Yamba cousins selected for Commonwealth Games in Delhi in October

Cousins Cameron Pilley and Donna Urquhart have been selected in the Australian squash team that will compete at the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Pilley, aged 27, and Urquhart, aged 23, are local products who started their squash experiences at the Yamba Squash Centre.

According to Squash Info Pilley's current ranking in world men's squash is 16th whilst Urquhart's ranking in women's squash is 18th.

Other members of the 2010 Australian Commonwealth Games squash team are:

Stewart Boswell 31 ACT
Ryan Cuskelly 22 NSW
Aaron Frankcomb 25 Tas
David Palmer 34 NSW
Kasey Brown 24 NSW
Lisa Camilleri 27 Qld
Melody Francis 21 Vic
Amelia Pittock 27 Vic

To further emphasise the success of squash on the NSW north coast it should be noted that Ryan Cuskelly is from Evans Head and Kasey Brown is from Taree.

Keeping track of all those election campaign leaflets in 2010

Citizens Electoral Council leaflet understood to have been authorized

by R. Barwick on behalf of Craig Isherwood

At last! Somewhere to go to check out those 2010 federal election campaign leaflets.
You can even upload images of those examples that are beginning to litter your own letterbox.
ElectionLeaflets.org.au

Browse at your leisure and spot those breaches of the Commonwealth Electoral Act as they are posted online.

NASA turns poet

 

Rumbles without sound

Auroras rain down
Magnetic fields shake
Beware the spacequake

Vortices swirl
plasma a'twirl
Richter predicts
a magnitude six

This month NASA decided to explain spacequakes

with information, graphs and 

a little poetry. 

Go Gillie!

I'm more than a tad tired of all that nonsense about Oz Prime Minister Julia Gillard being an unmarried, childless and godless sheila, so I was glad when Crikey's Bernard Keane took a scalpel to the mainstream media:

"The growing media obsession with both Julia Gillard's physical appearance and her marital status could be dismissed as indicative of both the essential inanity of the press and its casual sexism. That's certainly enough as it is. The media subjects female politicians to a blatant double standard, requiring them to conform to standards on physical presentation and lifestyle choices that are never applied to men. Moreover, it's not as if the media perpetuates a single stereotype to which female politicians must conform. Instead, it's a constantly changing set of requirements that means there's always something to criticise and the media always wins. Look too good, you're condemned as vacuous, or reliant on your appearance. Don't look good enough, you're disparaged as unattractive. Don't have a family, you're deliberately barren. Have a family, you're a career-obsessed harridan neglecting your kids. But it's more than that. The Australian yesterday launched a series of personal attacks on the Prime Minister, with the clear aim of ridiculing her and delegitimising her as a political figure. It complements an effort by Liberal Party figures to attack Gillard over her childlessness and her de facto marital status."

Go read the rest (with links to Albrechtsen, Stewart & Legge's sly nastiness) here.

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

First Dog on the Moon dun these at Crikey

Political Bad Taste Awards July 2010

And the Winner is.......

Click on images to enlarge

"I vote for freedom of worship if the worship is of Jesus Christ or The Jewish God anyone else well they are worshipping a false god anyway so who cares."
"Voting should only be voluntary for Liberal and National voters the rest can not bother since with every vote they bring the nation closer to the brink of disaster and closer to the hands of a (sic)muslim country."
"I am going to win this seat. I claim it as mine and when I get in I will give my votes all of them to God who is on the side of the Liberal Right" Liberal candidate for Chifley David Barker on now deleted Facebook page news.com.au 25 July 2010

Second place.......

"Wayne Swan is to surpluses what Paris Hilton is to celibacy they remember it once existed but they'll never see it again" Sitting Liberal MP and ex-SNAG Joe Hockey The Australian 20 July 2010

Third place.......

Mr Schonfelder lashed out at Mr Abbott's "very strong religious views and views on abortion ... sex before marriage ... all very conservative and not necessary", telling the Western Port News they were "influencing people to take their own lives".
Labor candidate for Flinders Adrian Schonfelder reported in The Sun-Herald 20 July 2010

Runners up.......

"The whole range of religions have made contact with my office to say they are very concerned about the stance of the Prime Minister, basically being anti-God. They don't like the fact we have got a godless Prime Minister." Sitting Liberal MP Don Randall The West 26 July 2010 [For those who can't believe their eyes the audio of these statements is at http://j.mp/arPfVh]

"In probably a year's time, just what a holocaust this will be.''Federal Liberal candidate for Ballarat Mark Banwell using a WWII genocide term to describe Labor's school building program 21 July 2010

"I quite like the Julia Gillard accent"
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott remarking on the accent of a contestant who was dressed like a hillbilly on the television show Hey Hey It's Saturday on 21 July 2010

Historical bad taste......

"about as much use as Linda Lovelace with her mouth closed’’ Tony Abbott speaking about Prince Charles in 1982 The Age 25 July 2010

Black Ops bad taste......

Those members of Tony Abbott's personal campaign team who appear to be playing the Gillard gender & lifestyle card 'off the record' with journalists, while their leader publicly condemns this type of comment.