But We Should Emulate Barnaby Joyce!

16 August 2006

Last night that vanguard of investigative journalism, Today Tonight, took time out from their usual stories on The Neighbours From Hell, Girls As Young As Twelve Getting Pregnant To Cash In On The Baby Bonus, and Heartless Companies/Scam Artists Victimising The Elderly, to present a new expose: Porker Politicians. Yes, the literal fat cats in Federal Parliament setting a bad example for the nation. The ones they particularly focused on were Joe Hockey, Kim Beazley, and Amanda Vanstone. The show's recognised expert popped up, announcing in a voice faintly quivering with indignation, "Politicians are role models."

No, I'm sorry. Any young (or not young!) person who uses Amanda Vanstone for a role model has much greater problems to worry about than their weight.

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Sometimes I wonder if people simply need something to complain about.
Today is a beautiful winter day, sunny and warm. Yet this morning as I stood at the bus stop I watched the cars go past for about five minutes. And just about every car that went by had its windows up and the air conditioning on, trying to create inside the car the pleasant temperature outside.

And yet I'd guess pretty much all of the drivers have complained about high petrol prices! It's madness, but there it is.

~~~~~

As a footnote to yesterday's post, I said that whatever the world thinks of America, we don't hate Americans. And I've seen another stunning reason why. On Monday night Major Michael Mori appeared on Enough Rope. Major Mori is the US Marine Corps defence counsel for David Hicks, still detained at Guantanamo Bay without charge after nearly five years. I thought I knew the full David Hicks story; I was wrong. Hicks's saving grace is the kind of man Major Mori is. I cannot possibly do justice to his eloquence and humanity, so please read his words for yourself.
5 comments

5 comments:

  1. sikamikanico16/08/2006, 10:59

    Interestingly, when I ran this post through the spell checker, it suggested "functions" for "Vanstone".

    I've been trying to think of a scenario where I might have typed Vanstone when I meant to write functions, but I just can't.

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  2. Asthixias16/08/2006, 22:58

    Of course people want to be unhappy. It's the Australian way - it's what tall Poppy is all about. Let's shoot down the successful by taking cheap shots at how they look. There are far more intelligent ways to criticize Vanstone without pointing to the fact that she looks like an Ogre - but we are talking about commercial television here.

    Let's assign a function to Vanstone. A mathematical function. How about the negative momentum operator, -ihd/dt. A negative number multiplied by an imaginary number, multipled by a very small contribution, then differentiated over time.

    Apply the Vanstone to any function or parameter and you end up with a very small negative number which eventually becomes zero. Seems strangely appropriate.

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  3. Omni17/08/2006, 07:57

    My husband always runs the A/C if I'm not in the car, and it drives me NUTS-he has no sense of financial responsibility!! (How do I know what he does? Because every time I AM in the car and he turns the key, the A/C comes on full blast, grrrrrrrrrrr.)

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  4. sikamikanico17/08/2006, 10:43

    Asthixias - you're talking to the woman who flunked year 12 maths and barely passed economics at uni...

    Omni - my dad actually used to go around the house (and it was a big house) turning lights on in all the rooms when he returned from work! (And being a self-righteous teenager, I'd follow him around turning them all off again!)

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  5. Asthixias18/08/2006, 03:28

    Sorry matey. I think blogs should have more maths in them. It is the universal language, after all :)

    ReplyDelete

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