Maintain your, er, mad-as-hell-ness

Okay, I've officially seen everything. Katto The Elder - former Queensland National Party State Cabinet Minister, who sat at same Cabinet table as former Premier Johannes “Sir Joh” Bjelke-Petersen in the 1980s - is supporting striking mine workers at Mt Isa. This has got to be the first strike that right-wingers have supported since the Orangemen killed off Northern Ireland power-sharing in 1974, or the truck drivers helped topple Allende in 1973.

This is not your father’s National Party. (Well, in your father’s day it would have been the Country Party, which is more ideologically accurate but also vulnerable to unfortunate puns by the likes of Gough Whitlam. Welcome to Australia, where we have a conservative Liberal Party, a National Party that only exists in three out of six States, a Labor Party whose only rusted-on voters are the unemployed, and Greens who, as Tim Blair noted, rarely live in places with any greenery. Queensland is governed by a Liberal National Party that's really a conservative regional party). Only a few months ago, the Party Formerly Led By John Anderson recruited Gary "Angry" Anderson, former lead singer of the hard rock band Rose Tattoo, as a member, possibly even as a future candidate.

So the party once led by "Sir" Joh - who won numerous Queensland elections by promising to crack down on street marchers and whale-loving greenies - could end up preselecting a candidate who sang "We can't be beaten/ We can rule the streets!" in 1982, "Calling" in 1989 and "I wish I were a tribesman/ in the hills of Afghanistan" in 1984.

Too sweet.

Myself, I think Azza should stand in Kingsford-Smith so the Nats could tell Labor "We see your shaven-headed pub-rocker from 1982, and raise you one”…

"I, Nedward, Ward-diddly-arden of the Northaroonies, hereby sentence ye..."

It had to happen… eventually. One has a rainier wolf castle, while the other…

Personally I had always thought The Big Bang Theory would beat The Simpsons to it. (But then a lot of TBBT’s unearned geek-cred comes from throwing in passing  interchangeable "[INSERT NAME OF SF/ FANTASY FRANCHISE HERE - Battlestar, Firefly, Caprica, etc]" references. Whereas Simpsons tends to actually engage with the content of what they’re parodying/ homaging… Or maybe it is GoT that is doing the homaging. Compare C Montgomery Burns with the Mad King Aerys Targaryen, for example… And has anyone ever seen the two Ms Van Houtens together in the same room?

And while on the topic of googlewhacking the words “Homer” and “Sean Bean”… GoT’s screenwriters David Benioff and DB Weiss also scripted Troy. Which means that it’s nearly a decade that they’ve been staring at their keyboards and screaming “Curse you, Paris!”…

Next: "Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella"

UPDATE: Whitney Houston has just passed away so I am removing this post.

Gone a'hunting

Memo to self: Don't use "John Bunting" as an alias.

Blog Update

Dear Father McKenzie Blog lovers

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Unfortunately our page has been hijacked by their javascript and so it has had to go.

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Yours sincerely

The staff at Father McKenzie

Husband of ([1 - 1] + 1 =) 1 Wife

The curious personal life of a Republican US State Governor. - Nor, nordt zadt vun.

(Who'd have guessed that the infamous "condom filled with walnuts" would turn out to be all walnuts, no condom?)

(Or predicted that two of the USA's four most prominent Arab-American politicians would independently share the very non-Arabic-sounding name "Mitchell"?)

PS: Now Marie Osmond's done the same two-step. Talk about "sealed for eternity"!

Ackroyd on ghosts...

... Peter, that is. Not Dan.

Memo to Bill Gates...

Dear Mr Gates,

1.      If I click "Shut Down" on my computer, and - trusting on the screen telling me "Do not switch off your computer. It will turn itself off automatically when it is ready" - I walk away and leave it unattended for an hour or two (or in some cases, overnight)... but then return to find that it didn't shut down after all because "[PROGRAM ABC] is not responding. Do you still want to shut down?" (which means that, if it we're talking about a laptop that I unplugged from the power point, its battery will be nearly flattened)... you can safely assume that 98% of the time, yes, I did want it to shut down. There may be situations 1% of the time - 2%, tops - where someone takes a few hours to decide whether to force a frozen program to close or not. But these are not me.

2.      If I'm trying to use the mouse to drag half a dozen files from Small Working Folder X to Big Backup Folder Y - and, in doing so, I let the mouse hover for a second or two over Big Backup Folder Y before I actually click on it - this brief delay does not, repeat not, mean that what I really wanted to do was to copy all the 500 or 600 files from Big Backup Folder Y back to Small Working Folder X. If I'd wanted to do that, I would have opened Big Backup Folder Y, selected all the files therein, and then dragged them back to Small Working Folder X. Two quite different actions.

