Clarence House ban ensures rolling antipodean satire by the Chaser team

The promotional clip



and two of the final no-access-to-the-wedding clips





No wonder Prince Charles issued a ban on using footage of the Windsor-Middleton wedding “in any drama, comedy, satirical or similar entertainment program or content” - The Chaser team's fame had gone before it and someone at the BBC had likely seen the promo and insisted the letter of the broadcasting rights contract be observed.

Still, Clarence House was naive to hope that the matter would end there with no prospect of raw, biting or even downright silly satire surfacing in response and, now the ABC is running the complete clip set on iView for the next twelve days.

Tell an average Australian "No" in an upper-class English accent and the rest is very predictable.

It's International Workers Solidarity Day!

It’s May Day and I’ll have a flower in my cap and be singing Solidarity forever, For the union makes us strong when I go out on the river later – thus giving a nod to fiery Beltane and workers' rights. The fish will be impressed. :-)
Elsewhere the Maritime Union of Australia is keeping up the side for worker solidarity and you can find march details on its website.

Found the flag fluttering at Google Images

OMG! Even Google went crazy

Even Google in Australia went ape
over the marriage of William to Kate

Anony-mice

Yamba

* GuestSpeak is a feature of North Coast Voices allowing Northern Rivers residents to make satirical or serious comment on issues that concern them. Posts of 250-300 words or less can be submitted to ncvguestspeak AT gmail.com.au for consideration.

The strange logic residing between Tony Abbott's ears

Consumer Price Index figure for the March 2011 quarter have been released this week and they show a rise of 3.3% through the year to the March quarter 2011, compared with a rise of 2.7% through the year to the December quarter 2010. A change of 0.6% compared to last year.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics; The most significant price rises this quarter were for automotive fuel (+8.8%), vegetables (+16.0%), deposit and loan facilities (+4.6%), fruit (+14.5%) and pharmaceuticals (+12.5%).

This is Tony Abbott on Wednesday 27 April 2011 courtesy of his own website:

The latest CPI figures show that families are under considerable pressure. I think that it just makes it all the more urgent that the Government reign back its own spending because families under pressure obviously don’t need the kind of interest rate pressure which the Government’s spending spree is contributing to. The other point that ought to be made is that, why make a bad situation worse with a carbon tax and a mining tax? This is a government which is adding to the cost of living pressure on families, particularly with its carbon tax…….
I think that if you look behind the headline statistic you see that one of the big impacts has been fuel, one of the other big impacts has been power. Now, fuel and power haven’t been impacted by the floods and the cyclones. Fuel and power prices will be impacted by the Government’s carbon tax and that’s why I think it’s so important that the people understand that this carbon tax is toxic, this carbon tax will make cost of living pressures worse and what we want from government is sensible decisions, not decisions that make a bad situation worse

Er, run that by me again? Forget that floods and cyclones have resulted in expensive fruit and vegetables across the board or that pharmaceuticals have risen yet again. It is rising interest rates, fuel and power costs that have really pushed up the latest CPI figures according to Tony’s calculations. And those last two categories? Well, domestic economic reality that has seen electricity costs rise inexorably for years or those international market forces driving the price of a barrel of oil are not part of the Abbott equation - these current rises have no structural cause he can see and any future rise will be all the fault of a carbon price mechanism that hasn’t even been introduced to the Australian Parliament as a bill yet.

One of the most offensive aspects of the Leader of the Opposition’s political character is the fact that he obviously thinks the average voter is so stupid that any old lie told often enough will get him into The Lodge by 2013.

One of the reasons why mature Australian native trees in your garden and no dogs in the yard lead to unique moments

Plant a koala-friendly tree today

Advance Australia the Plastic

I was having a yarn with a local shopkeeper the other day when he remarked that most of his over-the-counter sales involved plastic.
I was rather surprised, being addicted to the feel of a roll of readies myself, but it was an observation borne out by the Australian Crime Commission’s latest report this year:

“Card transactions have continued to increase substantially over the past decade.
For example, during that period credit card transactions have increased from 42.8 million to 118.8 million per month.
Australians spend A$17.8 billion per month on credit cards and A$11.3 billion per month on EFTPOS transactions, and they withdraw A$12.4 billion per month from ATMs……
More than 657 000 cases of card fraud on Australian issued credit and debit cards were reported in Australia during 2009.
The value of credit card fraud was estimated at 57.15 cents per $1000 transacted in 2009. The value of debit card fraud during that year was estimated at 9.43 cents per $1000 transacted.”

