Olympics Finish Down Under

yeah, NBC fuckers, try playing it Live next time, so we all can make the choice to stay up and see it, get up early and see it, or wait until the prime time repeat and see it. Not to Mention, not to fucking MENTION, the talking! Bob Costas and his idiot team, talked all over the bloody Closing ceremony, they cut out the drag queens, what they didn't cut out they cut to Atheletes, which is sort of alright, but show the whole ceremony first, then show the happy athletes LATER, and the only time Bob Costas shut the fuck up was to watch Kylie Minogue's tits!

Gah. I was Fuming, Fuming. Still get a slow burn when I think about NBC's fuckwitted fuckup of this coverage. Canadian TV showed it live, Canadian TV showed the whole closing ceremony, Canadian TV dealt with the time difference, and they're in the same bloody zone, they're next door for fucks sake.

Piece of advice? When you're sitting watching the abortion of a closing ceremony, don't get on to the NBC run chat thingie to vent. Cause you'll get people saying

"Well, if you hate American's so much, you didn't seem to not want to take out help in WW2!!" [me; oh yes, I see now, and the relevance of that to the Games is, oh right, NOTHING!!]

and

"Well, NBC paid for the Olympics, so they should get to say what get's seen and complain about the time difference"

[me:Paid? They paid? This might come as a shock to the Australian Government who spent 8 billion dollars on the OLYMPICS. I believe you meant to say they paid for the privilege, yes, that's a Privilege, not a Right, to broadcast. This does not give them territorial pissing rights! And for Chrissakes, the last time the Olympics was in the Southern Hemisphere and you big babies had to stay up late, was 19fucking56, fucking well get over it and deal for motherfucking once!]

OK, so I didn't say motherfucking, but you have no idea how many times I typed it and then back erased.

I don't hate America, I don't, I chose to live here, which means it's up there with Australia as a place I *choose* to live in, I just think that NBC are parochial and insular and the word I can't think of for thinking there's no other country worth a pinch of piss other than their own!

This is what happens to me when I get angry, my spelling goes to shit, and I lose words. The big words mostly, all except any word that has fuck in it, those spring to mind all to easily and if I get Really Mad, every second word would go well in a rhyming song about trucks.

Rate rise set to dampen Games euphoria

""Treasurer, are you aware that over the past month the Australian dollar has been marked down against every other world currency?" Mr Crean asked Mr Costello."
"Including the Algerian dinar, the Bulgarian Lev, the Bangladeshi Taka, the Venezuelan bolivar, the Mongolian Tugrik, the Mexican peso, the Vietnamese dong and even the Swaziland Lilanggeni and the Botswanan Pula."

So, what you're telling me is the Australian dollar is quite fucked, Mr Crean?

GST, Greatly Shitty Tax, I believe.

PM backs Ruddock over Aboriginal comments

"Mr Howard was left to defend Mr Ruddock in parliament today following the minister's suggestion in a French newspaper that part of the disadvantage facing Aborigines was their late contact with European civilisation."

"Reconciliation Council chair Evelyn Scott and her deputy, Sir Gustav Nossal, said the comments were no help to the reconciliation cause."

Nice to see the Australian tax dollars hard at work inserting Cabinet Minister's feet in their mouths. Personally, I'd prefer the insertion of a boot up their arse, but that might be just me...

Ransea's "An American In Adelaide" - an On-Line Journal

"The Leader of the Opposition, the mighty Kim, declined to accept any of the freebies being handed out by the fat cats and did not present himself at the Olympics. Thinking it not seemly to be seen being given free tickets to every event, wined and dined by the corporate power brokers."

Sam (my sister in Australia) says that the media is now giving Kim Beasley shit for not being patriotic enough and supporting the athletes. I think Good On Him for actually paying to attend the events he attended. And Howard is being his usual little slimy tick self and greasing all over any medal winning athlete he can glom onto.

I did not vote for him, I did not Vote for him, can I just let you know, I. Did. Not. Vote. For. Him.

Pet Fettishes? - ThreeWay Action

"My grandmother's comment on the whole thing was, "Just like a man not to notice that the female's unamused. I should have kept a spray bottle next to my bed."

Ha! That reminds me of two stories, my cat and earwax, and my Nanna and Poppa and Sex.

