This week’s spat between John Howard and Peter Costello over the prime ministership is all over the media, so no need for me to comment. But, thanks to Crikey I was reminded of one of Costello’s wond’rous snarky interviews — from 2003, again on the subject of the Liberal party leadership…
Cats that look like Hitler
This week’s website which simply had to exist: Cats that look like Hitler. (Courtesy of Tim Bray.)
David Hicks, Australian larrikin
Whatever you think about the political issues, Australian David Hicks, currently a long-term guest of the US government at the exclusive Guantanamo Bay health resort, does seem to have a sense of humour.
As reported in Crikey today (though not included on the free-to-view website), Hicks has been stirring the pot in a typically Australian fashion.
Hicks obviously speaks some of the language of the people with whom he’s lived, trained and fired weapons, but many of his comrades had little or no English when they arrived at Guantanamo. So they begged Hicks for knowledge of suitably dark and vicious curses they could hurl at their infidel American jailers, something that would really annoy the Servants of Satan?
The guards were subsequently met with an enraged chorus from the “worst of the worstâ€: “Gidday mate howareyergoin’, gidday mate howareyergoin’, gidday mate howareyergoin’“
I wonder what the guards made of that!
Hijacking the Craving Brain
According to a brief story from New Scientist:, researchers at US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism: in Bethesda, Maryland, figured out how just triggering the memories of cocaine use can set off cravings in former addicts. It’s all about that magic word “dopamine” again…
SBS Less Tabloid on Meth?
Back in March I complained about current affairs program Four Corners’ tabloid screeching about methamphetamine, and published follow-up comments. This week SBS has a go. Will it be less tabloid?
Winter Solstice Name Day 25
“Oh, no mate, I wasn’t Stilgherrian until after that was taken. For my student card, so that’d be… March, maybe February. Stilgherrian wasn’t until Winter Solstice…”
25 years ago today!
Daggy photo, eh? Am I scared or was I trying for cool and moody, somehow? Scared, I reckon. I was too nerdy to even know how to look moody, let alone actually achieve a significant level of floppy-haired angst. Now Stephen… now he pulls that off so well. But then he lives in Melbourne, it’s “of the place”.
Sydney doesn’t have the sandstone Victorian for a fully grey, Londonesque, Londonangstridden pout, 30% eye shadow and 70% the precisely-edited slow-motion curl of a designer black trench coat. Not with any genuine sense of ennui, anyway.