If my animals could vote in 2010?

If my animals could vote in 2010?

The dogs Blair and Tom would definitely be voting for Julia Gillard. She's a fine alpha bitch who got rid of the top dog and obviously knows were all the bones are buried.

The bathroom cat Venus would vote for Tony Abbott. He, like cats, knows that the world is divided into masters and slaves and how quickly he assured the big miners that his government would not tax them shows he respects the masters.

The goldfish think that the Greens have the best policies for them. The Greens are for a good environmental flow for all waterways and they have the kindest immigration policies - both these points are very important for foreign fish.

All the birds have agreed that they will put the Shooters Party at the bottom of their ticket.

Most of the geese will be voting for Family First since it pretends to be the moral majority. This falls in line with the unmated geese’s habit of attempting to disrupt the mating of any partnered birds.

The chooks are definitely swinging voters, they are keeping their cards and feathers close to their wishbones.

Arnold the poddy calf is still undecided; I think he's been talking to the chooks.

Original goose graphic

2010 Election Campaign Day 14 - it wouldn't be real without the Interpretive Dance Bandicoot

First Dog on the Moon dun these at Crikey

Bee-have

I am arranging a combined birthday party out at the farm. My mother is turning 80, two days before my Uncle reaches 92 and the youngest son is 26. So I have been on the phone ringing friends and relatives to inform them of the event.

I was talking to one set of Queensland relatives who live on a squatter selection that has been in the family since well before Federation.

When the selection was taken up in the late 1800’s the family arrived on site with bee hives, the only reliable sweetening agent that could be produced in the area.

One of my grandmother's fond memories was going to rob the bees with her mother - she was in charge of the smoker - and eating fresh honeycomb with the honey dribbling down her chin. Something I too have had the pleasure of experiencing.

About 20 years ago the neighbouring selection was purchased by the National Parks and according to the rello’s they have been quite good neighbours.
A few bush fires between friends were not enough to sour the relationship.

The month before I phoned he had received a letter from the National Parks stating that they had just became aware that he had European honey bees on his property, and that he is obliged to keep his bees out of the national park.

He wrote back to the parks official that he had gone down to the bees and read them the letter and, had even taken a map to show the bees so there would be no confusion about the borders between their land and the national park.

The bees, he wrote, have agreed to keep off the national park if the national park stops frog, lizards, birds, possums and other assorted critters from coming over to the hives and eating their sisters and raiding their honey.

He had just received the reply to his letter; it stated that the animals in the national park were wild animals and the authority could not control their behaviour and therefore could not stop them from entering his land and raiding his bee hives.
He was wondering how he was going to break this news to the bees.

They will be attending the birthday party - just look for the group bringing the mead.

Bee aninimation from Animation Buddy

The Great Cup Hunt

The last couple of months I've been lost in a mind fog.
I'm finding that I have the attention span of a goldfish with Alzheimer's. Nice rock....nice rock....[thunk]....where did that big hard thing come from?

My vagueness was brought home to me when I went to get a mug for my morning cuppa. There were only three mugs facing me.
Since I usually have about eighteen mugs in the cupboard I had to wonder where all the other mugs had got to?
I've never seen mugs migrate north for the winter before. Was this a new phenomena? Something to do with global climate change?

Then it occurred to me that every morning I make myself a cuppa, go down to feed Arnold the calf and then wander around the farm checking on things or down to the garden to work. So off I go on six cylinders, with only two firing.

Sure enough there are three cups sitting like nesting birds around Arnold's stall. The cup hunt is now on in earnest.

Next stop the garden. Each tap yields a cup, two on various garden posts and another one that had fallen off its wooden perch. I’m on the right track.

So then I walk the yard fence and this comes up trumps with another five. By the time I get to the main gate I have a bucket load of cups, a sense of destiny and a great hunger for breakfast.

After breakfast I unload the cups ready for washing and something occurs to me - where is the mug with the fish pattern I had with me this morning when I went on the cup hunt?

Pic from Google Images

Stop the world - I want to get off!