My cat, Mud, is a little twisted, I rescued him from the flighty 16 year old housemate I had at the time. She didn't pay the rent, she didn't look after her kitten, so I kicked her out, and kept the cat. Before I'd kicked her out, she'd told me stories how the guys at her previous house had used the hose to spray Mud, teeny kitten less than a couple of months old, around the yard. Nice. No, I never did meet those boys, else words would have been said. So, Mud started off a little feral, a little odd. He's a very affectionate cat now, though, if a little needy. Sometimes he'll just come running through the house howling, until I call him, he finds the room I'm in, mrows a few times, and then wanders off, reassured. Or some nights, he won't sleep in our bed until at least Jeff or I come to bed, and if we're up really late, he'll come down to the basement and mrow at us to come to Bed. I know, I'm anthromorphising, but if we get up, he follows us back up to bed, so I'm thinking this is real.

So, I'm patting him one day, sooking him up, and mid pat, my ear is itchy, so I rub my finger inside it. I go back to pat him, and he get's this intense blissed out look and starts licking my finger. Cat's got a thing for earwax. Now, it's his treat. I know, this makes me as odd as the said odd little cat, but he likes it and it's cheaper than Pounce.

My Nanna and Poppa Sex Story. This is my Dad's Mum and Dad, while they were still alive, about 10 years ago, when Poppa was at least 90, and my Nanna was at least 80. Pop had had hernia problems for years, and they finally had to do something about it, at 90. So, he's had the Op, there's me, one of my cousins, my Aunt, my Dad, my Mum and Nanna, all by the post-op bedside. The youngish Dr. is trying to explain, in euphemistic terms, what may happen with regards to "performance" after the Op. My Grandfather is German, a little hard of hearing and a lot anaesthetic befuddled, and keeps going :

"Vat, vat are you sayink? Vat is he sayink?"

So the Dr. would launch into another roundabout route, everyone knows what he means, other than my Pop with the:

"I don't understand, vat is he talkink aboutt?"

After time 3 or 4 of this, my Nanna just says very loudly (hearing loss remember);

"HE SAYS, WE WON'T BE ABLE TO HAVE SEX AS OFTEN."

The grandkids are highly amused and the sons and daughters are all "As OFTEN?"

Cause it's not too harsh to imagine your grandparents doing the horizontal jogging, but when it's your Parents, it's just all "LA LA LA LA, I cAN'T ****HEAR*** YOU, LA LA LA LA."

How to Make a Vegemite Milkshake - The Ingredients and creation


They missed a step. Vomit profusely. I have 2 kilo jars of Vegemite upstairs, I love the stuff, but this is one seriously gaaaghhh recipe..

TIME Digital - Special Report: Music Bandit


A How To make your Own CD's by Time. This is the Music Industries equivalent of How to make a Pipe Bomb.

Me? Were I in Australia, and able to get access to the $9.95 bin of the Australian stuff that's 95% of my downloads, I would be happily paying for it. But I'm not going to pay $30.00US for the import version of Daddy Cool's Greatest Hits, when all I really want is "Eagle Rock".

If the Music Industry were sensible, they'd enlist Napster and they'd do micropayments. A CD single is $5.00US, roughly, and that's with all the promotion and the having to go to the shop to buy it, cause I looked, and CDNOW doesn't appear to sell singles, and a full CD is between $12 and $15US, and that's with a load of songs you might not necessarily want.

Set up a distribution system, with credit card and check by phone (for those who don't have a credit card), and sell individual songs for $1.00 to $2.00 a pop. It's cheaper for people to buy the whole CD, if that's what they want, but if they only want one song, then you're hitting that market too. Then they can put it on their CD, or cassette or whatever media the Home Recording Act already allows.

CDNOW has a step close to this, a thirty day epired RA or Windows media only song to download for free. But if you like it, you should be able to go back and buy the electronic version.

Take advantage of this new media, don't legislate to blow it out of the water and take the cash cow that's paddling along side unnoticed out as well. Baby, bathwater, all that there.

Walking Naked
"I've been like that my whole life - people meet me and for the first hour I make an effort and talk really slowly. Then I get excited again and I babble away at 90 miles an hour. I've never had to stop doing it as everyone always seems to adjust.
Unfortunately when I'm hyped up I go into hyper drive and become incoherent."

