Cannibalism? Hogwash!

Well I have to say I'm disappointed that the Indonesian authorities didn't jail the Today Tonight crew (see yesterday's "Justice for All" post); instead, they evicted them from the country after they admitted they were there to work not as tourists. And what was this so-important story they were there to film? Oh, Naomi! Oh, TT crew! Where is your research department, and what are they paid for!? The crew were there, ladies and gentlemen, "to save a Papuan orphan from being eaten by his cannibal tribe". Sixty Minutes did a story on the poor orphan boy four months ago but decided it was "too costly" to rescue him, so the TT team went in like Wonder Woman and the Stooges to do what Nine Network wouldn't do. And to top it all off, Seven are saying that Robson and her crew were dobbed in to the Indonesians and flew straight into an ambush set up by rival network Nine!

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Research by a good many historians and anthropologists has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only aren't there any cannibal tribes, there almost certainly never were! Cannibalism is the jungle equivalent of urban myth. No researcher has ever been able to find an actual person who ate someone, it's always "in the old days" or "the tribe over the hill". And it's not hard to see why the legends would have been made up in the first place, either. A vulnerable village or tribe who told every visitor they were cannibals, or lived next door to cannibals, would have been left well alone by raiders. And telling the kids to be back at the hut by dark in case the cannibals got him would have obtained unquestioning obedience.

This isn't conjecture. A simple web search on the truth about cannibalism would have told the intrepid idiots from TT that. But then, I guess current affairs isn't about telling the truth, it's about making the truth. What wasn't even an issue today becomes tomorrow's story, if told in the right way, and that of course makes it next week's paycheck. But come on, Today Tonight and Sixty Minutes, try reporting the real news for a change, you might discover someone is interested in that, too!

The Straight Dope - Is there such a thing as cannibalism?
Courier Mail - Robson Frogmarched Home
The Australian - Robson Set Up by Nine
NineMSN News - Rivals Fight Over Cannibal Myth

Justice for All

Australia's current affairs programs, notably Today Tonight and A Current Affair, are the first to jump on anyone who bends the law for their own gain. We're presented with an endless procession of shonky taxi drivers taking the elderly for a ride financially, young people rioting, and con-men in every trade. How ironic, then, that the Today Tonight crew, along with host Naomi Robson, have been detained in indonesia for illegally trying to enter the country on tourist visas when they were, in fact, there to work. If this were someone from Indonesia who tried to come into Australia, pretending he was a tourist but actually here for a job, the Today Tonight team would have a field day "naming and shaming" him, one of their favourite tactics. Not to mention, of course, they would be pushing the highest court in the land, the Court of Public Opinion, where the solicitors are The Media, for a full conviction, fines, jail, and deportation. Quite frankly, the hypocrisy of this Indonesian event astounds me. I urge the Indonesian authorities not to go easy on them, but to prosecute to the full extent of the law. Fines will be paid by their Network and won't mean a thing. If there is any provision for a jail term for illegal entry into Indonesia, I urge the Indonesian authorities to use it.

We have had The Media lambast the Indonesian authorities for some time here in Australia. In every case where an Australian druggie is apprehended trying to smuggle drugs into or out of Indonesia, we have a picture painted by our media of inept, bumbling keystone cops and a third-rate backwater who wouldn't know what real justice is; a picture of children playing pretend grown-up games who really could never understand what real grown-up governments do. Attempts are made to move the criminals to Australian jails, presumably because they can't expect humane treatment, justice and so forth over there. It's a pathetic attitude, and it's utterly racist, the old white-superiority showing up again. I think it's time the Indonesian authorities hit back and made Australians realise they have as much right to enforce their sovereign laws in their territory as we have in ours, and that whether we have the same justice system or not, we should keep our noses inside our own country and not try to tell people outside it's borders what to do. Send Naomi and the Today Tonight team to jail - they did the crime, now make them do the time.

Nine MSN News - Today Tonight crew face deportation

Dumb & Dumber

Looking through the News today, I was torn between two stories both begging comment.