Ever wondered how we're all going to respond to an increasingly hostile physical world?
What path we'll go down as we confront the dire consequences of our own collective actions?
In the face of one monumental environmental disaster the only psychological defence left for some is laughter:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – At a conference of oil leak experts in Washington today, attendees proposed plugging the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico with executives of BP, the company responsible for the catastrophic spill.

"We've tried containment domes, rubber tires, and even golf balls," said William Cathermeyer of the National Oil Leakage Institute, a leading consultancy in the field of oil leaks. "Now it's time to shove some BP executives down there and hope for the best."

Submerging the oil company executives thousands of feet below the ocean's surface could be a "win-win" situation, Mr. Cathermeyer said.

"Best-case scenario, they plug the leak," he said. "And at the very least, they'll shut the fuck up."

But even as the oil leak experts proposed their unorthodox solution, environmental expert Marilyn Sufranski warned of the possible negative consequences of plugging the oil leak with BP executives.

"The Gulf of Mexico is slimy enough already," she said.

Lesser books you may have missed

Where ever I looked in the Oz blogosphere last week we were all being so deadly serious, so 'twas a relief to come across this #lesserbooks tag at Twitter.
Here's a small selection of titles on offer:

A Basement Master's Guide (Second Edition)
The Color Mauve
Pedagogy of the Depressed
A Clear and Present Annoyance
The Scarlet Debtor
Diary of a Cake Fiend
Tupac Kills A Mockingbird
Horton Hears a Where
War and Peas
Prude and Prejudice
The Maltseser Falcon
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Montana
Gone With the Breeze
Apprehension and Disapproval In Las Vegas
The Lion, The Witch and the Cupboard
The 38 steps
The Norwich Outpatient
Lard Times
Thus Spoke Uncle Bert

Which Witch? or Rumours To Spell By

The ladies at the croquet club have been looking at me with strange sideways glances since Bob’s encounter with the bunyip.
The story spread faster than dog fleas.
Bob’s fight with the dark dastardly bunyip grew to heroic proportions.

It seems my spell expanded as well. It is now known that I danced naked around the shed while reciting words from an ancient mystic language, only the last part of which could be understood by Bob the Valiant. Gigantous robusta meaning big strong spell was what he heard chanted. {Not grevillea robusta the botanical name for silky oak}.

An esky full of beer was made to taste like water, but Bob was safe in the shed, not a bunyip in sight and the next morning he emerges at dawn feeling great with hardly a hangover at all.
It seems that spell must have had hangover protection properties as well!

Graphic from Google Images

How we found out that there is a bunyip in the creek

Possibly a true story.....

The day was just like many others. Dusk was falling and the frogs were warming up for the night-time chorus.

Then we heard a strange yodelling sound and looking down towards the flat we saw someone running up the creek bank and falling into the long grass.
So the hubby and I jumped into the paddock basher and motored down to see what was going on.

Lying in the paddock was the next door neighbour "Bob" as naked as the day he was born. The smell on his breath left no doubt that a large amount of alcohol had been consumed (and possibly a assortment of other rather more illegal substances).

He was mumbling about being attacked by a large, black, hairy bunyip.
So on the lookout for Bob’s clothes and the bunyip, I grabbed a bucket and headed down to the creek to get some water as our neighbour was not in good straits.

After we cleaned him up we loaded him into the Torana and drove him home.
His wife strongly objected to him entering the house, so Hubby took him into the shed. A couple of horse blankets on the hay and Bob was as snug as a bug in a rug.

On the back veranda I found an esky with one long neck and quite a few empties.
I filled these empties up with water, replaced the screw caps and took them down to the shed.

Bob was regaling Hubby about the bunyip and how it attacked him: his heroic efforts to fight the dreaded beast and how he escaped its clutches.

Seeing me or more likely the beer, Bob insisted that he needed drink. I gave Hubby the only bottle of beer left in the esky which he and Bob shared while I went back to the house.

When I returned Bob was still worried that the bunyip was coming to get him, so Hubby had convinced him that I knew a sure fire bunyip stopping spell.
Glaring at both of them, I told them that I could cast a bunyip proof barrier around the shed, but if I did both of them will have to stay in there till dawn. Hubby fairly bolted out of the shed.

