In which Jindabyne tourist info earns a place on my hit list.

Jindabyne is a lovely little town. Really, it is. I quite like it. I would even go so far as to say I like almost everything about the place. I cannot, however, dock the 'almost' from that last sentence. Is it because there is a malfunction of some sort in either blogger or my computer I hear you ask? I thank you for your concern, but no. It is because I must contractually¹ reserve a brooding hatred of at least one part of Jindabyne.

The information centre.

Superficially, it's not such a bad centre. It looks nice enough. The staff certainly seem friendly and helpful enough. "Seem" is, however, the operative word in that last sentence. I don't know what your definition of 'helpful advice' is, dear reader, but for my money it should preclude advice such that, in following it, you materially increase the probability that you will die in the near future. But, hey, maybe that's just me. I wish to relate a conversation which occurred on the morning of Saturday 27th November. This is pretty much how I remember it, at any rate, and I will not be moved on its veracity.

Adriana: We were hoping to do a walk from Charlotte's pass to Kosciusko today.

She-Devil Information centre employee: Lovely! There are basically two routes you can take ..... (we choose one ... anticipating about a 7 hr walk)

We chose this route..... longer than it looks.

Adriana: So what are the conditions like?

Information centre employee: Well it's a little misty. And there is a little snow over some parts of the path .... but that shouldn't be a problem.

Adriana: Anything we should take?

Information centre employee: Well, you might want to take a spare pair of socks to cross the Snowy river..... or you could just take your shoes off. You want to cross that in the morning, too, because it rises during the day.

Adriana: And how cold is it? Last time we went we took way more warmth than we needed²....

Information centre employee: Well at the moment it's 11°, but the wind-chill is taking that down to 10° .... the key is to take layers.

Adriana: Should we take a map?

Information centre employee: Well, we can give you this one (same degree of detail as the above picture ..... they had other, actually good, maps for sale also). You shouldn't really need one, though. The path is clearly marked.

 So how did the walk itself go?

Well, to start with, there was a bit of this sort of thing:

....... but things ended up a little more like this:

O.K. so the picture I was going to put here, but didn't on account of Ads not wanting it put up(understandably I guess), was a selfie Ads took in which she believed she was likely to die³.

MATTERS TURN AWRY

What happened to us was pretty much as follows. A few kilometers short of Kosciusko the path kind of disappeared. This, in and of itself, wasn't necessarily a big deal. For a start, mist had gotten very thick in places and it was raining from time to time, so it wasn't that rare for us not to be able to see more than a five meters in front of us anyway. Actually, this leads me to my first favourite line of the day:

Ads: This *referring to very light precipitation* isn't rain .... it's just that some of this mist is condensing and falling.

Me: Ads, ah, you do know what rain is, right?

Ads: *pauses*... Shut up.

So .... when I say 'mist', I should perhaps really be saying 'cloud'. Also, there'd been some snow across the path before now ... and by that I mean great big stretches of it. But up until now it had always been pretty clear where the path actually was and, excepting a little nervousness about walking across slightly sludgy/slippery snow while being lightly rained on, it was easy enough to cross. What occurred here was a little different. What we saw now was a bank of snow resting on a sharp incline which, in its recently rained-on state seemed far to steep for us to feasibly climb up. In addition there were rocks immediately to it's left which could conceivably have been the edge of the path.... the possibility of which we decided to investigate.

It became reasonably clear, by virtue of the fact that the only way forward on these rocks rapidly became to climb downwards, that we were moving off the path. The question was whether we could traverse around this great big pile of snow and find the path on the other side. Ads, who was walking in front reached a dead end of sorts ... which is to say an end of rocks and a start of steep snow bank. This leads to another favourite line:

Me: If you slide down that, do you think you can get back up it?

Ads: No.

..... and, at that point, Ads slides down.

Perhaps because I thought she must have seen something path-related I came down to follow suit instead of, as I probably should have done, left Ads there and gone back to fetch help. Help, in this case, being represented by a group of well-equipped people on a 20 day hike who couldn't have been much more than 1km behind us. As I said, however, what I did instead was follow her, almost sliding down the entire slope in the process. And it turned out she hadn't seen anything at all.... she'd just slipped.

From where we now were, we certainly couldn't have gone back the way we came and, while we could actually see the afore-mentioned hikers moving along a peak behind us (we think, based upon a previous conversation, that they must have been looking for a place to camp), actually getting to them directly from where we were would have been even harder. With the levels of mist drifting around it didn't exactly very likely they'd seen us.... and what's more, we were now under a great big bank of snow we had reason to believe had already moved in previous rain. The only real option seemed to be to move forward and hope to find a way back onto the path.... which is what we now did.

In the distance, I could actually make out a structure and what was probably a path. Between us and them, however, was a valley, a small river and quite a steep ridge. It was highly doubtful we could get to them easily (if at all ... while there was no snow blocking our path, all slopes were very slippery due to rain and probably pretty treacherous at the best of times) via a direct route. I was only going to be able to make these out for a few more minutes, too, before mist and rain intervened, but their existence became increasingly important to us as it became impossible to move forward without also moving downwards into the valley.

While there was a constant threat of slipping... we were at least grateful that it wasn't raining. This gratitude lasted a few minutes. The sky then pretty much opened up on us with a truly heavy downpour, and while we were prepared for light rain walking upright, we simply hadn't gear that could keep us from getting completely wet through crawling around the side of a mountain and, when one factors in a now significant wind-chill, border-line hypothermia cold ... which is where we eventually got. Ads was in a far worse situation than I was too, since she depended upon glasses to see and subsequently had visibility of maybe a metre.... She was probably nowhere near as fit, also⁴. My phone, unsurprisingly, had no reception. Yay team!

It turns out that adrenaline is a pretty wonderful thing. So long as we kept moving, I found the only real indication that I was really fucking cold came when I grabbed a rock and felt pins and needles all the way up my wrist. On the downside this probably happened at least once every 10 seconds or so.

The story between here and when we found the path probably isn't all that interesting to tell. The important details are that we decided on a course of action, which is to say which way we would approach the distant path .... and I should probably point out that Ads' way turned out to be right⁵, and that we eventually made it on the other side of what was a pretty scary experience in light of the knowledge that we probably wouldn't have lasted the night if it came to that.

THE POLICE GET INVOLVED.

Oh, wait. The other thing I should mention is that is that after getting significantly higher, still being uncertain whether or not there existed any way to get onto the path we knew existed or whether there was a path at all on our side of the ridge that we were on .... and at a point when Ads' legs were kind of giving out on her ..... I realised my phone had reception. I now made the following awkward phone call.