Firstly, there was the British tourist up in the Northern Territory who has managed to get lost twice in a week, which has cost the taxpayers of Australia a great deal of money and man-hours searching for him. I'd like to be generous toward him and say something like, "These things can happen", but somehow I just can't bring myself to do it. What I will say, instead, is that the man is an idiot! A bit harsh, I know, but look, Fundamental Rule Number One of bushwalking says "Don't do it alone". Not to mention, be prepared, have the right equipment, have a good map, take plenty of food and water, etc, etc. It seems that this moron has failed in every single important respect, in an area of the world where even locals die of exposure from the slightest mistake. That he was found the first time within shouting distance of town, and didn't even know it, is pathetic. Let alone the fact that the second time, police rang him on his cell phone after his hotel reported he was missing again, and he acknowledged he'd been lost for 4 days. So why hadn't he used his phone to call for help? One day without water in that desert means it'll be your last one. Perhaps he was just too embarrassed, but the expression "dying of embarrassment" isn't meant to be taken literally.

Outback Tourist Rescued Twice in a Week

Secondly, one of the cows of the Heazlewood's, Latrobe, Tasmania, is to be given an artificial leg. Apparently, she (the heifer) was "very brave after the accident" and seemed to be "asking us to do something to help her… she also does seem to miss the leg and often acts as if she has a phantom leg there." Reality check, people. "She misses the leg?" No, she's just a dumb animal who doesn't know it's even gone. She has no capacity for rational thought at all. While dedicated animal husbandry is a Good Thing, you're obviously going a bit far. Cows don't talk, and can't ask you anything; they aren't brave, stupid, dynamic or morose, and they don't have immortal souls. Ascribing human emotions and actions to animals is, in my opinion, the first sign of madness. Don't get me wrong, I'm an animal lover and have pets of my own. I even have cows. It brings me joy and peace to feed and protect them, but their response is only instinct. If one is injured, I with great sadness have the vet put it down, because that's the humane thing to do. Your 'animal lover' status is a total pretense, because if you had one ounce of love toward the animal, you'd know it was cruel to keep it alive in the state it's in, let alone strap a false leg to it, all for your own financial benefit because you don't want to lose a good breeder.

The Australian - Theresa's no longer out on a limb

Berkeley Systems?

You remember Berkeley Systems, don't you? They made After Dark, the first wildly popular commercial screensaver. AD was created in a time before Windows 95 made screensavers truly integrated, and it was created with flair. Who could forget the Flying Toasters? Lawnmower Man? The Simpsons version of AD?

Apparently, everyone. AD fell by the wayside as Berkeley hit it big with a little Jellyvision program you might've heard of called You Don't Know Jack. Jack turned out to be the future of the company, and as the 123 different versions of Jack can attest to, it's been profitable. Oddly enough, Jack was similar to AD in that it was a bit of a prelude to what was coming down the pipe: online gaming.

Berkeley's embraced that, too; the game network Bezerk was one of the first commercially successful net gaming sites. But they outsourced that to won.net last year. So what's left at Berkeley? Not much. While you can still buy AD, why? It doesn't work on Win 2000 or Mac OS 9, let alone modern systems, and as their FAQ points out, upgrading software is cost prohibitive. There are dozens of free screensavers out there. And you can still get Jack, but who doesn't have it already?

The interesting part of the whole story is that Berkeley was bought out by Sierra - formerly Sierra On-Line - which also used to be a highly profitable company. Now, Sierra is but a shell of its former self because it didn't keep up with the times. Berkeley, whether under the Sierra umbrella or not, succumbed to the same fate.

9/11 Five Years On

Well, it's 9/11, the anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. At least, it is here in Australia, which is 18 hours ahead of the US. And although the Towers get all the publicity, let's not forget that there were other targets that got hit too. Even the White House was apparently going to be a target for a fifth plane. Like most of the western world, I watched the aftermath on tv and cried as I watched. Even now, as I type this sentence, the memory of those people jumping to their doom, all hope gone, brings tears to my eyes. The 9/11 events were possibly the saddest most of us will ever see in our lives.

I have a couple of acquaintances that are conspiracy nuts, and every single thing that ever happens is a high-up conspiracy by someone, apparently. I firmly believe the truth stands on it's own, so I looked into all the 9/11 conspiracy stories so that I could intelligently argue against them - or agree with them, if the evidence suggested they were actually right. And everything I've read suggests that my initial reaction, that they were nuts, was correct.

