Grafton Jacaranda Festival, 24 October to 2 November 2008

Time to mark your calendar for Grafton's Jacaranda Festival which has been held each year since 1935.

Markets, street float parade, pipe bands, dancing, fireworks, dragon boat racing, competitons, kids fun, exhibition gardens and an evening ball - just some of the things to enjoy.

Details here.

Photos from Hub Pages

A little Ginger Meggs grafitti

Opened up the local rag to what's become the most important page since Chapman turned it into an ersatz Tele and there lurked the background grafitti within Ginger Meggs:

Why experiment on animals when there's so many politicians around?

Ah Ginge, when all else fails you remind me that everything has its funny side.

So you think you can run a council.....(5)

ABC TV Media Watch alerted us all to an amusing scenario last night.

It seems that National Party stalwart, Neil Marks, may have to face the possibility of an obviously unplanned loss of income if he is elected as a Lismore City councillor and mayor.

Neil Marks presents the breakfast show on Radio 2LM which is owned by Richmond River Broadcasters.

On this show he informed all and sundry of his registration as a candidate in the forthcoming local government elections and granted himself a bit of free air time to broadly outline his ticket.

Neil Marks: National Party is nothing to do with this. The people I am involved with in the, in the ticket have nothing to do with the National Party whatsoever. We are people who are just concerned, who want to see what we call sensible growth for the area... It will be pretty exciting I think and you know, I'll give it my best shot. — 2LM Breakfast, 13th August, 2008

Mr. Marks then came a cropper.

...should Mr Marks be elected to Council his future tenure at the station will be reviewed by 2LM management.— Email statement from Bill Caralis (Chairman, Richard River Broadcasters) to Media Watch, 1st September, 2008

Statement from Richmond River Broadcasters here.

One may remember that Neil Marks stood for National Party preselection in the seat of Page prior to last year's federal election campaign.

Here is Mr. Marks with his Nationals hat barely disguised when interviewing Joe Hockey during that campaign.
Uncle Joe liked it so much he posted it on his own website.

U.S. intelligence wants our cute cat pictures!

A thought from My Heart's in Accra which started this ramble:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

The Cute Cat Theory with notes on political activism and censorship found here.

Meanwhile according to CNet the U.S. intelligence community is not happy with the direction the Internet is taking.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence--and conceivably military--consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. "Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. "We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

It seems that the mighty American security agencies would be bereft if they couldn't keep peeking at all those cute animal pictures (which are such an obvious front for urban terrorists and Taliban supporters) as they are being published on the Net.

Which begs the question of how subversive does the CIA or Homeland Security find the pic below?

Apologies to the dog's owner for making fun of such a sweet pic found at MSNBC News .

Smiling through the greenhouse gas.......

Someone at The Daily Telegraph obviously has a sense of humour.

Tim Blair (a renown climate change sceptic and purveyor of dubious 'coldening' facts) has a blog at this News Limited paper.

Yesterday his webpage featured the above advertisement.

* Click on graphic if Flashplayer freezes

Ch-ching! Rudd's grocery watch list for September

Well the first of the month slipped by without me remembering to click on to that oh so forgettable website, Rudders' Grocery Choice.

Breathless with anticipation, I logged on yesterdee arvo and found the same vacuous information as before - ie., a Basic Staples Basket along with other basket types from unspecified stores somewhere in North-East New South Wales.

Go directly to the national Woolworths site and you can find out the weekly specials in their stores nearest you.

Coles has a similar specials link, as well as Shop Online.

Even Franklins allows you to look up specials.

While Aldi lists its grocery selection.

All have more usable practical information than Grocery Choice, but make no mistake, none of this allows our regional mob any real purchasing choice.

A 100kms round trip to the nearest competitor to your local supermarket makes the whole thing laughable - the fuel costs involved in chasing these 'cheaper' groceries mean that there would be no actual savings.

So, Ch-ching!, once a month Rudders is going to offer us all a slap in the face because his website seemed like a good idea for that day's media sound bite a couple of months back.

In the lands of the seriously weird

• Rumour hits the blogosphere that Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, faked her last pregnancy to give 'birth' to her own grandson. Over 1,000 people comment on DailyKos post since Saturday.

• Obama for America camp contact the Huffington Post and try to make it a federal crime that the Republican camp didn't search the archives of Palin's hometown newspaper before announcing her as McCain running mate. At the same time, Obama campaign doesn't appear to think that sending a Democrat supporter up to Alaska to go through the same archives last weekend was just a little bit excessive.

• Obama and Biden flog a 5 inch "first edition" car magnet:
  

• The world is due to end in 8 days as it is eaten from the inside out according to boffin quoted in The Sun.


• Bloggers finally pointed out the visual and aural irony of the pairing of Obama and Biden. Here, there and everywhere. OBAMA-AND-BIDEN...SAY IT FAST..SOUNDS LIKE OSAMA BIN LADEN....MAYBE ITS JUST ME?

• Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd thinks that publicly threatening to suspend welfare payments made to a family, if one or more of their children is chronically truant, shows no punative intention.

• Advice on looking out for terrorists in the U.K. - if a neighbour can't tell you his exact travel plans he's in trouble:
  

• It has been reported that the Rev. fred Nile has been made national president for life of the Christian Democratic Party, which would make it the least democratic party since One Nation incorporated to keep out Chinese-Australian activists.