Presenting Antipodean Anonymous Bloggers: The Tongue in Czeech (#2a Aug 2003 AD)
Insomaniacally Informaniac (sic), Media Dragon, is on the hunt, unmasking and honouring bloggers who are serving, for better or for worse, the virtual Antipodean world. The blogscroll was stolen in the middle of the day from the local Parish.
My bohemian licence really just wanted to create something speculation-provoking and perhaps useful and fun.
The same friend who asked me last week whether I deliberately skipped czeching out ABCWatch has also pointed out that the relationship & continuity between the practices of blogging and toilet graffiti is rather strong. Often, there is flaming and counter-flaming around a particular graffiti.
One of the main reasons I went straight to After Grog Blog was that I do not know my Roman alphabet too well since I was brought up on the staple diet of Soviet cyrilic letters (sic).(smile)
Strangely, most of the journalists I seem to admire happen to carry I am from the ABC press badges. As a result, I have a fairly balanced biased for ABC. Without any doubt the ABC has on its books some dead wood, some of the damp leaves have even been decorated with journalistic awards, (but then again Hitler was nominated in the late 1930s for Nobel peace prize.) Still, I believe that Russell Balding inherited an organisation peppered with community minded staff and most programs are blessed with sound walking and talking encyclopaedias.
Conspiracy leaden ecyclopaedia has it that Uncle ABCWatch and bloggers like Prrrrofessor Yupnib are sexed up group of ASIO characters. I assume that in 30 years time the younger generation will examine the validity of other rumours such as sievx. Some are In De-nial that sexing down is also taking place in the virtual world down under.
In a recent entry Unisexed UNCLE ABCWatch denies being the kind of simpleton who saw effects where there are (sic), in fact, only phenomena, and then tried to attach causes to them, he would conclude that Richard Alston's assault on Auntie had had some moderating effect.
Then we read that it's to Miranda Devine's credit that she's defending Auntie, after David Marr's use of his Media Watch pulpit for a gratuitous attack on her.
This is her argument:
There are pockets of audacious bias in the ABC, but similar pockets exist in other media, and appeal largely to the already converted. Fair-minded people apply a mental filter.
But the ABC is also about much more than AM. It's Play School and Bananas In Pyjamas in the mornings when other channels run cartoons in between ads which turn three-year-olds into Coco Pops junkies. The ABC is Angela Catterns and Sally Loane, Richard Glover and James Valentine, providing pleasant, informative, ratings-winning radio. It's The 7.30 Report and Lateline doing a professional job on tough issues. Tony Jones the other night gave Richard Butler a polite but deadly grilling about his flip-flopping position on WMDs. The ABC is Australian Story, consistently the best, most surprising gem on TV.
UNCLE ABCWatch fails to tell us what he expects, wants or is; They-He-She only state(s) what IT... is not:
READER JIM T. HAS BEING (sic) DOING A GASTROPOD, and lifting material, but from Andrew Sullivan rather than the New York Review of Books.
He expects ABCWatch to publish it?
What do you think this is? The Australian?
Presenting Antipodean Bloggers: The Truth Laid Bear (#2 Aug 2003 AD)
What kinds of personae do we make? What relation do these have to what we have traditionally thought of as the 'whole' person? Are they experienced as an expanded self or as separate from the self? Do our real-life selves learn lessons from our virtual personae? Are these virtual personae fragments of a coherent real-life personality?
-Sherry Turkle
media & the net: Paging Alan Anderson Alan of Weblogestan
The value of blogs like Alan Anderson is that they use their blogs as a memory aid, to leave useful URL's for friends and generally as a personal tool. Other people do read it to, and they get an interesting view into their daily rituals, but they couldn't care less if no-one viewed it. Also, these bloggers record of how people go about their Ausie life and as a result future historians will blOrgasmise over the fingerprints so generously typed behind.
· Corrugate aussie accent! [Alan Anderson]
Alan mates and mates and procreates in both virtual and newspaper lands. To Anderson sons life is more common sense, than cutting science. So cut the bull! A mixing pot of tough convict sons are described as mates:
Tim Blair - Aussie journo and decent right-wing bloke.
Tex - He whacks them hard and often.
Gil Shterzer - The Israeli Guy, living on freedom's frontier right next door to the crazies.
EXTRACTS: Good on him:
The Pope is about the only one in Europe who appears to care about those people - and the only one to listen to scientific advisers. Good on him. He has partly redeemed his claim to moral authority in my eyes.
