lars von Trier, who needs to get hisself into a good fistfight in the parking lot of an Arby’s on a warm summer night, or something to wake his lame self up. Meantime I guess we’ll go back to “Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries” and the ineffable “Persona.” God, that one’s good.
Annals of the Bumpy Ride Dept. –
Well, the other night it was cinema night at Fortress Zenger, and for once it was a total fookin train wreck.
WARNING/ACHTUNG/AVISO: the rest of this post will be a lot of blather about old movies, so skip the whole thing if that sort of stuff bores you!
In honor of the passing of grandmaster Ingmar Bergman, we thought we’d screen some of his work. Herein lies a problem, though; upon which I shall now dilate. Everyone present had seen Bergman’s greatest hits many times, so there seemed little point to showing anything from his magical decade, roughly 1955-1966, which begins with the flawless “Smiles of a Summer Night” and concludes with the magisterial and fathomless “Persona”: Ingmar had his ups and downs, and he made sorta-good movies both before and after that period, but for that decade he lived within a magic circle, and everything he did was pretty much perfect. This wasn’t true about the rest of his career.
Which brings us to Cinema Night. Personally I don’t think Bergman’s genius really survived the switch from black and white to color: I think all of his utterly necessary, don’t-miss-this! sort of work was done in black and white, and even his best work in color is just sort of okay. I also don’t think he survived the switch in leading actors from the sublimely theatrical Gunnar Bjornstrand to the “meh” Erland Josephson.
All of which considerations we ignored, and decided to screen one of B’s that none of us had ever seen before: the much-praised (and somewhat notorious, to anyone who’s seen it) “Cries And Whispers” — or, as a South American grad student with a poor grasp of English once described it to me, “Screams and Whimpers.” I think she was on the right track, though.
Bad enough that one is forced to watch the luminous Harriet Andersson undone by time and sickness; but by 1972 or so, Bergman’s fixations had sort of ossified, and we all thought we were watching a bad Bergman parody. Color doesn’t do him any favors either, and by the time of the infamous mutilation scene, the movie was literally booed off the screen by a room full of Bergman fans.
As an antidote, we tried to pop in “Talladega Nights,” but that also got booed off the screen within 15 minutes. Next we unwisely chose Warren Beatty’s insufferable and interminable “REDS”. I recall going to see it on a hot date as a teenager (yeah, I was the kind of teen who thought THAT would make for a hot date); we spent the whole movie making out in the back row, and occasionally overhearing some platitude about how leftists were good and everyone else was evil. Yawn.
Should have learned the lesson from back then, but what’s even worse now is what appallingly bad acting there is in that dreck. Booed off screen within 40 minutes. Can’t say we didn’t give it a fighting chance.
After many arguments and bottles of wine, we finally settled down for a full screening of “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” In a way, it was a fitting tribute to the great Ingmar Bergman.
God bless the old fecker. They don’t make ‘em like that any more. Certainly not by the likes of Lars von Trier, who needs to get hisself into a good fistfight in the parking lot of an Arby’s on a warm summer night, or something to wake his lame self up. Meantime I guess we’ll go back to “Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries” and the ineffable “Persona.” God, that one’s good.
Yes, I recently saw “Reds” again for the first time in yonks and it has not aged well has it? An interminable kitchen sink soap opera with a few nice big scenes uneasily inserted here and there.
About halfway through yet another balls-achingly boring mumbled domestic between John and Mabel, I snapped and started composing a telegram to that nice young Mr Hoover at the Justice Department. “They’re in a cottage in Provincetown!”
Well at least you didn’t watch the “The Serpent’s Egg”. Great nightclub, shame about the movie.
On the whole though I think I prefer Antonioni to Bergman. And Altman to both. Be fun to eavesdrop on the three of them, and Stanley K, catching up in the great editing suite in the sky.
Nabakov [7:41pm]:
Funny you should mention that …. during the Viet-Nam War, a bloke I knew [different unit] was in the dunny when they were attacked. Temporarily paralyzed when wounded, he fell forward unable to move his legs. The armour-piercing/incediary or tracer rounds set fire to the tar-paper lining the structurs and drops of hot tar fell onto his bare back. He survived …. but said that if he hadn’t, he would would have been known forever as the bloke who got shot in the bum and burnt to death in a dunny – not as one of our glorious dead who died in battle.:-) Fair dinkum, going to the dunny can be hazardous.
Just for the record, Lee Hazlewood died August 4.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2142293,00.html
He produced and wrote “These Boots Are Made For Walking” for Nancy Sinatra among many other great songs (such as “Some Velvet Morning”). A sad loss of a great musical visionary. his last album was released in October 2006.
From the Guardian obit;
Damn. Lee Hazelwood finally went to Jackson!
Now playing Nancy and Lee’s greatest hits in tribute. He was a highly original popmeister. For quality if not quantity I’d put him up there with Serge Gainsbourg, Mike Chapman and the young Phil Spector.
From my lady friend’s DSE departmental newsletter:
“NEW DPCD SECRETARY ANNOUNCED
In a bizarre twist it was confirmed late yesterday that the new Secretary of DPCD will be the previous Premier Steve Bracks. Steve has been at a loose end for the last week and a bit. He and Teri conferred over tea the other night, and decided together that it was time for Steve to return to public service and that this new role would provide new and interesting challenges from another side of the fence (there are many sides to the metaphorical fence in my view). Weird, eh? This item makes no sense. Sorry about that.”
And yes, that oddball metacommentary at the end was in the original.
Oh, for uitlanders, that’s the newly created (well, amalgamated) Department of Planning and Community Development.
Bracks the public servant under Justin Madden’s portfolio – is someone helping steer the big man through to a bigger job?
Jeepers Japerz, have you turned into a human hot button?
Said segregated john is located on a US military base! If Satanic al Qaeda has got within a mile this toilet, then heaven help the US military effort.
May I modestly suggest that if that is the concern of the US military authorities, then your directive, viz:
might be more productively posted at the entrance gate of the base.
Unless, of course, there is something of enormous military and/or symbolic value being protected within the sanctum of the base bathroom…
Or am I missing an important American cultural and/or spiritual touchstone here?