Still, 5 years on, there are still a lot of questions that haven't been answered about 9/11. Chief among them is the basic question: "Why did the US go to war against Iraq in response to a terrorist attack by Afghanistan?" Could it have something to do with the fact that, by best estimates, the world has roughly 15 years of oil left, and Iraq has 65% of the world's remaining reserve? And why are the allies still in Iraq? Weren't we assured at the time that it was a quick in-out to stabilize the situation, and that the allies weren't going to become a long-term occupying force? What about all the financial links that Michael Moore made in Fahrenheit 9/11 between the Bush family and Saudi high finance? Sure Moore was as biased as biased can be, knew all the answers to his questions before he asked them and only made the documentary to show his own point of view - but then, that's what every documentary does.

Perhaps the most basic question we need to ask about 9/11 is this: Why, of all targets the terrorists could have chosen, was the US singled out as a target, and why did they hit at the heart of finance? What is it about the US that turns ordinary men into psychopaths who are willing to kill themselves and others to make a point? What can we do, as a tiny, fragile world, to make ourselves better, to bring peace to the world so that no man feels this sort of thing is acceptable?

Sadly, despite the predictions of many, many years of science fiction, I think we're still thousands of years away from that capacity, if it ever happens at all. And that's the saddest thought of all.

New Blog

Many famous Christian books are also, unfortunately, hard to read because they use old, archaic English. One that almost every Christian has a copy of is CH Spurgeon's "Morning & Evening", a twice-daily devotional. I've created a new blog (this one will still continue to operate) in which I will attempt, day by day, to translate "Morning & Evening" into modern language. Whether you're a Christian or not, the lessons in "Morning & Evening" are well worth learning. I admit I'm no Spurgeon, and I hope that in trying to make the book accessible to modern audiences I'm not making him turn over in his grave. I trust I'll stick to the original essence of the lessons as much as possible, and certainly ask that people who feel I've failed or changed the meaning, tell me so. You can also find on the same blog links to an online version of the American Standard version of the Bible, as well as a FREE complete audio version of the Bible in MP3 format (not computer-read, and with music and dramatisation). Whatever your leanings toward Christianity, I urge you to check out my other blog and maybe learn a little more about life while you're there.

morningevening.blogspot.com

Brocky Makes a Hat-Trick

Well, rounding out the hat-trick of famous deaths this week is Peter Brock, possibly Oz's most famous racecar driver. For those who don't know what a hat-trick is, it's a term from the game of cricket where 3 people get out in a row (and for the really dumb, 'cricket' is that game where a bunch of over-paunched men stand in a paddock getting suntans and very, very occasionally throwing a ball at one man in the middle). Peter Brock's former partner, Beverley, says she had a premonition last week that he'd die in a car accident by running into a tree. Interestingly, the stingray who killed Steve Irwin during the week may also have had a premonition about Steve's death, but we'll never know because stingrays are too smart to spout crap like that to the media or anyone else.

You may have gathered I don't believe her. And the reason I don't is that she is just too specific, as well as the fact that she didn't tell anyone before the event. Any fan of Nostradamus knows one of the fundamentals of having convincing premonitions is to hide the message in completely unrelated gibberish so that no sane person could ever see a link between the the original prediction and the event. The secret is not to say, after the crash, 'I predicted that last week', but instead to ring the papers before the event and say something like 'Blossoms of the springtime cut in twain, the tree of life weeps'. Now that would have convinced me absolutely that she knew he was going to die.

Ex-Partner Spouts Crap
Nostadamus on snopes.com

Optical Illusion

One of the better optical illusions I've seen, click on the link below and have a look at the full version of the Spanish castle. Stare at the dot for 20 or 30 seconds, then move the cursor into the picture area and it will be replaced by a BLACK & WHITE copy of the same image - but you'll see it in full colour!

False Colour Optical Illusion

To Boldly… er… Stay

William Shatner, better known to the world as Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, won't be boldly going into space aboard Virgin's commercial spaceliners. Shatner, who rose to fame on some pretty dodgy acting ability, has often been criticised for his "pay me or I won't play ball" attitude, and this time is no exception. Despite being offered his ticket, worth £114 000, free, Shatner wants to be paid for the trip as well! Read the whole article at the link below.

Shatner Won't 'Boldly Go'

Uncle John Needs You!