Kapeesh, mi hombre?

Yours sincerely,
A Microsoft User Who Has Resisted The Siren Call Of The Mac For Many Years

Wild about Hari

Now this is bad: Emmerich does Dornick.

We originally announced last summer that Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy was headed to the big screen. After bouncing around between multiple production companies, the master of disaster, Roland Emmerich, and Columbia Pictures won an auction Thursday for the screen and development rights to Foundation. Best known for his disaster blockbusters (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and the forthcoming 2012), Emmerich will be using Foundation as a directorial vehicle - this time on a galactic scale. Emmerich and Columbia won the rights over others like Alex Proyas and Warner Brothers.

Foundation is an epic saga spanning hundreds of years where humanity finds itself scattered throughout the galaxy under the oppressive rule of the Galactic Empire. Originally published in serial format as five separate short stories beginning in 1942, Foundation tells the story of a group of scientists, the Psychohistorians, who are doing all they can to preserve knowledge as the colonies around them steadily regress. The study of psychohistory equates every possible outcome of a large society into readable, predictable mathematics, allowing its practitioners to accurately predict long-term events. Through this insight, a discovery with disastrous consequences is made and a plan is set in motion to avert it.

Although Columbia did acquire the rights to the trilogy, there's been no word yet on whether Foundation will be a single film venture, or if the entire Foundation trilogy will eventually make its way to the big screen. We're expecting Sony to test the waters and see how this first film does before they greenlight any sequels, given the size of the production. Whatever the case, Emmerich seems to be the perfect fit. However, I am weary of the difficulty to adapt Asimov's saga. With such lengths of time and a plot reliant on long-term, plodding effects, can Emmerich make it exciting while still being faithful to the source material?

- Brandon Lee Tenney, " Roland Emmerich Directing Asimov's Foundation Trilogy" (16 January 2009)

You don't need a pocket-calculatron covered with psychohistorical equations to predict another Bicentennial Man/ I, Robot- style galactic-scale frak-up coming to the box office with this. The mention in passing of "the oppressive rule of the Galactic Empire" shows someone completely missed the point... Others, too, foresee looming disaster:

"... My prediction is that the story will be dumbed down to Galactic Empire vs The Mule (an evil mutant rendered in CGI like Gollum), and the Foundation will be a secret defence force set up many years ago by Salvor Hardin that will swing into action using its awesome Psi powers. No need to mention Psychohistory, and certainly no role for Hober Mallow. ..."

To dull the pain (and, hopefully, to avert particularly egregious disasters on the principle that "whatever you foresee, will not come to pass"), I propose we gain some solace by predicting what scenes Roland Emmerich will graft onto Asimov's original story: eg...

* Nobody listens when Hari Seldon tries to warn the people of Trantor about the giant tidal wave that is about to destroy the First Empire. A sneering redneck Mayor mocks Seldon in a whiny voice. Later, audience cheers as said Mayor drowns in a spectacular sea of lava from the ice asteroid's impact while Seldon's infant son is rocketed away from the dying planet.

* Limmar Ponyets defeats Bel Riose by planting a sonic grenade in the exhaust pipe of the Imperial Fleet's flagship. Ponyets then escapes by holding his breath and free-falling down to the nearest planet, out-racing the growing fireball from the spectacular explosion.

* Hober Mallow shorts out the droid armies of the Korellian Republic using a computer virus program written by a wisecracking genius kid from the ghetto. The droids then explode spectacularly.

* Han Pritcher takes spectacular and bloody revenge on the Baroness - the ruthless, whip-cracking dominatrix who commands the Second Foundation's elite Death Skull marines - for killing his family and burning his farm to the ground.

* The Mule (Michael Clarke Duncan, with Ron Perlman playing his second head and Billy Crystal providing voice talent for his mutilated third head) spectacularly strangles his admirals one by one, using his prehensile scorpion-tail, as they fail to re-capture Arkady Darrell. Little do they realise that our spunky heroine is hiding inside an exhaust shaft, where they will never find her.

* Salvor Hardin punches out a Martian invader.