000 person: Police, fire or ambulance?

Me: Umm.... rescue? *I explain, somewhat awkwardly, our situation*

000 person: What's the nearest suburb?

Me: Jindabyne, I think.

000 person: I'll put you through to Jindabyne police.

There was now a little phone hockey and awkwardly long waiting for people to call me back and such-like, which would have been a whole lot more amusing if we didn't feel like we were freezing to death on the side of a mountain (I particularly liked when they asked 'can you shield yourself from the wind there, we can't quite make you out?' .... No, actually we can't.... that's kind of the problem here). All of this took place while we were, unbeknownst to us, a few hundred metres from the path which had now emerged from under probably around 1 km of thick snow cover. Turned out that big bank of snow above us kind of was the path. Hey ho. Having made contact, been reassured ..... eventually..... by police that what we were doing would definitely see us reach the path at Rawson's pass and being assured that someone, somewhere knew enough of our predicament we made one final push up the steepest most foreboding piece terrain above us and.......

WE FOUND THE FECKING PATH!

.... and this is what it looked like from the other side.

Found it.

There are probably now only a few things worth mentioning. Firstly that we made our way to a toilet block and shelter. It was at this point that we made use of one of the few pieces of advice we got from the information centre lady and changed our socks to nice, dry ones. Thanks so much for that tip! They even stayed dry for, you know, a minute or two! That was awesome!

Rain, wind and light hail had now gotten to the point where reception was completely shot again so I couldn't let the police know we'd made it, and when we finally did it turned out that they were on their way to pick us up. The path from Kosciusko to Charlotte's pass now in front of us, it turns out, is wide and stable enough to qualify as a road if you happen to be a 4wd.

We met with a few people who'd made a fire in Seaman's hut, and got to chatting with them. One of them had come the same way we had, except over the snow on the path⁶, and who now delivered another of my favourite lines of the day:


Hiker-girl: Yeah, if you lost the path you're gone.


Me: *pause* .....


Anyways, after a smallish break near a fire, we moved to make the final dash back to Charlotte's Pass, eventually seeing a pair of headlights in the distance which we rightly assumed represented the police who had come to pick us up. It was still raining at this point. We were freezing and hobbling/limping along the path now when Ads delivered what was, hands down, my favourite line pf the day:

Ads: I wish they hadn't come to pick us up.... now we can't say we did the whole walk.

Me: *long drawn out pause, then I point at my face* Ads, this is my unimpressed face.

Our trip back was spent being mildly lectured to, which wounded Ads' pride a little, but didn't bother me in the least:

Policeman: Did you have a first aid kit⁷? GPS? A map? A compass? Did you know that you we have the highest density of brown snakes in the country around here, and that they're prolific at the moment⁸?

Me: *singing* It's good to beeee alive, to beeee alive.....⁹

Anyways ... I guess the moral of the story is that if you're going to do a walk like this you should come prepared for the worst, and as the police advised us, be prepared to spend the night.

Also, if you happen to be in the Jindabyne tourist info centre...... say 'hi' from me.

¹You think I enjoy getting angry about stuff and ranting all the time? You think this makes me happy? Honestly, you have no idea how much of a drain this puts on me psychologically.

²Around the beginning of Autumn.

³If you're friends with Ads on Facebook, though, it's actually been put up there.

⁴Readers who have actually met me may be surprised to learn that, owing to a regular fairly serious ride to work, I'm actually reasonably fit now. Honestly. No ..... really.

⁵My way had the upside of being such that, based on what we knew at the time, being certain to get us there, but the downside of being a lot more arduous. Ads didn't think she could have made it.

⁶We'd met various people coming the other way who mentioned what seemed to be, based on their tone, a smallish snow drift around Kosciusko also which simply didn't seem to gel with our experience of it. Either a large amount of snow was shifted and deposited there in the rain, or the rain ate away at the edges making it harder to climb on to.

⁷While we didn't have a first aid kit, we had betadine, bandaids, hand sanitiser and such-like... which, let's face it is about all that the average person could actually use in said kit anyway.

⁸Christ I'm glad we didn't know that.....

⁹I actually was singing this in the car....

Mark Sharma talks in third person. Mark Sharma sulk now. Mark Sharma say everyone at Unleashed racist. Unleashed turned into bigger farce.

This post is probably beneath me.

Actually, who am I kidding here, of course it isn't. 

A friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous unless they choose not to be, quipped recently that I'd hit the big time by getting an Unleashed author to post a comment on my blog. One way of putting perspective on that is to point out that, well, I got the Unleashed author most likely to open a post with "So whats up fa-gots? How are things in ur lil Gay Land?". Another is to point out that that post is, as I type this, the second result to come up for a Google search of the man in question, after his own web site. So not exactly big time prominent writer, here....


However. This dude is apparently going to contest a state seat in the next NSW election. And it'd be pretty funny if I could maintain anything like that level of Google prominence when that happens, so.... let's just all take a quiet moment of appreciation for the following extract from his spirited and rational defense (a summary of which is written over the above picture in red):

But clearly this is not going well with Left Labor- Greens Communist alliance and their supporters. A quick look at the said article shows how every comment on the page is against me.

Oh dear..... 

If one then moseys on over to the original post one sees firstly that, well, commenters  have not been altogether kind to the unfortunate Mr Sharma. Happily, one also sees a few supporters bravely standing against that evil communist tide. Rather like King Cnut.... only with Margaret Thatcher underwear, an "I ♥ Mark Sharma" t-shirt and .... well, probably lobotomy scars. Take completely disinterested random bystander Jamie:

Well that certainly sounded natural and un-forced, didn't it? I found the "These questions have been raised by Independent Mark Sharma and people like me" bit especially convincing. Almost like..... Look, 'Jamie', I'll level with you.  It's not that I'm saying you are Mark Sharma, necessarily ..... it's just that I'd be very surprised if he didn't more or less tell you what to say in some way. If there were actually a way of actually settling the matter, yes I'd be quite happy to put up money there.

In any case, if one can believe his rants about the Indian/immigrant community of Strathfield needing better representation than they currently have I really hope, for their sake, they can find a better candidate to represent their interests somewhere and soon. Also, what the hell is with the publication standards at Unleashed?

 Mark Sharma for a regular friday slot!!!! 

Update (6/12/10): I have, sadly and rapidly, lost my place of Google prominence apparently after posting my latest. Suspect my prominence there (or anything like it) was only ever going to last as long as a Mark Sharma post was my latest. Woe :( ... I guess it's nice to learn a little about Google's search algorithm, at least. 