Australia's Defence Forces are having a hard time getting people to join up, and have just embarked on a multi-million dollar recruitment drive. The crew from Chaser's War on Everything decided to take to the streets to drum up a few more recruits to help our nation out! Maybe if we can get a few people to join, we might be able to fix some of these planes, ships, submarines and tanks of ours that fall apart whenever they're started up!

Tasmanian History

Ancient Aboriginal handprints stencilled on the rocks of a cave, colonial convicts’ chisel marks in the stones of a cottage wall - Tasmanians treasure their heritage and wherever you go you’ll find evidence of times past but not forgotten.

Walk along a beach and come upon a midden of shells left by Aborigines thousands of years ago. Look down from your window under the eaves to a courtyard where colonial stagecoaches changed their weary horses. Step into a colonial prison cell and experience a few terrible moments of pitchdark solitary confinement. Comfort yourself in a country tavern that’s been welcoming travellers for 150 years or more. There’s history wherever you look - the buildings and boats, the tales and traditions that form our heritage.

Some important dates in Tasmanian History:

1642 - Abel Janszoon Tasman, the Dutch explorer, sailed passed the west coast of our island. He named it Van Diemen’s Land after the governor of Batavia.

1772 - The first Europeans to land on the island, the company from the expedition of the French explorer Marion du Fresne, came ashore at Marion Bay on the east coast.

1803 - Lieutenant John Bowen, a British soldier, chose Risdon Cove on the eastern shore of the River Derwent in the south-east for the first settlement of Europeans. In 1804 Lieutenant-governor David Collins moved the settlement across the river and Hobart was founded.

1804 - Europeans settled near the mouth of the River Tamar on the north coast. In 1806 the settlement was moved upriver and Launceston was founded.

1815 - Governor Davey proclaimed martial law against bushrangers - criminals who lived ’rough’ in the bush, terrorised settlers, stole farm stock and held up travellers.

1822 - The Sarah Island penal settlement was established in Macquarie Harbour on the west coast.

1825 - Van Diemen’s Land, which had been part of the colony of New South Wales, became a colony in its own right.

1829 - Europeans settled what later became Burnie, on the north coast.

1830 - The Black Line, a military plan to round up Aborigines, was started. George Augustus Robinson started his mission to protect Aborigines and take them to a settlement on Flinders Island. Both plans failed miserably. Henry Savery’s ’Quintus Servinton’, Australia’s first novel, was published in Hobart.

1833 - The Sarah Island penal settlement (see 1822) was closed.

1834 - John Batman sailed from Launceston to Port Phillip in Victoria - he and his associates founded the city of Melbourne.

1842 - Hobart Town became a city. Convict transportation reached its peak - 5,329 in one year.

1852 - Payable gold was found near Fingal, near the east coast. Elections were held for the first municipal councils in Hobart and Launceston.

1853 - The last shipment of convicts arrived.

1854 - The two houses of Parliament (upper and lower) were established.

1856 - Van Diemen’s Land’s name was changed to Tasmania. The title ’governor’ was conferred on the representative of the English crown.

1864 - Salmon and trout eggs brought from Europe were successfully hatched.

1868 - Primary education became compulsory.

1871 - Tin was discovered at Mount Bischoff near the west coast.

1876 - The Elwick racecourse opened north of Hobart.

1877 - The penal settlement at Port Arthur was closed.

1880 - The first telephone was installed, with a line from Hobart to the Mount Nelson Signal Station, just south of the city.

1883 - The ’Iron Blow’ was discovered at Mount Lyell, near Queenstown in the west.

1884 - Fears of a Russian invasion led to the island’s defences being strengthened.

1890 - The University of Tasmania was founded.

1900 - Tasmanian forces left to fight in the Boer War in South Africa.

1901 - The Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed - Tasmania became a state of Australia.

1907 - The public library, previously in temporary accommodation, moved into the Carnegie Building (Hobart) - a gift of Andrew Carnegie of New York, USA.

1914 - The first aeroplane flight in Tasmania. Tasmanian forces left to fight in the first world war.

1920 - The chocolate factory north of Hobart was built for Cadbury’s, an English company.

1940 - Tasmanians forces left to fight in the second world war.

1973 - The first legal casino in Australia opened at Wrest Point, Hobart.

1974 - Tasmania’s State Wages Board awarded women equal pay.

1975 - The ’Lake Illawarra’, a bulk ore carrier, crashed into the Tasman Bridge in Hobart,causing part of it to collapse. Twelve people, from the bridge and the ship, died. The ship sank and has never been raised. The bridge was rebuilt and reopened in 1977.