The Bad:
Those Yanks sure know how to throw a BBQ. Throw another Islamofascist on the barbie, lads.
The Funny:
It is with great regret that I announce the capture of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, a.k.a. Comical Ali.
***
Reader: "Alan, you promised to make your site prettier, and all you've done is steal Tim Blair's template."
Alan: "You try holding down a full time job and blogging. Anyhow, you're meant to be reading me for my insightful commentary (cue sniggering), not my choice of colours.
"I wanted this template first, but bloody Blair went and stole it. And I'm only changing to it now because some technophobic reader with a version of Netscape older than I am has complained that he can't load my site. Guess who that was."
Dictionary:
Pissweak cowards or military hawks
Idiosyncrasies: Self-styled "red baiter"
"Oh, but Alan, it's not an actual bomb; you don't know whether he would ever have used the centrifuges, etc, etc."
To which I reply, "Shut up, you leftie morons. The point is that he was hiding stuff, just as we thought. We couldn't know what, precisely because he was hiding it, and Hans Blix wasn't about to excavate the back yard of every scientist in Iraq. But we weren't about to take the risk. Now you've got evidence that he was trying to deceive us, so you can take your leftie whinging and shove it up where it belongs, together with your dole cheque, you parasitic communist losers."
***
My letter in today's Australian:
"UNION criticism of the breaking of the picket line at BHP Steel highlights a fundamental misconception on the part of many Australian protesters about what constitutes "peaceful protest".
I would fight tooth and nail for unionists' right to protest peacefully at a rally or march. But people have a right to enter their place of work. To blockade their access and then cry "violence" when you are removed is disingenuous. The act of blockading another citizen's right of way is itself an act of violence.
It is high time that we became less tolerant of such unlawful behaviour. Police should be instructed to use all necessary force to break picket lines as soon as they are formed. Anything less is a concession that the rule of law can be usurped by mob rule."
Character Stengths:
Gambling is a great Aussie tradition, so it's time for a bet. When will the War on Iraq start? Unfortunately, I can't run a proper gambling competition (stupid laws), at least not openly. Nor do I have much in the way of prizes to offer. So this one will have to be a friendly bet.
Send in your guess of the day that war will be declared. To clarify, this is the day (Washington DC time) that President Bush announces that the military solution is going ahead. Closest guess(es) will at least get a mention and copious praise for the guesser's strategic insight - or blind luck.
Here's a hint. My guess is 10 February.
Weaknesses:
Andrew Bolt wins the prize for quote of the week with his retort to the Victorian Government committee on water usage which came up with this mendacious twist on the totally banal contemporary fascination with the culturally exotic: "something could be learnt by exploring the drought response strategies adopted by indigenous people, plants and animals".
Like what? Getting Melburnians to suck the juice of the pigface? Having us move from waterhole to waterhole? Making us leave our weak behind? Which tribal strategy did the author of this fashionable piety have in mind?
Challenges:
DEFENCE is a form of insurance. As with most insurance, the temptation is to dispense with it. But as September 11 demonstrated to the US, such an approach to matters of national security can have devastating consequences.
Opportunities:
Getting back to first principles, that is. Left and Right should be over; it should be right or wrong; no matter who is making the point whether it is Tim Blair or Tim Dunlop.
Image:
· Amen [ Google]
Quote & Link:
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
· Three Strikes...and [FiremenUnion ]
Doing:
Thinking::Lloyd Evans, attending a convention of young Trots and Maoists in the UK, brings us an observation which accords with my own experience:
The hard Left tend to dress carelessly and without any attention to style. Many are physically ill-favoured too. There were plenty of keen-eyed youngsters around, but I don’t recall a single stunner. Guts, limps, spots, humps, corns, boils, scars, tics: these are marks that distinguish the species.
Reading:·
The Voyage of the Catalpa: A Perilous Journey and Six Irish Rebels' Escape to Freedom [Guardian(UK)]
Loving:
Father Christmas and Easter Bunny
Watching:
WWII movies
Bias:
Even Right of Tim Blair. In response to email correspondence, let me state for the record that I did not mean to imply that I agree with all of the new Governor General's views. In particular, I do not support serious religious education in government schools. With that said, I think that the multiculturalists' obsession with wiping any trace of Easter or Christmas out of the classroom is ridiculous. Those festivals are essentially secular Australian events now, quite apart from their separate existence as Christian religious festivals. Anyone who can take offence at Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny needs to take some happy pills and get over themselves.
Temper:
Alan spits out words like a machine gun in Charlton Heston's hands.