In casting my sure fire spell I walked around the shed reciting all of the plant botanical names I could think of - finishing with a rousing chorus of “grevillea robusta, GREVILLEA ROBUSTA, GREVILLEA ROBUSTA!"

Bob looked happy when I completed the circuit of the shed and the spell was in place, but as we started to leave his doubts grew.

It was then I remembered that a side effect of this spell is that it makes beer go flat and taste like water. Bob was keen to try the beer and to his surprise the spell worked. He was very pleased when I counselled that if he needed to check if the spell was still working all he had to do was have another bottle of 'beer' from the esky.

Would you believe it we finally arrived home in time to feed the Angus poddy calf.

We're laughing now but......

We can laugh at the joke and say never happen or only in America, but.......

Murray Hill Incorporated is Running for Congress
Corporations are people too!

Until now, corporations only influenced politics with high-paid lobbyists and backroom deals. But today, thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, corporations now have all the rights the founding fathers meant for us. It was their dream to build the best democracy money can buy.

That's why Murray Hill Incorporated is taking democracy's next step — running for Congress. Join us and build a vision for the future we can all be proud of. Vote Murray Hill Incorporated for Congress!
Vote Murray Hill Incorporated for Congress!

Get a load of the U.S. Supreme Court judgement which caused this tongue in cheek announcement that Murray Hill is fielding a candidate at the next American election.
Apparently the American courts have moved one step closer to according corporations full citizenship rights by giving companies the same First Amendment right of free speech as a person - therefore a right to unlimited spending on political advocacy during election campaigns.
Score in 'The Best Free Speech That Money Can Buy' Contest:
U.S. Government 0 Big Business 10

Snapshot : Murray Hill Inc video

Flacco tells Cardinal George Pell a thing or two **

Talking an amble down one digital pathway I came across this in ABC National Radio's archives for the Science Show:

"Flacco: Now, it has come to my attention that Archbishop George Pell has threatened to excommunicate Catholic MPs if they support therapeutic cloning, and this has made me wonder how the church stands on the subject of cloned foods, for it is no secret that no matter what your faith (or lack of it), you've been eating cloned fruit all your life. Bananas, oranges, even Eve's apple was a clone, not to mention giant strawberries. You see, these foods have been modified over 6,000-odd years of agriculture.

So would this mean that Catholic vegetarians could be excommunicated for eating therapeutically cloned fruit? Basically I think that George Pell is a therapeutically cloned fruit. And perhaps there is more behind this anti-cloning crusade, for it is only hunters and gatherers who eat anything close to food in its original form, and without foods being genetically modified, well, the planet could only support a few odd million human inhabitants.

So perhaps it is George's plan to rid the planet of all non-Catholics and a few excommunicated upstarts, therefore leaving the Earth cleared for Pell and his cronies as opposed to us clonies. So to counter this and prevent further bad puns like that I suggest the unreligious must stand up for the clones, we must build an ark to house all our cloned flora and fauna and then lead them one by one onto this ark to be flung to a new planet to self-replicate in peace.

And it occurs to me that perhaps God himself is the original therapeutic clone; he lives alone, no need for a relationship, made us all in his image. We are all clones of God! How about that, George! If you yourself are a therapeutic clone of God, then perhaps you will have to excommunicate yourself. Not such a bad thing really, for if the Catholic Church would stop all this excommunicating it could then feel free to indulge in its opposite. And the opposite of 'excommunicate' is to communicate. Amen.

Robyn Williams: And it starts this week of course. Monsignor Flacco being typically inconvenient and annoying."

** This post counts as my contribution to North Coast Voices efforts to keep Monsanto & Co.'s blog monitor in full-time employment. Yup, I'm laffing at you Mista Missie Mons!

First Dog On The Moon takes the mickey out of Monsanto with Canolabees

First Dog On The Moon cartoon from Crikey
5 October 2009
Click on image to enlarge

* This post is part of North Coast Voices' effort to keep Monsanto's blog monitor (affectionately known as Mr. Monsanto) in long-term employment.

One American perspective on Obama's response to Korean nuclear gamesmanship

U.S. comedian Andy Borowitz takes a look at Obama's response to recent events in Korea:

One day after North Korea launched a successful test of a nuclear weapon, President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with "the strongest possible adjectives."