News just in: Sydney suburb of Strathfield uncovers dire existential threat to Australia.

Mark Sharma.

Mark Sharma. Maaark Sharma. Mark. Sharma. Repeat these words, dear reader. Savour them. Let the sweet, sensual, seductive sound of Shaaaarrrmmmaaaaa.... make love with your tongue, vocal cords, nasal cavity and lips to mark this fine day.

The day the prophet spoke to us.

Who is Mark Sharma, I hear you ask? Why, Mark Sharma is Strathfield, dear reader. And Strathfield is he¹. He speaks its thoughts. He lives out its wants and desires. And today, dear reader, which some day will be recorded as the first day of year 0 in a newer, more enlightened calendar, Strathfield spoke to us.

It was not a message of comfort, dear reader. Rather, it was a terrible vision of the future. But fear not, my friend, for in this vision lies hope. If we can but heed this call, if we sinners can but repent, become conservatives and joint this great movement Australia may once again become a land of prosperity, heterosexuality and economic liberalism.

Why do Gillard, Swan and Brown hate freedom so? The prophet would not tell us. Perhaps it is because they are not conservatives, and as we all know, freedom is a conservative value. Perhaps it is because they are brainwashed vessels of leftist hate. Who can say? But hate it, they do. And as much as we might like to tear these hate-mongers limb from limb in the name of Australian freedom, dear reader, let us instead let the soothing words of the prophet stay our righteous hands:

.....it will be a waste of time if we spent our entire energy targeting them. Instead of that it would be more productive to focus on their hidden agenda.

Indeed.

Their hidden agenda? Why it becomes only too obvious if you are but willing to look with clear eyes. Consider, first, what they have already done.

If the shock of another tax was not enough for the Gillard Government, now there is a foolish debate going on in Canberra on same same-sex marriage. The ceremony of marriage might be different in different cultures but the institution of marriage is the same no matter where you live. Marriage can only happen between a man and a woman. There are no "ifs and buts" or grey areas to it. It doesn't matter whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or belong to any other faith. The concept is the same everywhere. Just because we live in the 21st century, it doesn't mean we should destroy our way of life for delusional people. There is no possibility of any debate on this issue and it should be kept out of our sacred parliament.

Why should we ruin our way of life for delusional people, indeed? For people so wrapped up in their delusional mindset as to disbelieve such manifest truths as the existence of bronze age gods, transubstantiation and his elephantine majesty Ganesha?

OUR SACRED PARLIAMENT MUST BE DEFENDED FROM SUCH FILTH!!!

But why must they do this, dear reader. Why? My god, man, but isn't it obvious?

But despite all this, the Greens are relentlessly bringing up gay marriage and attacking Australian families. Why is Senator Brown doing all this? The only assumption one can make is that the Greens want to weaken our economy with a carbon tax and destroy our social fabric with gay marriage. A weakened nation would serve as a perfect launch pad for communism.

Don't you see? Don't you see you fools!? First they introduce flouridation of our very water suppy to dilute our precious bodily fluids. Then, using their cunning sham of 'global warming', they tax carbon to cripple our great nation's economy. Finally, to weaken our defenses by tearing the social fabric in two and turning our defense forces camp, they let gay people marry each other. Why else would you do these things? Isn't the next logical step that we find ourselves a satellite state of the Soviet Union communist UN world government?

WAKE UP AUSTRALIA!

¹It's just a bit of a shame he isn't the rest of Watson, really.

Kites, the Remix: Or in which I wish to beat my brother to death with a rubber pigeon.

Henry, Henry, Henry. You are a bastard. I've realised for a while that ANU film group reviews have to be read through the lens that they've gone out of their way to track down someone in their ranks who either actually likes the film in question, or is at least willing to pretend they did. I've always expected a little more from you, though. You once wrote this review of Synecdoche, New York. Thanks for that. I mean, who knows? I might have otherwise seen it unprepared or something.

The point being, I've come to think of you as a reviewer I can trust. When you wrote this review of this piece of shite, though Henry, you broke that trust. You broke it hard. You gave me the impression that the movie could conceivably be enjoyed on some level. You made me think it was possible to get to the end of it without wanting to beat to death every last person who was involved in the making of the movie. You lied, man. You robbed me of 90 minutes of my life. You even have the balls to open as follows:

I'm not sure it was necessary to edit down the Bollywood original (which, at 130 minutes, was already remarkably short by Bollywood standards) by 40 minutes.

You aren't? You weren't possibly swayed by the remaining 90 minutes still actually feeling like about, oh, 3 long hours being taken to tell some puerile story you could have done justice to in 5 minutes, after which the story-teller would probably be forced to apologise for injecting that kind of stupid into your head? Only you wouldn't accept that apology. I mean, you would say you had for form's sake, but over the years it would knaw at you and, one morning when you wake up dreaming once again of this stupid tale and convincing yourself that it was the only way to drive it out of your head, you'd track the storyteller down and torture them to death. You'd then offer the story in your own defense at trial (which would see you released on humanitarian grounds), only to end up infecting others with its banal odiousness, thus starting the same vicious cycle again and possibly bringing about the end of civilization as we know it!  

Am I exaggerating? Well, yes. But I hope I have, at least, prevented anyone reading this from actually thinking for even a second that seeing Kites, the Remix is an idea they should actually entertain. This is to say, Henry, that I just did what should have been your job for you.

I swear what they must have actually done with this movie is take their initial stupid idea for a movie then defaulted to a six year old to actually flesh the story out. We'll call this six year old 'Chuckie'.

Producer: O.K. so, how are our two lovers re-united?

Chuckie: Um, so Jay is, like scuba diving in this awesome coral reef, when he sees her swim right past him without recognizing him .... and, and, she looks kind of like a mermaid and stuff. Then, when they drive back to the house of the family they're both marrying into they, like meet up again.

Producer: Hmm... O.K. I guess that might work..... yeah, they both make independent trips to the same coral reef on day-trips from LAS VEGAS, NEVADA!?!?!?!

Chuckie: Yeah. And then after they go out on a date the night before her wedding to the brother of his fiance, she gets found out.... and, and, there's a fight and stuff. And we finish the scene with her fiance, who is like the brother of his fiance, like firing a gun right at Jay! Jay's the name of our hero, by the way. Awesome, right?


Producer: Ummm... O.K.