Take my water/ Take my land/ Just don't touch my/ Free broadband

Am typing this sitting in a McDonald's cafe. Macca's restaurants used to give you water (with ice, in a paper cup) for free, on request. Now, however, they charge $1.65 a cup. On the other hand, you can have broadband wireless Internet for free as long as you stay here. (Notionally there is a 50-MB limit, but if you run out, you just log out for a few minutes and then log in again and your slate is wiped clean.)

Free Internet, but charged for water. I don't want to sound ungrateful, since I guess one can always make up a water deficit from a tap in the park for free, whereas Internet usage is invariably user-pays elsewhere (eg, Zarraffa's cafes give you 15 minutes with each cuppa, but then charges for additional). But it seems incongruous.

Ironically, I would say the abolition of free safe water on demand has made me spend less at the temple of the pale orange clown than I otherwise would have. Firstly, because there's no way I'm paying $1.65 for ordinary H2O, even with ice, when I have water bottles in the car. Secondly, a sense of resentment that Macca's has instituted this penny-pinching change - it's not as if giving away free water was sending them bankrupt, and the amount of money I've spent at McDonaldses in my lifetime would be well into four figures now. Broadband is an indulgence for adults - nice, but dispensable. Hydration is a non-negotiable for children. And thirdly, the effort of packing up one's kit and escorting one or more children out to the car to drink for free from the water bottles is so substantial that it doesn't seem worth the effort to come back into the restaurant again once they're quenched. (Particularly since such effort is such a hurdle that one puts off rehydrating the children until later in the session than one would if the task was less effort). So I end up staying for a shorter time, and therefore spending less. Maybe this was an anti-obesity measure instituted by Mayor McCheese.

Ideally, of course, every cafe or food court would have a washbasin with a liquid soap dispenser and some paper towels right there in its main eating area, so that children can rehydrate - and rinse their food-sticky fingers - without having to go to the bathrooms and touch toilet door handles on the way. So far, however, only Nando's Grilled Chicken has this. Don't the toy stores and newsagents, at least, have an interest in pushing for this? Is a drinking fountain near the eating area - at the very least - asking too much?

UPDATE (2011_11_21): The $1.65-a-cup charge for water seems not to apply to all Macca's outlets. Most I've been in lately seem to be happy to give free water if you request it when you make a paying order, or if the counter staff can remember you having recently made a paying order. Perhaps charging money only applies if they think you haven't made any other purchase. Given how often I've observed people waltz in to make use of McDonalds' toilets, then waltz out again without buying anything, I think it's justified to have some policy to stop the free riders. However, on the couple of occasions where we were charged $1.65 a cup, we had made a purchase (in double figures, too). In fact, I think my offspring had proferred an emptied soft drink cup to be refilled, thereby putting proof of purchase beyond dispute.

Pay money, take choice

"After all, in whose hands would the Australian people prefer to leave their Constitutional fate: the author of the J-curve and the L-A-W tax cuts [Paul Keating], who had the previous week revealed an intention to jail journalists for revealing inconvenient Government secrets; or the man the Australian public [sic] had christened 'Honest John,' and whose decency has been a shining light through all the pitfalls of public life?"

- Tony Abbott, The Minimal Monarchy, And Why It Still Makes Sense for Australia (Wakefield Press, 1995), p 13.

Very well, then: let the Diogenes-es of the Liberal Party hear from this honest man:

'Asked about the level of support for the Greens, which he calls a passing phase in his book, Howard calibrated his view in a significant way. He noted that in some inner city electorates, voting Green could become institutionalised through Greens-voting families passing the habit down through generations - in the same way voting Labor or Liberal was a family thing a generation or so ago.

'And while he didn't say as much, he suggested one way to institutionalise the Greens vote would be for Liberals to allocate preferences to the new party in a bid to oust Labor MPs in soft left inner city electorates - as when the Liberals gave the Greens preferences in the federal seat of Melbourne, which led to the election of Adam Bandt. Howard pointed out that if a Greens politician was elected instead of a Labor candidate it would have the same outcome: one less number for the non-Labor side in Parliament...'

- Dennis Atkins, "It may benefit Libs to heed Howard's advice," The Courier-Mail (28 October 2010), p 11.