In remarks to reporters at the White House, Mr. Obama said that North Korea should fear the "full force and might of the United States' arsenal of adjectives" and called the missile test "reckless, reprehensible, objectionable, senseless, egregious and condemnable."

Standing at the President's side, Vice President Joseph Biden weighed in with some tough adjectives of his own, branding North Korean President Kim Jong-Il "totally wack and illin'."

Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test "supercilious and jejune," leading some in diplomatic circles to worry that the U.S. might be running out of appropriate adjectives with which to craft its response.

But President Obama attempted to calm those fears, saying that the United States was prepared to "scour the thesaurus" to come up with additional adjectives and was "prepared to use adverbs" if necessary.

"Let's be clear: we are not taking adverbs off the table," Mr. Obama said. "If the need arises, we will use them forcefully, aggressively, swiftly, overwhelmingly and commandingly."

More from Andy Borowitz here.

It was a Goose Waterloo

The geese have met their Waterloo. Defeat was absolute and humiliating and it couldn't have happened at a better time.

Just when they had become totally overbearing and their confidence level had reached its peak, disaster struck in the form of Black Neck Storks or Jabiru as they are locally known.

Each year around this time the storks fly in with the newly-fledged young from their nearby nesting sites.
This year the parents arrived with two youngsters that small they still had their L plates on - the landing was not pretty.

The adults then wandered down the swamp for a bit of quality parent alone time, while the kids played in the shallows.

The geese obviously did not see the whole family arrive but they soon spotted the two youngsters, so en mass they marched down to put these intruders to flight.
The plan was going well, the geese had them surrounded.

The name calling was in full voice when one of the stork parents decided that the barnyard bullies had over stepped the mark and walked back from down the other end of the swamp.
It was no contest, the stork walked through the ranks of geese which fled in all directions.

A small group of geese tried to regather in the middle of the swamp.
This was the chance the black swans had been waiting for; two pairs of swans executed a beautiful pincer movement from the sides that sent the geese straight into the area where the storks were waiting.

This time the youngsters decided that it was their turn to chase the geese which they did with glee.

The geese ended up in the shed paddock, they have been there for two days.
Their dreams of farm domination in tatters around their webbed feet.

Previous post in the Geese Saga:
Worrying times under this feathered fascism
Goose stepping in all this rain.....

LOLing over Q&A political definitions

Thanks to Mark Newton's tweet for this heads up about ABC TV's Q & A Political Dictionary

Some prime examples:

Abbotomised (adj) to abbotomise (verb): quasi medical procedure to stimulate the faith based areas of the brain. by Q&A

Apple zealot (noun): A person who always complains of a 'PC bias' from moderators. These people obviously do not like PC's. They prefer macs. by bjorn989

Asprin Election (adj): A double dissolution of parliament. by bjorn989

Buswell (verb): To cause a humiliating blow to yourself.
eg. "He was doing alright until he Buswelled himself." by Kevin 11

Garretted (adj): to have ones views silenced by the system. for example when a strong icon of a certain movement enters a political party and is Garretted into taking the party line. by generationwise

Heffernistic (adj): pertaining to the tendency to forcibly interrupt a rival's press conference to make a political point; also the ability to engage in furious public argument with those ostensibly on your side (see Joyce, Senator B.) by Q&A

Joyceful (colloquial): as in "I've had a joyceful…" often muttered by Bill Heffernan in times of stress. by Q&A

Kevined (verb): as in " all I asked was a simple question and suddenly I found myself kevined" - ancient chinese art of lulling political opponents into paralysis by reciting mysterious and incomprehensible jargon without drawing breath. Can be fatal. by Q&A

Neal (verb): to cause sudden and extreme injury. Eg: his career was going well until he was Nealed in the iguanas. by Q&A

Turnbully (adj): to attack people for being like yourself. by Matthew O

Sandy Gandhi provides a good laugh

Australia’s most ‘Easterly Indian’, Sandy Gandhi of Byron Bay, was a highlight on Australia’s Got Talent recently.

Click here to watch Sandy.

Also read Far North Coaster's interview with Sandy here.

pic: Far North Coaster