Chuckie: And then we get some flash-backs and shit, and we replay the scene, only this time it's like 'hey, I changed my mind, there are no gunshots at all, Natasha hits her fiance over the head with a bottle instead!'


Producer: Right..... I mean, it seems like they're going on the run rather early here, Chucky. How do we pad-out the remaining 75 minutes?

Chuckie: With, like awesome chase scenes and stuff! Like, they'll be running away from all these police cars, and it'll be like 'Oh no, they're caught!' ... but, but then they'll see these .... HOT AIR BALOONS! And, like, they'll jump onto a rope from their car and climb up it and get away!


Producer: O.K.... so I guess that'll work. I mean, a brightly coloured, slow-moving hot air balloon would be a really difficult thing for the police to follow......

Chuckie: Yeah. And they'll get into these other cool chases and then get to Mexico and get married. And it'll be really funny, cause earlier when he asks how to say 'I love you' in Spanish, she'll teach him to say 'I'm shitting my pants' instead ... which will be a really funny thing for him to say instead most of the time, cause it has the word 'shit' in it, lol, but it'll be extra special funny when he says it at the wedding.


Producer: And then her evil ex-fiance will catch up with them?

Chuckie: Yeah, and there'll be this big awesome chase scene and he'll get shot..... and, and she'll put him in a train and we won't see what happens to her. And, and we won't find out until he goes back to Las Vegas after getting all better 'cause this poor Mexican family performs surgery on him.


Producer: I see. What does happen to her?

Chuckie: Oh, it's really sad! They chase her to a remote cliff , and she drives off of it.

Producer: Wow.


Chuckie: Yeah, and then he like finds out after running away from a gunfight after being saved by Jamal, who is like the family's servant who becomes their friend because they're awesome, only Jamal's been shot and he whispers it to Jay before he dies. Sad, hey?

Producer: Yeah....

Chuckie: And then Jay will be all, like, hard-arse and he'll have an uzi and, and, when all the bad men catch up to him he'll be, like, shooting them ALL in slow motion and it'll look really cool 'cause it'll be raining really heavily.... it rains a LOT in this movie, by the way. Rain's dramatic. It says so right here.

Producer: in Las Vegas?

Chuckie: Yeah. And things get even sadder, too, 'cause, then Jay's ex-fiance appears behind him, cause she was following him all along or something and, like shoots him in the back, crying. We feel a little sorry for her, too, 'cause she's been used like a doormat. So Jay doesn't shoot her back, and she doesn't shoot him again, she just, like, cries as he staggers off.

Producer: Wow, so what happens, then?

Chuckie: Um, so he drives to the cliff where Natasha died and he jumps off it.

Producer: O.K.... so he drives back to Mexico with a bullet in his back and...wait, how did he even know where the cliff was? Did Jamal whisper the GPS co-ordinates to him when he was dying or something?

Chuckie: Maybe... Umm, it's like a really sad ending, though, hey?


Producer:  I guess.... assuming the audience doesn't feel like they would have gladly pushed Jay off the cliff themselves 5 minutes into the movie... Look, Chuckie, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Here's a suitcase full of money. You make that movie.


Chuckie: Awesome.

Australian Ride to Work Day: you are hereby cordially invited to go fuck yourself.

Currently being in my 3rd week of riding to work daily, I'm sure you can imagine my sense of joy at learning that, on the 13th of October, there was to be a free breakfast at work for anyone who rode in on the day in question. On the off-chance you can't, well, take a look at this and work from there. I have never gotten over my student-days joy at free .... anything¹. A free breakfast for riding to work? A ha ha HA!!  I was going to do it anyway you fools!!!!!!!

My joy, however, was short-lived. Well, actually, it wasn't in the sense that I'd learned of this like 3 weeks ago. In the sense that this makes for a good, solid opening to a paragraph about how everything went sour ... and also in the sense that I could possibly have been even more delirious with joy, like, the night before or something .... we can all agree it was. You see, it was raining pretty heavily this morning. Finding myself suddenly thrust into the ranks of those whose decision to ride may actually be determined by the provision of a free breakfast, but being the complete out-and-out hard-arse you all know me to be, I bravely donned my Gore-Tex^TM and made my way to work through near² to impossible odds after only umming and ahing for around 20 minutes. Like people who went to 'Nam and stuff... I'm afraid I'm rather reluctant to talk about the horrors I then experienced on the way to work. I am prepared, however, to talk about the horrors that greeted me when I got there. You see...

There was no fucking breakfast left!

Well, O.K., so there was in the sense that there was some fruit and a little cereal lying around amidst people packing up and stuff. After stepping out of a much-needed (to wash all the mud and blood and shit off) shower, and arriving at 9:20 to an 8:30-9:30 breakfast, I expect a little more than a few hairy pieces of fruit and the dregs of the cereal, though, you bastards. I expect danishes. I expect coffee. I expect sausages, hash browns and young, nubile serving-folk looking to anoint my tired feet.

Congratulations 'National Ride to Work Day', you just earned a place on my hit-list.


¹Hmmm. Perhaps a disclaimer is in order here. Anyone now thinking to send my joy circuits into overload by offering me a free kick in the testicles is advised to stop being such a pedantic smart-arse.


²Assuming a rather broad definition of 'nearness'.....

News just in: Dumb Opinion Piece Published on The Drum.

Acknowledging that the above probably reads like a headline from The Onion, allow me to say that I am nonetheless shocked. Why, oh why can't Clementine Ford and Virginia Haussegger unite and fight against the common enemy, The People's Front of Judea, I hear you ask?

Well, in a sense, they can. Virginia Haussegger's article (abridged from a speech given in a debate) is a thoughtful enough kick in the pants to western feminism regarding it's (I think) cowardly cultural relativism and the resulting moral crisis she claims it finds itself in. Enter Clementine Ford, who says 'Waaaa! All this nasty stuff not our fault! We do plenty! P.S. I'd like to subtly hint that people who agreed with Hausegger are all Islamophobes, if I may', thereby neatly demonstrating Haussegger's point presenting a devastating rebuttal.

Ford's was, I think, the most mind-bogglingly silly piece of writing I have seen on the Drum. This is a highly competitive category.