1978 - Passenger train services stopped in Tasmania.

1979 - Tasmania’s first ombudsman was appointed.

1983 - The High Court of Australia ruled against the building of the Gordon-below-Franklin dam, planned for the Gordon River in the south-west.

1986 - Archaeologists working in the south-west discovered Aboriginal rock paintings thought to be 20,000 years old. In 1987 they found Aboriginal stencils of handprints dating back to the last Ice Age.

1993 - The $53 million Henty Gold Mine opened near the west coast. Speed cameras were introduced on Tasmania’s roads.

1994 - Freedom-of-information legislation came into force.

1995 - The Aboriginal Land Act was passed and 12 significant historic and cultural sites were returned to Aboriginal Tasmanians.

1996 - David Boon’s 12-year career in first-class cricket ended. He had played in 107 matches and scored 7,422 runs.

Crikey! First Don, now Steve!

Aussie personality and Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, has been killed in a freak accident while filming a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, by a stingray barb. His wife, Terri, is currently trekking the magnificent Cradle Mountain area in Tasmania and has been notified by police of his death.

Steve achieved notoriety a couple of years ago for feeding crocodiles while holding his young baby, attracting the most criticism since Michael Jackson dangled his own baby from a balcony. The media, and the public, got stuck into Steve quite a bit over that incident. An all-round good guy, fun and happy, adventurous and caring, he took the criticism to heart and was greatly hurt by it. I hope, in the time between those dark days and his death, he came to realise that those who jumped so hard on him at the time were just shocked and held no malice.

NineMSN News Story
Some Steve Irwin Cartoons

Barnes & Diesel

I can't say where I got this from yet, but the absolutely 100% reliable word is that rock legends Jimmy Barnes and Diesel will be live in concert in January next year (although possibly February - date has yet to be fixed), at Launceston's Aurora Stadium. This is a charity concert for a cause which is very close to Diesel's heart, although again, I can't go into those details other than to say for very close family reasons, the concert will happen. Keep your eyes open for the first official announcements in a month or two...

RIP Pluto & Don

Sadly, this week marked the passing of two Great Bodies of the Universe - Australian Democrat's Founder, Don Chipp, and the planet Pluto. Don Chipp was one of the brightest lights in the Australian political scene throughout his career, with his catch-phrase "Let's keep the bastards honest". In fact, as the tributes flowed at his funeral, it's fairly certain that never before has St Paul's Cathedral heard so much laughter. Comedian Andrew Denton apologised in advance before reading a bawdy poem that Mr Chipp wrote for his 80th birthday last year, then described Mr Chipp's impression of government censors and what they might do with pornography magazines, his lust for the Queen and the similarities between former prime minister Malcolm Fraser and an Easter Island statue "with a poker up its a%s".

A more solemn reaction around the world, though, for Pluto, now demoted officially from "planet" to "dirty annoying spot on the lens". Poor Pluto, always bullied for being so small and deftly kept out of the inner solar system by the big bully Gas Giants, has now had to suffer the ultimate shunning by a group of scientists who said years ago they had discovered every single planet and there was no possiblity of more being found; only to now say they have found hundreds, including a bunch bigger than Puny Pluto. These are the professionals who can't find where most of the matter in the universe is hiding, and who see a big area of nothing at all, and call it an object with the unlikely name of "Black Hole". Not so many years ago these same so-called learned men were seeing great big animals floating around the sky, and men with bows and arrows.

We can't do anything for Don Chipp now, but we can certainly "Protest for Pluto". I urge you to write to your Parliamentary Member today.

Honey, I shrunk the solar system

Lies & Statistics

"There are lies, damn lies, and statistics" said Mark Twain. The world is littered with statistics, and statistically, the average person is bombarded with five statistics a day. Statistics are usually misleading and deliberately distorting, as they are used to demonstrate not random samplings of truth, but trends among a specific area of the population on a specific topic. According to a website on statistics, though, this quote from Mark Twain is accurate: "statistics are often used to lie to the public because most people do not understand how statistics work. The aim of this entry is to acquaint the reader with the basics of statistical analysis and to help them determine when someone is trying to pull a fast one." But then, you must always remember the sage advice of George Carlin, too: "Think about how stupid the average person is; now realise half of them are dumber than that."