Heh. This sounds like someone not a million miles away from where I'm sitting. This weekend, I'll be meeting a bunch of people I'm excited to meet, at JOurnalCon, JournalCon, JournalCon!, and my best way of breaking the ice is to talk as much as I can until I'm comfortable. I'm going to need subtitles. Caoimhe, come stand over here next to me!

Lazy Sunday Afternoon, got no Mind to Worry

[The title is a Small Faces song, while searching for a link about them, I found this. (oh!) If you've not heard of Jessa/Shelley, go here..]


Most Sundays, Jeff and I have a routine. From noon til 4pm, the radio is set to NPR and we settle in at our newly DSL'ed computers and geek and listen.

12:00 to 2:00 A Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor is folksy, the humour is gentle, the music is good, and I've been listening on and off for about 20 years, since I was 15 and first heard it on AM ABC radio in Country South Australia. It's familiar and fun and we like it. We didn't listen to it today, it's a repeat, the seasoner opener is on October 7th, when I'm at JournalCon... Ah well, it's not every Sunday we listen, and as Jeff says, the first week will probably be Pledge Drive. (They saved a theatre, which is kinda cool, and Close to our Hearts.

2:00 to 3:00 Savvy Traveller Sometimes they talk about Australia, usually they talk about interesting places, and not just a travel mag perspective, they've previously had a really interesting interview with the founder of The Lonely Planet Travel Guides, and a sarky English guy who does a feature called Bad Taste Travel. Recent trips included a trip to Precious Memories, Branson, which sounded very Stepford Wives to me, and a guide to the sewers of Paris, mmm mmm!

3:00 to 4:00 The Splendid Table This is so not a program you listen to before eating, because if you haven't had food, you're legeating hungry at the end of it. I made pasta with corn, peas, tomatoes, onion,feta and garlic in the middle of SavTrav, cause I knew I wouldn't make it through the show. Half way through the show, Jeff had to bound upstairs and get some pretzels, muttering "I can't *stand* this show, it makes me so Hungry". This week, she had some cool links to her favourite foodie websites, including
Chowhound.com: A Quick Intro which started out as a gourmand munchers journey through New York, but has expanded, and Cheese!, which is Jeff's weak spot. Cheese that is, not the site. Although the site promises fresh French cheeses airlifted daily from France to your door, so that may be the start of Christmas gifties I suspect.

The shows afterwards don't catch our interest, so it's back to the Nesgroups and Napstering for the Antipodes.
New

National Rifle Association: Product: 'Banned! Video Updated - Informercial 2000'


In the interests of fairness, I've put the link to the Infomercial Video on the NRA website. I've searched their site for any response to the Australian Attorney General's letter, but I can find no mention of it. It may well have been there in one of Charlton's previous monthly addresses he does, but I can't see any sign of those being archived. I'm tempted to write to them and ask if there's any textual response on their site anywhere. But you have to give them your name and address and all that there, and that's a bit more involved than I want to get just now. If anyone else finds it, I'm more than happy to read.

26 June 2000 : Handy atlas a cornucopia of information on sex
"And contrary to what we are led to believe from
surveys, we are not all at it all the time, says Dr
Mackay. In fact, some of us never get it at all. Almost
one third of adults are celibate or have sex very few
times a year, while a survey in the United States
found 15 per cent of adults are having half of all the
sex."

This fact has lodged itself in my brain. It's one of those memorable facts like there are more handgun deaths in a weekend in New york than a year in Tokyo. Can't find the link to that stat, I read it on Handgun Control.

Also on Handgun Control, I've found this copy of aletter from the Australian Attorney General to Charlton Heston and the NRA.

I was up late one night, and flicking channels, and saw the front steps of Parliament House in Adelaide, so I stopped to check it out. An infomercial saying how violent and nasty Australia was becoming now that the stricter gun laws had been passed. Infuriated, much? I'm surprised Jeff wasn't bounced out of bed, or at least woken up with the incandescence of my fury. Here's another page , with a rebuttal of this piece of shit ad.

Which Offends or Amuses you the Most?

Jesus Dress Up!

Firestone Blimp

These both appeal to the darkest side of my humour. The side that even in the bleakest times of my personal history will be able to crack wise.

Flame Warriors

Are you in there? Who are you? How many of these do you recognise?