(The same outcome? I'd dispute that. Three important differences between a result of "80 Labor MHRs, 70 Coalition" and "65 Labor MHRs, 15 Greens and 70 Coalition", even if a Green/Coalition coalition is unthinkable: (a) Parliamentary logic. The Coalition might be able to defeat Labor on specific issues by peeling away the Greens, especially on "transparency" matters: see Tasmania since 1989. By contrast, they won't dent a solid absolute majority of Labor MPs. (b) Electoral logic. There will be Labor MPs who are nervous about Greens defeating them on Liberal preferences, and vice versa. Sows the dragon's teeth of discord on the left side of politics: compare the Liberals and Nationals in Queensland. (c) Moral ambit claims. "We won more Reps seats than any other grouping - 5 more seats than Labor and a whopping 55 more seats than the Greens" sounds very impressive if you don't analyse it too closely, and if there's another hung Parliament with a combined Liberal/National plurality - the Liberals will almost never, of course, be that largest single party on their own - this trope, repeated endlessly by Murdoch journalists, can be used to make a Greens/ Labor alliance seem illegitimate and anti-democratic.)

'The former prime minister, John Howard, has urged the Liberal Party to avoid doing preference deals with the Greens, even if it puts the Coalition at a tactical disadvantage. Speaking at the National Press Club yesterday to promote his autobiography, Lazarus Rising, Mr Howard said ultimately the Coalition had nothing to gain by helping the Greens take seats from Labor. This was because the Greens would always support Labor and their agenda was more extreme. ''I think my side of politics has got to be very careful about giving preferences to the Greens. In my view the Greens are worse than Labor,'' Mr Howard said. ''The Greens are fundamentally anti-free enterprise. They have terrible foreign policy attitudes and they have a lot of social policy attitudes that a lot of Labor people would find abhorrent.''...'

- Phillip Coorey, "Don't give preferences to the Greens, says Howard", Brisbane Times (28 October 2010).

Okay. Can someone please tell me, yes or no: Does JoHo think the Liberals should preference the Greens ahead of Labor, or does he not?

"The shooting of The Hobbit will begin in February..." - no, nothing to do with the Pill, Third Rite Reconciliation, or tariff protections (thankfully)

"Yiss, thut uzz how we got over-stoffed. I unushully iggrid to take jist one ixtra kimera-min, bit thin huz brither turned ip too ind knocked on my door, ind thin huz brither dud too, ind huz brither, ind huz brither, ind so on untul we hid twilve pipple there and I couldn't rilly till inny uv thim to jist git lost ind go away."

The shooting of The Hobbit will begin in February with Sir Peter Jackson in the director's chair. Director Peter Jackson launched a fresh broadside at actors' unions Wednesday, as Hollywood executives and the New Zealand government continued talks on keeping "The Hobbit" in the country. Jackson said he was "incredibly angry" at the NZ Equity actors' union for launching industrial action which threatened his $500 million project without properly consulting its members. The Oscar-winning director also disputed NZ Equity's assertion that it called for an international boycott of "The Hobbit" last month after he refused to negotiate with it on minimum conditions for actors on the set. Jackson said the union called the ban, which has since been lifted, before contacting him about its concerns. [...]

- "Unions held gun to my head: Hobbit's Jackson" (27 October 2010)

This'll hard be

"Lesson I: The second person pronoun, whether singular or plural, whether the subject or the object of the verb, is 'you', not 'y'all y'all..."

Oh, wait. Wrong Georgia. Okay, then, maybe this will work.

Yes, that's what the voters want these days - politicians who are 100% on-message and predictable (see: 2010 federal election, results of)

The Queensland Opposition Leader has sacked a policy adviser and reprimanded several others for jokingly proposing that teachers should be issued with Tasers. John-Paul Langbroek says he is angry at the staff members for creating a joke policy proposing that Tasers be used as form of behaviour management in schools. He says it was in extremely poor taste.

"It's conduct that does not accord with the high standards that I expect from my office," he said. "I've got a history in my family of a father who's a retired teacher, a mother who's a retired library aid and of course it's not anything the LNP would seriously consider as a policy for behaviour management in schools. I think it's very disappointing that sometimes in an office situation people can lose sight of the main game and in this case clearly that's been done. It's not to the standards that I expect and that's why action has been taken and will be taken."

- "LNP staffer sacked over joke Taser-for-teachers policy", ABC News (26 September 2010)

Hey, Jean-Claude... this was obviously a joke, okay? No normal person out there in marginal-seat land really, actually thought this was a real actual, LNP policy. We're not idiots. We realised full well  that it was meant as some light amusement, like Bill Hayden's "drover's dog" comment, or NaSto Despo's "Men Of Senate" calendar, or Joh Bjelke-Petersen telling the media he was going to award himself a knighthood, or... oh, never mind.