In today's News, figures have shown that Tassie has the highest rate of fatal air crashes in the country. Between 1990 and 2004, Tasmania recorded 1.8 fatal accidents per 100,000 landings, above the national average of 0.7 fatalities. The guy in charge of these statistics warns that it should be a wake-up call to all light plane pilots.

Except that Tasmania only has a population of half a million or so people, and the rest of Australia has 20 million. Where a busy Sydney airport might have 100,000 lands per year, we'd be lucky to have 100,000 landings per decade! As everything in Tassie is so easily within driving distance (maximum 4 hour drive from one end of the state to the other) that small planes aren't a big thing here. Even our major airports, like Devonport, only have 3 or 4 small planes hanging around. Ask any Tasmanian when the last air fatality in Tasmania was and the answer will probably be, "Have we ever had one?"

But of course we have had one or two tragic accidents. And those have blown out our statistical bubble so that for the next 20 years at least, we'll be higher than the National Average, even assuming no-one else gets killed.

The lesson? Statistics can say anything at all. Use your brain.

ABC News Tasmanian Air Crashes

Microsoft Does it Again

Microsoft does it again, another on-stage demo which goes completely wrong:



How pathetic is Microsoft anyway? Does anything they produce work!? I'm not being platformist here, but c'mon - Apple's Steve Jobs comes on stage doing a jig and looks like the cover guy of Playgirl Magazine, Microsoft's Steve Balmer comes on stage and looks like a hippo having a heart attack, and takes 2 or 3 minutes to recover his breathing. On-stage their voice recognition does an atrocious job and they blame 'ambient noise' like there wouldn't be any in a normal office, while Apple have had voice recognition that works for over 10 years. Various Microsoft on-stage shows have crashes, remote controls that don't work, programs that show the Blue Screen of Death. I don't think there's ever been an Apple demo which didn't work, and they were showing off more impressive stuff!

And the daily grind for the average user - I boot Messenger and it asks me every two minutes to allow a different port number than the one I just authorised it for. After ten minutes of chatting whatever the person at the other end types just comes up as a blank line at my end. It tells me I have Hotmail and when I try to access it, it gets into a complex loop of self-forwarded web pages which never get to Hotmail. Which is fine, because I can't use it any more anyway - I lost my password and when I clicked on 'Lost Password' it tells me that it sent instructions on how to change my Hotmail password to... guess where? My Hotmail account. The one I can't access. I install a Microsoft product and the installer progress bar ends after 10 items, then stays at 100% for another 10,000 items after that. Or breaks right through the right-hand-side of the dialog and keeps going... right off the screen. Or the installer says it's finished and when I click 'Finished' it then starts installing another component of the same installation. Dialogs that use 'Yes' or 'Cancel' to questions like "Installer will now finish" Video's using MediaPlayer that take 5 minutes just to buffer when YouTube or Google Video finish playing the whole thing inside a minute. And having buffered it, when I rewind it to play it again it has to rebuffer it all over again before it plays! I fast-forward a bit and then watch 3 minutes of black screen with audio only, because there are no keyframes or else they're not implemented well. I install Word and it won't open half the files I created with previous versions. And keeps second-guessing me (wrongly) about everything I want to do. And oh, don't I look so, so professional to the client with those stupid boingy sound effects and animated helper characters running around the screen!

Nothing this dinosaur of the company produces works properly, or indeed even halfway properly. There are never any new ideas of concepts, only second-rate clones of products from others. Their operating systems are full of thousands of holes and vulnerabilities, viruses run rampant, and all because everything they ever do isn't the result of dynamic, intelligent programmers, but instead the results of a bunch of outdated suit-men cobbling together something, then instead of taking the time to get it from concept to marketable product, they just release it as a finished product anyway.

The staggering thing about it all is this - wouldn't you think the men that produce this crap would just say, "Damn it, what a loser of a job I've got. I don't know why I even bother coming to work to produce this crud. Surely I could get a job with a real company that produces things that work?"

Pathetic. Absolutely, completely, mind-numbingly pathetic.

Wonder-Dad

With Fathers' Day coming up this weekend, spare a few moments to ring your Dad and your Mum, because if you don't do it on Fathers' and Mothers' Days, then when will you? And if you don't get on with your Dad any more, think how fortunate you are to have him when compared to this Aussie Genius, and be 'Glad and Prad of yer Dad':

Jail for Tumble-Drying Kid

Who Watches the Watchers?