A great idea for all Australian schools

An idea that's being promoted in the home of great ideas, the United States of America - of course! - is absolutely brilliant. And, with a bit of lateral thinking it can to be slightly modified and readily applied right here in Australia. In the US the idea is being promoted in military circles, but here in Australia our schools seem the obvious place to apply the idea.

So, what's the bright idea?

Groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large — and largely underground — population of nonbelievers in the military.

Jason Torpy, a former Army captain who is president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, said humanist chaplains would do everything religious chaplains do, including counsel troops and help them follow their faiths. But just as a Protestant chaplain would not preside over a Catholic service, a humanist might not lead a religious ceremony, though he might help organize it.

An atheist group at Fort Bragg called Military Atheists and Secular Humanists, or MASH, has asked the Army to appoint an atheist lay leader at the base. A new MASH chapter at Fort Campbell, Ky., is planning to do the same as are atheists at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

Read the full report about this this in The New York Times here .

A final word on Trump's 'birther' claims

Long form of Obama birth certificate
released by the White House 27th April 2011

That faded playboy Donald Trump became the butt of more than a few jokes this month as he megaphoned those ridiculous old claims concerning U.S. President Barack Obama's birth certificate, which had been released to the media in short form during the 2008 presidential election and which was verified at the time by FactCheck.org.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – A threat to the fledgling presidential campaign of Donald Trump emerged today, as a group of activists charged that Mr. Trump is not eligible to hold the nation’s highest office because his hair does not originate from the U.S.

The group, who call themselves “Balders,” claim that the hair-like substance that crowns Mr. Trump’s head is from a foreign country, which would mean that the candidate is less than one hundred percent American.

“Time and time again, Donald Trump has refused to produce a certificate of authenticity for his hair,” said Leeann Selwyn, a leading Balder. “This is tantamount to a comb-over of the truth.”

But if in fact Mr. Trump’s distinctive mane turns out to be of foreign origin, such a revelation need not be fatal to his presidential hopes, says Professor Davis Logsdon, who has studied the history of presidential hair at the University of Minnesota.

“Remember, several of our greatest early presidents, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had hair that originated elsewhere,” Mr. Logsdon says. “The only thing that could kill Trump politically is if his hair turns out to be from France.”

At a GOP event in Iowa, Mr. Trump made no reference to the Balders controversy, and instead sounded an upbeat theme: “If I am given the chance to do the same magic I did for NBC, America will be the number four country in the world.”

In a piece of good news for Mr. Trump, a new poll showed a majority of likely voters agreeing with the statement, “Donald Trump being sworn in as President would be a great last scene in a Planet of the Apes remake.”

Not content with making himself a laughing stock over Barack Obama's place of birth, the trolling Trump then went after the U.S. President's academic history.

NEW YORK (AP) — Real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate."I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."

After being shot down in flames on the birther question Trump tried to run the line that he forced the President to release his birth certificate, but in reality he joins those on the Birther Scorecard who fell to earth in flames and a somewhat embarrassed Jerome Corsi whose book has just been pwned by a president.

I look forward to the next Borowitz installment!

Of course those rightwing American nutters aren't making everyone laugh, as correspondence between the White House and Dept. of Health in Hawaii shows:

As does this MNSBC opinion piece accusing Trump of spewing racial hatred:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/42790588#42790588
And that's the last word.

Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day.

With parts of the NSW North Coast exceeding average April rainfall before the month was out and the ground starting to sour in low spots, it's certainly been a soggy Autumn for many and it doesn’t look any better for May through to the end of July.

Bureau of Meteorology mapping

“The chances of receiving above median rainfall during the May to July period are between 60 and 75% over north eastern New South Wales and the southern half of Queensland, with the strongest odds on the Queensland/New South Wales border region (see map). Such odds mean that for every ten years with similar ocean patterns to those currently observed, about six to eight May to July periods would be expected to be wetter than average over these areas, while about two to four would be drier.”