I did not know till now that the usages of Sulva were so common among you

A SEX-starved businessman was so hung up on his ex-girlfriend after she dumped him that he paid $18,000 to recreate her as a life-sized sex doll. The 50-year-old man put together a collection of photos of his ex and told Italian adult toymaker Diego Bortolin: "I want it just like her but with bigger boobs," Italy's Il Messaggero newspaper said. Mr Bortolin, who hasn't named the man, creates extremely realistic sex dolls at the factory behind his shop, named "Temptations" in English, in Treviso, Italy. "She was a smiling blonde girl but he wanted bigger boobs and a curvier backside," Mr Bortolin said. "Our normal dolls are very realistic and everything works just like the real thing. Mr Bortolin said he usually charges around $US 5000 for the dolls, but that this particular project was more expensive "because we had to replicate everything, right down to the shape of her nails and teeth." The doll weighs 58 kg and is about 1.6m tall. Mr Bortolin said the doll is fully flexible and can take on any movement or position a human can. "She is now the perfect girlfriend as far as I can see," Mr Bortolin said.

- " Man replaces ex-girlfriend with custom-made sex doll" (2 September 2010)

Hungo

This blog has on occasion made mock of Mungo MacCallum in these his declining years, but occasionally he has seen his predictions come true. Admittedly, not in 1992, when he wrote in the Weekend Australian Magazine just before the Tasmanian election that the State's Hare-Clark electoral system ("also known as the 'Hare-Brained System'.... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Brilliant! Never heard that one before!) was certain to deliver a hung parliament.

But back in the day, at the height of his powers, Mungo was indeed a journalistic force to be reckoned with, for in 1977 he managed to predict the result of an election one-third of a century later:

"... Win, lose or draw (a very real possibility which must be causing the incoming Governor-General, Sir Zelman Cowen, the odd sleepless night)..."

- "Malcolm's Last Joke," Nation Review, 1-7 December 1977), repub as Chapter 21 in Mungo on the Zoo Plane: Elections 1972-77 (UQ Press, 1979), p 196.

As did John Howard's former chief of staff, Grahame Morris, back in the now-expunged era of the Latham Ascendancy:

"There is every chance after the election the Prime Minister will have to wake up every morning worrying about what Bob Katter had for breakfast."

- Glenn Milne, Hamstrung by the minors," The Australian (6 September 2004).

"Heaven's gate" - always a good omen (so to speak) for an ambitious film producer

Okay, well, the much-trumpeted (so to speak) Paradise Lost film doesn't seem to be happening after all (surely not copyright claims? I knew the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act had a long reach, but even so...). However, all hope do not abandon. For in lieu thereof, there is another: Lucifer: The Movie, to be directed by conservative activist Ray Griggs. Preview clip at YouTube here.

My verdict: The CGI's brilliant. Depicting heaven as Pandora-meets-Lothlórien, as an Edenic forest-island floating in the clouds, is inspired (so to speak). Establishing Michael and Lucifer as besties who later become deadly enemies during the War In Heaven does not come entirely out of left field (even as a mortal bound by linear time, I foresee the line "You were like a brother to me!" being uttered at some point *) but it can certainly make the characters resonate if done properly. The dialogue could do with some trimming, and please, not Warwick Capper/ David Lee Roth as the soon-to-befallen archangel. But this is a promising start, and hopefully the hairstyling budget can match the CGI budget on the final cut.

___________________________________________________

* And then, when Lucifer is kicked out of heaven, he - hmmm.... - falls into a pit of molten lava, and emerges looking all burned and hideous, with his skin stripped off. Something like the attached artwork by Ong Chew Peng, which I have christened (so to speak) "Eric Bana arm-wrestles a flayed Malcolm Heather."

"It's an invasion..."

Islamophobia is even more widespread in Australia than anyone had expected.

Didn't Labor already have a frank Tudor as leader...?

I wonder if you can

"... proletarians [were]... subjects of governments founded on the inequity of power, ... individuals who were inevitably exploited by and exploiters of others, because they had consented to be elements in the State-Machine...

"... The Odonian society called itself anarchistic, he [Atro] said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists whose social order functioned without apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbor states. When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would either wake up to reality or be wiped out...."

- Ursula Le Guin in 1974 (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, pp 109, 203).

"... But we cannot have free and open dissemination of information and literature unless the use of written material continues to be controlled by those who write it or own legitimate right in it. We urge our government and our courts to allow no corporation to circumvent copyright law or dictate the terms of that control."

- Ursula Le Guin in 2010 (Petition Concerning the Google Book Settlement).