What do you call a judge, a prostitute, a lawyer and a dead American academic? No, the answer isn't "A good start", because this isn't a joke.

Police are investigating claims that retired Federal court judge Marcus Enfield lied to a court (a crime, perjury) so he didn't have to pay a $77 speeding ticket. It's only 2 or 3 months ago police across Australia were warning drivers not to take the blame for a mate or spouse by pretending you were driving, not them, when the speed camera caught the car. It's a crime, and you could end up paying a lot more than a few dollars - your protecting your friend can get you both jailed. Nonetheless, the judge, who of all people should know better, told the Court he wasn't driving that day, that the car was loaned to an old friend - American academic Professor Teresa Brennan. The trouble is, Teresa has been dead for 3 years. There have also been claims that the judge blamed an entirely different US-based academic for two other traffic infringements in 1999 and 2000, but the judge says they're not true. The prostitute had a falling out with a Sydney solictor, Michael Ryan, and ransacked his rubbish bin, finding drafts of the judge's public statements on the whole issue, so now solicitor Ryan has resigned, or been sacked, from the case.

It seems the judge doesn't think the law applies to him - now he's been charged with disobeying a no-parking sign in January this year. He claims he can't walk far because of a previous leg injury, and he had his frail, elderly mother with him that day. It seems he thinks it's ok to break laws as long as you have a good personal excuse. I wonder how many people who came through his Courts over the years he accepted that defense from!

The Australian

Gunns Unlimited Ego

Poor old John Gay had a bit of a knock today when the Victorian Supreme Court rejected out of hand Gunns Ltd's claim for almost $7 million damages against 19 or so environmentalists, plus The Wilderness Society. The Court ruled that the claim was too general, against too many people. Which is hardly surprising, after all, those 20 respondents are just scapegoats meant to represent the Tasmanian population at large and it's attitudes. Tasmanians outside of Launceston, the only area which will significantly benefit from the proposed new pulp mill development at the heart of all this protest, are overwhelmingly against the idea. Gunns Ltd has consistently lied about the project, claiming it would not hurt old-growth or protected areas of forest. Other views suggest up to 85% of the trees the mill pulps will be old-growth. And Gunns has lied all the way along the line about the pollution which would be produced, the number of jobs, the amount of water the mill would demand (Launceston already faces a shortage of water)… in fact, you name it, Gunns have lied about it. The latest Court submission is version 3 of their claim - version 2 was laughed out of Court last year, the Court describing it as "embarrassing" and "at best ambiguous and at worst misleading", and ordering Gunns to pay the costs of the defendants.

Like most Tasmanians, I'm pretty sick of hearing about Forestry. I'm sick and tired of the Greenies who can't protest sanely and take everything to ridiculous extremes, and I'm sick of companies like Gunns whose management have no moral code at all other than the Holy Dollar. I'm sick of hearing the lies on both sides of the fence.

The punchline to the joke is that most of the Reserved and World Heritage areas are "set aside for future generations to enjoy" but who is this mythical future generation? When does the present stop and the future begin? Using the accepted definition of "generation", there have been 3 or 4 generations since some of these Reserves were "set aside" - but apparently they're not the "future generations" that the Reserves were set aside for.

Whose forests are they? Who gave anyone who doesn't own the land the right to decide who does what in them? Don't chop them down, and don't tell me I'm not allowed to ride a horse through them or have a picnic. Stop treating them like Holy Mother Gaia's Revered Children and start seeing them for what they are - dirt and trees.

The Australian - $7 Million Bid Rejected

Maps Update

I'm running a bit behind with my new map for Lux this week. Last week, after talking it over with the Map Lab, I decided to change the name from 'Space Invaders', which may still be copyrighted, to 'Lux Invaders'. Because the name itself was changed, that meant the new map upload completely took the place of the first one and that put me 2 days behind normal schedule, so I can't upload 'USS Lionhart', which a lot of players are waiting anxiously for, until tomorrow or the next day, because only 1 upload per week is allowed. So be patient, folks, it's not far away. Meanwhile, here are a few more I've been working on which you'll be seeing in the Map Manager in the next few weeks: