Now I am become Cate Blanchett, Destroyer of Worlds

Cate Blanchett sums up the importance of the arts:

Our job is to change reality, to challenge it, not prove it and explain it.

Change reality. Right. Glad we've got that out of the way. It gets better:

But there is more. We do more than all that. We must remember the arts do more than just that. We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

Change governments? History? Gravity? Reality itself? And all that at the risk of her own life? What does Miss Blanchett do in her spare time?

Frankly, I think she's overreaching herself here. In all my years as an actor and writer my performances, plays, and stories have only resulted in a cabinet reshuffle in the Balkans, the shortening of the Franco-Prussian War by four days, a 0.002 percent increase in the gravitational pull of Sirius, and a slight reorganisation of the space-time continuum resulting in a minor alteration of the strong nuclear force. As to risk, I don't know about my life, but my ulcer has been acting up over the past week.

Maybe Oscars are some sort of force multiplier. But then, Miss Blanchett isn't one of those "unimportant" people eking out their "brief, limited, unimportant lives."

Lord love a duck.

Droughtgate

Now it's just getting silly.

Rotating house

Been there. Done that. Lost the keys.

Duel dud

Winner of the Most Disappointing Headline Award.

It seemed so hopeful; full of the promise that Mr. Crowe had graduated from flinging telephones to the Big Time of violent eccentricity–especially with the promise that the combatants would be mounted on bicycles. Unfortunately, things unravelled faster than the Christmas jumper my mother in law knitted for me. There are rules to duelling, after all. Was Mr. Crowe of noble birth? I don't think so. And being an actor, he can't possibly be ranked as a gentleman. Worse, his opponent was a journalist, whom everyone knows is more properly flogged with a horsewhip than fought. Then it turned out that said journalist is a woman. That put the whole contest quite beyond the pale and would very likely have got Mr Crowe blackballed from the better clubs.

Then I discover that this wasn't "breakfast for two and coffee for one", but a damnable cycle race.

Mr Crowe will, of course, be contacted by my seconds in the morning and he may have his choice of weapons. Bicycles excepted.

Not surprised

On Friday, the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex,Canberra, Australia,sent out more than 25,000 messages to the extrasolar planet Gliese 581d. It was full of the usual "Hello, we welcome you in peace and hope you can help us with our problems" rubbish*, but we here at EI have the exclusive clip of the return message from the beings of Gliese 581d:

*My message was: "We are coming on with fire and sword; laying waste to all before us. Surrender, if you wish to live and we will roar with laughter at your cowardice." It didn't make the cut for some reason.

RESULT!

In England, dancing in the streets, in Australia, black armbands.

Wallaby crop circles

According to the BBC, wallabies getting stoned on poppies and making crop circles.

This is more of a breakthrough than you might think. We not only have opium poppies growing wild in Britain, owing to some local councils who didn't read the seed packets properly, but there are also wallabies living on the Yorkshire Moors. They're good fun. You can always tell a dog who'd come across one because even very large bunnies tend not to punch one in the nose and it's always worth a laugh down the pub to look mystified while some rambler from down south tries to reveal that he thought he saw a kangaroo that afternoon.

Then we find out they're responsible for all that mashed-down corn as well. Now all we need to do is find out if wallabies were around during the Bronze Age and we'll have Stonehenge sorted out as well.

Stop the presses!

Werribee Banner headline:

Naked man found in bath

The slowest news day ever.

Bushbunker

For those years when Bonfire Night gets completely out of hand.

A Leap Forward

Thanks to this great Tasmanian invention, when you pick up tomorrow's newspaper it won't just seem like a load of Wombat poo, it will be.

Cattledog Castaway

An Australian cattledog reunited with her owners after being castaway on a desert isle for four months.

Excuse me, I've a cinder in my eye.

Salt Declared Doubleplus Ungood

First they came for the cigarettes and I said nothing, then they came for the fat and I said nothing...

130,000 Inflatable Breasts Lost at Sea

Some stories need no comment.

Swimming with Crocodiles

This would be impressive, except a) they're sober and b) they're behind Plexiglas.

Australia, how far have you fallen?

Save the Planet(TM); Eat a Kangaroo

Scientists in Australia claim that eating kangaroos will fight global warming because 'roos don't fart greenhouse gases. I would have thought that since cows do, eating more beef would be the answer.

Sounds like propaganda from Big Kangaroo to me.

Green Logic

STOP PRESS

Television commercials cause global warming. Global warming pressure groups air television commercials. Therefore, global warming pressure groups cause global warming.

Save the Planet™!

Roboshepherd

Australia is investigating how to use robot helicopters to herd cattle.

Carl the Cattle Dog and Little Ann the Australian Shepherd lodge official protest.

Hillbilly Science

Australian scientists proclaim that it's okay for first cousins to procreate.

This is why we don't let scientists decide issues of morality.

Breakfast of DEATH

According to an Australian "environmental health researcher" with no grasp of palaeopathology or even basic epidemiology, global warming will turn your morning corn flakes into a bowl of crunchy killer madness.

Death Star

Astronomers at the University of Sydney have discovered that,

A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

Somehow it makes rototilling the garden a bit pointless.

Mmmmm... Ham

Thieves in Australia have made off with 17.6 tons of ham. Police are posting round the clock guards on all mustard, horse radish and cheddar cheese warehouses.

Al Qaeda is not suspected.

Eight Out of Ten

Russell Blackford has an excellent piece on the cluelessness of a certain Australian imam on the matter of separation of church and state and why Islamophobia is nothing but a bad word that should be dispensed with:

Unfortunately, the impression has been created by many Muslim leaders that Islam seeks to control all aspects of individuals' lives and does not shrink from using secular power to achieve its aim. We are all well aware of extreme examples in recent history, such as Afghanistan under the benighted Taliban regime. Until that fear is laid to rest, it is quite rational for the rest of us to fear Islam's political ambitions - which is one reason why the word "Islamophobia" is so stupid. A phobia is an irrational fear, but secular Westerners actually have perfectly rational reasons to be at least wary of Islam.

This is excellent stuff as far as it goes, but he does fall down on one point:

The question is not about kings and popes (though it is certainly relevant to the temporal ambitions of the current pope). It is about how religionists of any stripe can reassure the rest of us that they will not use the coercive power of the state to impose their contentious (and, let's face it, usually miserable) moral doctrines, should they come to command an electoral majority.

The matter of "miserable moral doctrines" aside, this is only half true. Yes, it is a question of reassurance, but not, as any competent theologian will tell you, that the church will be dangerous if it is backed by the power of the state. It is rather theat the state will be dangerous if it is backed by the awesome power of the church in the hands of fallible human beings. Hence the reason why most Christians reject theocracy and why even in the high-water time of the Catholic church the Pope only ruled his temporal realms as an earthly prince equal with his fellows.

Indeed, G. K. Chesterton dealt with this very neatly in The Everlasting Man when he addressed the Arian Heresy and the myth of the state as dictator of faith:

Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise of Christendom. It is common enough to find another critic saying, 'Christianity did not really rise at all; that is, it did not merely rise from below; it was imposed from above. It is an example of the power of the executive, especially in despotic states. The Empire was really an Empire; that is, it was really ruled by the Emperor. One of the Emperors happened to become a Christian. He might just as well have become a Mithraist or a Jew or a Fire-Worshipper; it was common in the decline of the Empire for eminent and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults. But when he adopted it it became the official religion of the Roman Empire; and when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it became as strong, as universal and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It has only remained in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have put it, it is but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.' This also is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of orthodoxy, to say that it was only officialdoms that ever made it orthodoxy. And here again we can call on the heretics to refute it.

The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; thought was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalized, religion into which civilization might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity; he abandoned even Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at. dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation. If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.

A small point, but an important one.

Australia in Space

"Academics" in Queensland are up in arms about the exploration of space for fear that we might turn the Moon and Mars into extraterrestrial versions of Australia.

Taking barren, lifeless balls of dust and converting them into prosperous, free, democratic friendly, hard-working Anglophone nations that swear fealty to Her Britannic Majesty and boast beautiful beaches, loads of beef and lamb, superb seafood, barbecues, scuba diving, sailing, horseback riding, decent beer and Vegemite? A staunch ally through a century of war and conflict? The sort of place that my wife keeps asking me if we should emigrate to?

When do we start?

The Ultimate Martini

Australian doctors have saved the life of an Italian tourist by giving him an alcohol drip feed.

Oddly, in many parts of Australia this procedure is known as "cutting out the middleman."

Party Hints

Next time you're at a party, jump in and say,

Did you know there are more wild pigs than people in Australia?

It's guaranteed to stop the conversation dead in its tracks.

Problem, Meet Solution

Meanwhile, the global warming cult is on a roll, blaming all those farting mooses for increases in attacks by cougars, leopards and black bears, who have had enough and decided to take direct action-- though not against the moose, apparently.

No matter, because from Australia comes a humble solution to the kitty/black bear problem that simply requires a bigger pot.

Crocodiles of Life

An Australian rancher spent a week trapped up a tree as hungry crocodiles circled beneath.

Sounds like a perfect metaphor for my financial situation.

Great Moments in Journalism

This regarding an episode in the recent Australian flooding:

Raymond Island was surrounded by water

Stop the presses!

Robocrook

A senior policeman demonstrates that he needs a little lie down:

Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.

Sarah Connor was unavailable for comment.

The Australian Connection

In the wake of last week's bombing attempts in London & Glasgow, Australian authorities are carrying out raids and are questioning five more doctors with (if you read the BBC) nothing in common beyond being doctors.

By a staggering coincidence, at least one is named "Mohammed", so I suspect that they are not Methodists

Big Brother Want You To Take Shorter Showers

I'd love to see the marketing strategy on this one. It's a device for your shower that shuts off the water after twelve minutes whether you want it to or not. Amazingly, the Australian company that makes these things expects you to install one voluntarily and pay for the privilege.

Aside from the niche miser-and-masochist market, I can't see this one going anywhere, though I have no doubt that the Ministry of Busybodies Intent On Controlling Every Minuscule Aspect Of Everyone's Lives On General Principles will be jumping up and down with glee at the idea of having these Orwellian things required by law.

The Gulf

Apparently the Royal Navy isn't the only service that the Iranians have attacked. In 2004, the mullahacracy tried to capture an Australian boarding party, but that one never made the headlines. Why?

Answer: They fought back and won.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald,

Quoting a "military source", BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported Iranian forces made a concerted attempt to seize a boarding party from the Royal Australian Navy and that the Australians "were having none of it".

"The BBC has been told the Australians re-boarded the vessel they had just searched," Gardner reports, "aimed their machine guns at the approaching Iranians, and warned them to back off, using what was said to be 'highly colourful language'.

Our sources inform us that the Royal Navy has requested a shipment of spines from the RAN.

Some Animals Are, Etc.

The Victorian state civil and administrative tribunal in Australia has ruled that a Melbourne pub has the right to bar customers based on their sexual orientation.

It's bad enough when bigotry rears its ugly head and people are discriminated against with the most transparent of excuses because of whom they love, but when an official arm of government adds its weight and approval to such vile...

Oh. The pub is barring heterosexuals? Why didn't you say so?

That's all right, then.

Your Moment of Python

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Man crushed by flying cow

Run away! Run Away!

Tiny Detail

A yacht has been found off the coast of Australia with the sails set, the engine and computers running, life jackets and emergency beacons intact, and the table set for a meal. There were no signs of anything wrong, save for a torn foresail.

All very Marie Celeste, isn't it? Even the torn sail isn't that odd, since it probably happened when the craft fell off the wind and the jib was free to flap about until it tore itself to pieces. What could possibly have happened to have plucked three people into thin air?

At least, it's mysterious if you only rely on the BBC's print version of the story, which leaves out a tiny little detail found as a mere aside in the video report: the liferafts were missing. Suddenly it goes from mysterious to prosaic as the question changes from "How did they disappear?" to "Why did they jump into the liferafts from a perfectly sound boat?"

My money is on strong current, close reef and panic, which is how a friend of mine ended up in the water off the coast of the island of Hawaii clinging to a liferaft case dropped courtesy of the US Coast Guard that lacked any sort of instructions on how to open the blasted thing* while he watched his supposedly doomed catamaran crest a wave against a lava cliff, turn 180 degrees, slip back down without a scratch and head off to New Zealand.

*His remark at the time was "What am I supposed to do? Take it home and fry it in butter?!?"

And Your Point Is?

Australian aboriginal artists are being lured into producing works with the promise of drink and drugs.

Sounds like a lot of theatres I've worked for.

Poster Girl II

Looks like Beccy Cole is not only the Poster Girl, but also the Single of the Year and the APRA Song of the Year Girl as well.

Congratulations.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Is multiculturalism dead?

No, but it's not at all well.

The Other Holy Book is Desecrated

From News.com.au:

Two Muslim students have been expelled from an Islamic school in Melbourne for urinating and spitting on a Bible and setting it on fire.

And this was followed by a notable lack of rioting and murder on the part of Christians around the world. Strangely, Newsweek is remarkably absent as well.