A few rants at points of consideration for Ford, in the highly unlikely event she reads this blog:

1. Considering how often in subsequent comments you show frustration at people misconstruing comments about males perpetrating violence against women as meaning all men are violent towards women, you might like to take a moment to reflect on how ridiculous it is for you to take any criticism of Islam or Middle Eastern culture as an indication that the speaker thinks all Muslims are inherently evil. There is nothing at all inherently wrong with cultural criticism or even vilification, and I would submit that Islam, as it is currently practiced today, is quite profoundly misogynistic. I think that is bad. I would also like to submit that any culture that accepts honour-killing as a part of it is a culture that contains some profoundly shit elements. You might also remember certain evil acts of vilification regarding such cultural practices as disallowing women the vote and maintaining that a woman's place is in the home. I know, hey? They shock me too.
2. If you title an article Stop blaming feminists for the world's problems, you might like to consider indicating or referencing a single, solitary instance of someone actually blaming feminists for at least one problem in the world. Haussegger sure as shit didn't. She did seem to imply that systematic gross human rights abuses against women should be of special interest to those who would consider themselves feminists. I, too, was shocked by this scandalous assertion.
3. You write "Her argument is so fundamentally flawed that it's difficult to know where to begin." Might I suggest you begin with something she actually fucking said.

In any case, Clementine, on the off-chance that I'm currently coming off as too reasonable or sane or something I thought I might just sign off as follows:

Clementine, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Clementine? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a woman who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

Where have you gone, Wilson Tuckey? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.....

Oh wait..... there you are, buddy!

I have to say that I was disappointed with his first two posts. Sure, with his second there were tantalising hints that he thinks Marius Kloppers should bugger off back where he came from with his liberal ideas ..... but where was the fire, Wilson? What was with all the reasonably coherent posting?

Imagine my joy, then, at his third post. This beastie reads a little more like a comment on Andrew Bolt's blog. This is more like the Wilson Tuckey we all know and...... know! This is the Wilson bravely showing the Coalition the way through the wilderness, in stark contempt for the opinion of others, coherency, actual parliamentary influence and growing senility. But why are you all wasting time listening to me? Take it away, Wilson....

Greg Combet interview with Kerry O`brien on Gillards broken election promise to not  introduce a Carbon Tax reminded me of Paul Keatings LAW broken election promise. Tony Abbott should now introduce some LAW to the Parliament banning such a tax making it clear he will attend any Divisions involved.

This initiative will test Gillard and the Independants both in the debate and the vote. In particular to match their rhetoric with actual evidence as to the ECONOMIC¹  and ENVIROMENTAL BENEFITS of such a measure.

Lastly, however, reader ..... I must ask you to imagine my visceral sense of horror when I realised what many of you are no doubt realising after reading the above. Wilson Tuckey is ..... me. Given a few years of disillusionment and the onset of early senility .... is it really such a stretch to go from here, here or here to .......here?:

Whilst a Gillard promise has a 24hr USE BY DATE she might just be prepared to provide a guarunteed (sic) figure as to the reduction in CO2 emissions per 1% of tax imposed excluding of course those emissions that are exported to other countries.

Having seen what lies ahead, dear reader..... I'm really not sure I can go on.....

Update: title corrected.

¹Possibly Abbott could stand in parliament with a sign reading 'Where is da money, Ms Gillard?'

I am an idiot, too.

O.K., so I didn't check that the listed primary voting percentages added to 100 (and are already a percentage of valid counted votes, not ballots returned). Probably around half of Arkan's primary preferenced Labor, after all.

It is my melancholy duty to inform you that Andrew Bolt was right. The Sikhs in Cowper really are the thin end of a Labor-boat people wedge insidiously started by the Labor movement in the 1830s and only now bearing fruit. It's really no surprise they're such pansies on the issue of burning asylum seekers alive for fun these days, really, is it?

By way of apology to Bolt, allow me to present the world with irrefutable proof, courtesy of your the Maoist's ABC that muslims are stupid:

... and that "our" ABC is, in fact, run by rabid atheistic communists out to make decent, hard-working Christian folk out to be bigots or something...

Andrew Bolt is an Idiot.

Look, Jethro, those two numbers is equal, hic..

The results in Cowper hardly provides strong evidence that the Sikh community votes in a bloc (relative to the Coalition or Labor at least). Hell, the very reference he quotes seems to inicate that the majority of Arkan's primary vote can't have been Sikh anyway. Worse, if you assume that all Greens preferences and no CDP preferences went to Labor in Cowper, approximately 3/4 of Arkan's supporters must have favoured the coalition rather than Labor.

One wonders how some of the nasty little racists commenting would feel if they realised that, if anything, the 'Sikh voting bloc' in Cowper probably favours the Nationals.......

A post which promises, at some point, to be about the NBN.

Imagine a ball. In as much as I would like, in this story, for someone to be picking it up and this to be considered a legal move, imagine it is a rugby ball. Let's make it gray. With a red duck on it¹. Now let us imagine a game of rugby proceeding on a field around the ball. This game has become rather scrappy. So scrappy, in fact, that everyone has pretty much forgotten about the ball's existence in their determination to beat the crap out of anyone wearing different colours from them. Hell, some are even attacking even members of their own team with eye-gouging fury. I suppose I really could have just said it had descended into a brawl. I didn't, though, because I'm trying to be all evocative and shit. You O.K. with that, Mr 'Get the fuck on with the story'? Hey, man, fuck you.

Anyways, into this farcical scene steps a diminutive, bespectacled man in a suit. He makes his way over to the ball, dodging the odd fist, elbow and knee attached to various combatants who appear to be paying little attention to him. He stands over the ball, glances furtively in a number of directions then, tentatively, he picks the ball and holds it wonderingly for a while. He now has the power. He can decide the outcome of the game. With a new-found air of superiority and contempt he looks around him at a field of stupid, narrow-minded neanderthals in rugby uniforms who still haven't noticed that the kind of bespectacled nerd they used to beat up in high school has just taken control of their game. He smiles, shuts his eyes, and runs. So taken with the sheer joy of his situation he fails to notice the single nondescript tree standing just outside the playing field he has inadvertently plotted a course directly at. Again without anyone paying any attention to him, he runs directly into it with a soft, anti-climactic thud and falls unconscious on the ground. The ball rolls quietly away where it lies waiting......

An ode to non-boredom

Dave raises, I think, a fair question when he asks if a boring election campaign is necessarily a bad thing. To put matters another way, there is a reason that 'May you live in interesting times' is considered a curse. Given, however, that we do live in interesting times - I would submit that if a country finds itself failing to have an interesting election campaign, then the chances that this is due to a bi-partisan consensus having been struck on a discovered set of policy decisions that is actually most conducive to the long-term happiness of the country are very, very, slim. As far as Australia is concerned I would be interested in seeing anyone maintain, with a straight face, that this is the reason we are currently facing an election of coma-inducing dullness.

Politics is a game. It does not exist to safeguard our happiness. It does not exist to discover the best solution to the problems the people effected by it face. It just exists. Some countries play this game by rules which are more conducive to the well-being of its participants¹ than others, democracy being a pretty good innovation along those lines, but all dull contests really mean is that dull tactics are sufficient for the goals of those most actively playing it. Stability is a very, very different thing from optimality.

In the Australian context, we see two major parties in a state of near alliance, and I would submit that this is because they have reached a point of equilibrium where they feel, with good justification, that any major divergence on either of their parts will be penalised, not because they've struck policy gold.


¹And in all countries, the list of participants in the game extends to the entire population, whether they like to admit it or not. In Australia, for instance, we don't. We pretend that the manner in which politicians consistently behave (and the manner in which politics is reported) in the long term has absolutely nothing to do with us.

You were lied to as a child.

My palms were sweaty¹. I was nervous. I had, however, once more avoided an awkward encounter in a lift.

"I made it" I announced to Ads,who had once again, just moments before, initiated an inane phone conversation having exhausted all constructive work and communist tea party related activities at work. "Well" she quipped, her voice quavering in that 'I am about to say something really clever' kind of tone. "What goes up must come down".

What goes up........ no, I'm sorry dear reader, but this is Bullshit. Why do they do this kind of thing to you when you're young³? Leaving aside the fact that 'up' is such a completely relative term anyway... what about clay pigeons? Hmm? What about if we, say, made a really big cannon and fired Sol Trujillo into the sun?

I realise that this is the day after Mother's day and all..... but I see through your lies, mum.

So kids, what goes up does not have to come down⁴.

¹Mom's spaghetti².

²O.K. Sue me. That was American spelling.

³Watched kettles do fucking boil.

⁴This is a metaphor for life⁵.

⁵Ads made me write this.

In which I stop traffic.

I wish to relate, dear reader, the events of some nights ago which characterise nicely that emotional roller-coaster I will charitably call 'my life'. It was a cold and windy night. I say this not just as a cliched story opener, but because it fucking was, O.K.? There was one of those southerly winds you get here that both chill you to your giblets¹ and remind you that winter is a-comin'. Did my poor mitten-less hands freeze solid, I hear you ask in a tone con notating the deepest of concern? While I am touched by your evident worry, dear reader, it is my happy charge to inform you that no, they did not. I have, in short, been re-united with my mittens, and in the subsequent reveling I have, I am ashamed to admit, failed to inform you, my fellow mourners, of this happy news. How did this joyous event take place? Well, it all started with a conversation with one Adriana Siddle². Knowing me as well as she does, dear reader, allowed her to ask of me question of such startling simplicity and breathtaking brilliance³ as to warrant an appreciative "ah" from you, the audience⁴. Whilst I was wallowing in some characteristic and well-deserved self pity, I was asked the following (and brace yourselves): "Have you ..... checked the pockets of all your jackets?". I had not done this. As a result of so doing, however, I have been united once again with my mittens of awesomeness +3.

Anyways, I was walking home on the night in question with a satisfied strut and a hankering for fish and chips. It was while I was closing in on the noble fried-fishmongers that a curious thing happened. I was bitterly disappointed whilst strutting across the zebra-crossing opposite to realise that the day was what can only be described as 'a monday'. This is important in as much as the fish and chips shop on Aro Street is closed on Monday. My mood rapidly improved, however, upon realising that the mitten-accentuating strut I adopt whilst sporting these lovelies had finally paid off. A driver who had stopped to let me pass casually leaned out the window so as to say (and this seemed to be the only possible explanation) something along the lines of "what fine mittens you have, sir! Wherever can such items of apparel be purchased (indeed, I had not thought such wonders possible in this world)?". Once again, however, I was both forced to taste bitter disappointment and consult this chart. I had mis attributed the cause for this arse's communication with me to be my mittens, when I should instead have linked it with that kind of second-long pause you only really get from realising that a fish and chips shop is closed. What he actually said was the following: "Hey, mate, if you're going to cross a road fucking cross it, alright? Don't fuck about". Such situations piss me off mightily. What the fuck is one to do? In the time it takes for you to even realise what has been said, the bastard is already a few hundred metres away from you and your response of "I know you are, but what am I?" can no longer avail you of anything. Curiously, but two nights before my office-mate had a cigarette stolen from his mouth in similar circumstances when an expert kick-boxer sucker-punched him in the face, took it and walked off. We have since concluded that the only adequate answer to such circumstances is to constantly carry a loaded gun⁵. Even Michael Moore could not possibly argue with this clear and present need.

In the mean-time I must satisfy myself with the knowledge that he caused himself more of a delay in yelling at me than I did. Just so you all know where I'm at. With my life.

¹I am now crossing the word 'giblet' off of my Stuff to use in a sentence - Urgent!! list.

²It needs to be pointed out for various reasons that myself and Adriana are at the moment officially together. I love her very much and she needs to stop being silly.

³Alliteration This is satisfying....

⁴ And, just quietly, my people are everywhere. Those of you who fail to do this will be crushed. As you were.

⁵"Oh, yeah?" bang "well, one of your tyres is flat, arsehole".... "An expert in kick boxing, is he?" bang " It didn't seem to help"......

I'm not one for hyperbole........

...... but¹ and this .... is like Nazi Germany. First, dear reader, they moved my office 10 metres down the hall for no good reason at all - and you did nothing, for it was not your office. Then they took away our coffee beans for Christ's sake²!!! - and you did nothing, for you did not drink our coffee. I'm not sure exactly what they're going to do next .... but I'm sure we can all agree that the writing is on the wall and that my entire readership is .... well, don't be expecting me to stick up for your rights when things turn really nasty, O.K.? Basically, you've let me down. I am currently drinking the very last cup of free, real coffee as supplied by the school of mathematics, statistics and computer science to graduate students on up. It is a sombre moment marking the, I think we can all agree, first step down that slippery slope towards nuclear Armageddon. It's been nice knowing you all......

But moving along ..... this does seem like a good place to ask the question: What makes people vote republican? I do not pose this question in a topical "Dear god how could anyone want to risk giving Sarah Palin the nuclear codes?" kind of way - but in the more general sense as posed by the author at said link. See also an online book here. On the one hand, well, surely what makes people vote the way they do is as valid an area of social research as any other.... and, well, I tend to agree about the existence of people of a certain mindset to actively vote for parties who are demonstrably acting in manners contrary to said voter's interests and that there are substantial numbers of conservative voters that fall into this category. On the other hand, though ...... I get an uncomfortable feeling that someone approached a grants committee and said something like "basically, my research will be on how people who vote Tory suck more balls than Annabelle Chong - slip me some dough, brother". How would Today Tonight deal with this, I wonder? How do I feel about the fact that I just asked that question? It's a thorny one.

DISCUSS!

¹Happy, Dave?

²Bean-counters are stealing our beans, if you will. My office mate and I have thoroughly scoped out the administration building to find out where they hide theirs (it being our solemn duty to return the favour) ... but thus far to no avail.

Covers

A recent conversation I was involved in turned its attention to cover versions of songs. Specifically, cover versions which are better than the original. This category turned out, unsurprisingly, to be very small. We could all agree, for instance, that Gary Jules' version of Mad World is better than the original by Tears for Fears. Yes, all agreed, Eminem's Ice Ice Baby is indeed superior to the original by Vanilla Ice¹. Things got a little more strained over whether or not Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower beats Dylan's (it does, damn you)..... but where things always get a little hairy (for me) is when we get onto Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's not that I think the original is, well, a good arrangement per se (dear god that awful eighties backing) .... it's just that Jeff Buckley gives me the shits. In point of fact, I would submit that no-one has yet covered this song properly². It's a great song. It sounds to me a little like a drunk finding god in a pool of his own vomit (in a good way, though .... honest).... but when I hear Buckley doing it, well, I find myself saying (unfortunately, and as far as social decorum is concerned) "oh for fucks sake why don't you just shoot yourself already". Matters inevitably take a hairy turn from this point onwards. It was lucky, then, that I was able to produce the following video. However we may differ as human beings, I offer, we can all agree that Avril Lavigne must never, ever be allowed to sing³ Coldplay's The Scientist ever again.

Ladies and gentlemen, live and off-key I give you perhaps the greatest piece of butchery ever performed by a diminutive Canadian pop singer on the work of a contemporary British band:



¹Of course, this is true in a rather trivial sense. It really doesn't matter how good or bad you think Eminem's version is .... what's good about it is the simple knowledge that Eminem is covering Vanilla ice. If just knowing that such a thing exists in the world isn't enough to make you smile, well, I guess you're one of those people who didn't cry when Bambi's mother died.

²Which actually adds to its charm. If the version you end up hearing never quite matches up to the version in your head, well I mean, .... listen to the lyrics. This is .... appropriate.

³It was very, very tempting to stop typing on that word.....

In which Fitz has a rant on a topic about which he doesn't really care all that much.

Are there, dear reader, too many sports and events at the Olympics? I say yes.

I should probably hasten to add that I'm not saying 'yes' for the trivial reasons Chris or Sam would, either. I have trivial reasons of my own.

Michael Phelps, we are told, is the greatest Olympian of all time based solely upon his medal count, for instance, which is just plain stupid. Could, pray tell, a javelin thrower have possibly managed to get 8 gold medals based upon javelin throwing prowess alone I ask? Of course not. Michael Phelps, on the other hand, gets to enter 8 variations on much the same event and he's just instant Captain Fancy-pants. Is it coincidence that the previous record of 7 medals was also held by a swimmer? Are the Illuminati involved? It's not even as though swimming is all that interesting to watch anyways.

I propose, in future, that winning a swimming event be only worth 1/8 of a medal with each such winner having to compete in some manner of free-for all involving crocodiles and rotating blades. The first to manage to construct a complete gold medal gets to keep it. Then that sucker would be worth something.

Team sports, also, are for the most part kind of dodgey. Synchronized swimming? Bizarre floor routines involving a ribbon, ball and a bola hat filled with plum wine in which a single apple floats? Scrap them, I say. Walking shall stay, but only if snipers are placed at random positions around the track. Let's see the bastards maintain their silly "walk-not-run" discipline then, shall we?

A real call to arms.....

Up until this very morning I had thought that my favourite Wikipedia article was the entry on the neenish tart, which wins this accolade for its public interest, accuracy and the obvious wealth of research that went into it (click on the one cited reference ... it's awesome).

After reading the latest xkcd, however, I have another one. That no-one on the talk page appears to notice the obvious, if unintended, satirical humour in the fact that the pre-amble has tags stating that "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards" and that "All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear" is itself, I think, note-worthy (although, I really must tip my virtual hat at whoever left the "It seems to me that the added publicity won't hurt this article -- in fact, nearly any edit to it will have no choice but to improve it. For example, the entire "Logocentrism" section could be replaced by "PENIS PENIS PENIS LOL" and it would greatly improve the overall clarity." comment)

What really brings a sense of sorrow to my heart as regards this article, however, is how disappointing the history section is. I was rather hoping that a "find: 'vandal' " type search would reveal a little more than it actually did. To be sure, there have been some noble efforts¹..... only not, I feel, nearly enough. For the most part, the 'vandalism' history appears mostly to refer to people trying to link to the xkcd comic in question, or something similar.

And then I thought to myself, well, that something can be done about this.... and, damn it, we're the people to do it. We have but to take the energy we put into our chalking war on that retarded 'we killed god: you don't care' campaign by these people and combine it with both our prior wiki-vandalism cunning and the fact that it's really, really hard for wikipedia to ban ip addresses that correspond to entire frickin' universities. What say you, dear reader? Shall we fuck this page up or what? I dream of a day when it becomes untenable for wikipedia to maintain a 'deconstruction' page consisting of anything more than a brief entry such as:

Deconstruction is a term used in contemporary literary criticism, philosophy, and the social sciences. Originally coined by Jacques Derrida, he apparently took the actual meaning of the word with him to the grave.

A single tear makes its way down my cheek as a contemplate the possibility that my blog may now become a force for good in this world.

¹Others .... not so noble, exactly, but cheers Gemma just the same. And who are 'we' to talk here, anyways (I'm talking to you, here Martin)

Left-leaning social engineering gone MAD!!!1

Look. So, let's just get out of the way the rather reasonable premise that what two (or more) consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is no business of you or I. This is, I feel, a principle even the Bill O'Riellys among us must pay at least lip service to..... and where Bill leads, dear reader, I follow. But .... when a group of pomo, "progressive", pinko, cafe-latte-mixed-with-chardonnay-in-a-bucket swilling, chattering class elites claim the right of certain individuals to force their lifestyle choice upon an innocent child .... well it's then that decent, hard-working Americans Australians such as you and I need to stand up and be counted. Especially when this lifestyle choice represents an abomination in the eyes of GOD himself².

Which brings us to the case in question, involving a homosexual couple who identify themselves only as 'Roy' and 'Silo'³. Roy and Silo made a lifestyle choice, dear reader. And fair enough, says I. I mean, if they want to condemn themselves to eternal damnation well, that's just their choice. Unfortunately, however, those social engineers on the left (represented here by one Robert Gramzay, may this fag-enabler burn in HELL!!!!) just had to step in, didn't they? They gave Roy and Silo a child to raise. Yeah, that's right buddy, a poor innocent child. It's time the silent majority stood up to be counted here, and declared that enough, dear reader, is ENOUGH!!!! According to no lesser authority than GOD himself, children should be raised by a father and a mother. Yeah, you heard me Gramzay. Give my regards to Satan when you see him.

Roy and Silo .... or possibly Squawk and Milo shamelessly
flaunting their unholy relationship in the fag-enabling
pit that is Manhattan.... Cute penguins? Or an abomination before
god himself? I'll be the judge.........

¹Let's see if this one works, hey.....

²Such as, say, the heinous decision to subsist on shellfish. And don't kid yourself, buddy, such sick individuals are out there.

³Or is it 'Squawk' and 'Milo'? I'm confused. Not happy, Scientific American.

In which I am in a bad mood about being in a good mood1

In a manner of speaking, that is. It's just that, well, I feel I'm at my best when I'm ranting about something .... only at present I've kind of got nothing to rant about. Which has left me a little annoyed, to be sure, but not enough to rant about it. I can't even summon up the vitriol to rant about that, either come to think of it. Or that. Or even that, for that matter.

Now, while I like sitting around all day recursively defining arbitrarily large sequences of stuff I just don't feel like ranting about, I guess it's time to let it go and move on. This is not the kind of thing I'm very good at, so you might want to all take a moment to drink in this personal-growth-of-Fitz moment. So, I purchased a bed today. It's a good bed. I got it on trade me which, for that majority of you who are hard of being in New Zealand is much like ebay, only better in every conceivable way. I bring that up, in the context of my general state of rantless-ness, because there was at least one petty vendetta I still held close to my heart, which was the systematic egging (or possibly leaving a burning bag of dog shit on the doorstep) of every house that had advertised a room to rent and arranged with me a time to come and view the place only to tell me upon arrival at said time that sorry, the room was already taken². I'm feeling a lot more well-disposed to such individuals now, however, and have decided that, on balance, I think I'll let them live on account of the fact that if I had gotten one of those rooms I wouldn't have found myself in possession of the room I'm going to be moving into on Wednesday.... which is far and away the best place I've looked at. It's on Aro Street. In the Aro Valley. The flat-mates seem fairly cool. The room is large, warm, surprisingly sunny and completely devoid of the truly unfortunate wall-paper pretty much every other house of comparable age I looked at sported with a perverse sort of pride. I'm about a 10 minute (tops) walk from uni. If I walk out the front door, turn left, and walk around 10 or so meters I find myself at arguably the best bakery in Wellington. If I walk a further comparable distance, I find myself at probably the best dvd shop in New Zealand. Why, only today was I sitting at the bakery in question having a conversation with an organic chemist about his conversion from practicing karate to taking up aikido. There was a long, drawn out explanation of the philosophical differences between the two martial arts and the kind of people who practice them, which I felt was getting a little too "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" for my tastes right up to this incredible point of stillness where I have to admit I achieved a truly Zen-like insight of my own into mysteries of the universe. "So," I said nodding thoughtfully, "what you're telling me ........ is that aikido is to karate.......... what Mr Miyagi is to the Cobra Kai". This, I feel, illustrates nicely not only the type of place I'm moving in to ... but just how far I've come as a person.

¹Also, in which I borrow my method titling posts from Jetta the dog, the failure of whom to update their journal for quite a while now has left a small 3-legged staffy shaped hole in my life. Come back, Jetta, we miss you.

²Arse-cunts!!!!! Seriously, on one occasion I trudged wearily up hills at 9:30 on a cold windy Sunday morning whilst fecking ill only to be greeted at the door by some chilled-out arse who took a few long drawn out nods of his arse-with-ears head before making such a statement. Not that I'm bitter. Actually, I'm fucking not. It's fucking annoying me.

I'd like to talk to you about Sweden1

Australia, as I'm sure you're all aware, has seen fit to go about purchasing billions of dollars worth of sleek, aerodynamic, awe-inspiring killing machines with money we could otherwise have ploughed into education, health, supporting under-privileged combinatorics PhD students² or .... I don't know ..... something we might actually end up using. Now, I'm wise enough in the ways of the world³ to realise that we're just never going to get over this desire to have cool tanks, ships and planes and shit .... so instead I've been thinking about something we could actually do with them.

Is there, I thought to myself, a nation on earth of such pure, unadulterated evil that invasion (or at the very least bombing back into the stone age) just for shits and giggles could be seen as justifiable, nay morally obligatory? It occurred to me, dear reader, that in fact such a country not only exists, but has been insidiously veiling its perfidy for years now with a cloak of high living standards, low crime-rates, silly accents and bad music⁴. I'm talking about Sweden, people.... Sweden⁵. They gave the world ABBA, and we said nothing - for we do not watch the Eurovision^TM song contest. They gave the world IKEA^TM - and again we said nothing, for no-one is man enough to admit that they have a small collection of strange post-construction-superfluous connective plastic thingies they hope like hell are not essential to the well-being of their cabinet. Then they gave us Hälge ... and there was nothing much to say, really. Would we stand alone, dear reader? I think not. I submit that the maiden mission for our shiny new F35s is clear......

Figure 1: proposed bombing route sticking to international
airspace and avoiding national boundaries⁶

¹You see, dear reader, it's occurred to me that Google whoring is for losers. I've decided to try my hand at a little crazies trawling. And methinks that the true crazy is of a mind to post first, read footnotes later.

²You think all of those multi-coloured pens and 3 hour lunches at 5 in the afternoon pay for themselves? Ask Geoff.... they don't. In fact, after this post I shall look into an 'sponsor a combinatorist' scheme. I submit that there is no heart so hard as to be supplied with Geoff's downcast visage and not give generously.

³Honest....

⁴Yeah, you heard me Dave. For Abba alone must the Swedes die....

⁵I'd just like to take this moment to forestall a few scurrilous insinuations. This maniacal desire of mine to pluck Sweden clean from the stream of history has nothing at all to do with the fact that a Swede kept me awake last night .... and not in a good way. I spit on such theories, sir, with the phlegm of righteousness.

⁶Norway doesn't count.