On Monday (Australian time) the Pope died. So did my parent’s dachshund Rudy who managed to make it to 21, which is not just extremely good going for any dog but pretty close to the longest recorded lifespan for any dachshund.
Rudy was a good boy, but what about Pope Francis?
In my personal opinion Francis was one of the better Pontiffs of recent times – keeping in mind that the bar for Papal decency is simultaneously pretty low and disturbingly difficult for so many of them to reach. He made some good statements and implemented some good policies, while not being outstandingly horrible to the Vatican’s usual punching bags. With an institution as ancient, hidebound and prejudiced as the Catholic Church that’s about the best you can hope for.
So now the race is on for a new Pope. Unfortunately the prophecies of Saint Malachy have now run out, so we can no longer have fun speculating on which Cardinal best fits whatever nonsensical aphorism he (or a 16th century forger more likely) scrawled down. The big question is whether a progressive (for the Papacy of course) like Francis will make the cut, or if there’ll be a conservative backlash and we end up with someone only slightly to the left of Attila the Hun. There’s also the increasingly traditional speculation over whether they’ll choose someone from the global south, or go with yet another European.
Time will tell I guess. However the dice fall, as long as they don’t elect anyone named Peter the wider world will probably be alright.
Anyway, here’s the song I always think of whenever a Papal conclave rolls around.
“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.” — RFK Junior on autistic people
There once was a moron named Bobby, The CDC he liked to lobby, Already insane, When a worm ate his brain, He spreads medical lies as a hobby,
RFK Jr.’s quite yappy, He lacks the good sense of his pappy, If you do as he bids, You’ll kill millions of kids, But the worm in his brain will be happy,
Anti-vax RFK teaches, Raw water and milk’s what he preaches, Before very long, If we let this go on, We’ll all be relying on leeches,
While stumbling out of bed towards the shower this morning my brain told me I should rewrite The RCMP (1965) by obscure Canadian satirical band The Brothers-in-Law to be about the BPRD from Hellboy.
I strongly suspect that people who drink don’t have to put up with this kind of nonsense.
People are understandably talking about her Phryne Fisher novels, but she also wrote a series of slightly odd but highly enjoyable young-adult, post-apocalyptic novels set around Melbourne and Geelong. They’re well worth hunting down if you’re into that sort of thing.
In my close to half century of listening to music there are two sequences of notes that – from the very first time I heard them – affected me so deeply that I can only presume they speak directly to whatever twisted and shriveled thing within me that passes for a soul.
The first may be found in a number of tracks by the British music/art/prankster duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, known by a variety of names such as the JAMs, the KLF, K2 Plant Hire and the Timelords. A pattern of seven notes, played twice, repeated in several keys baroque style, I first heard it in Last Train to Trancentral (Live from the Lost Continent) from the album The White Roomat 2:13.
It had appeared earlier however on the Chill Out album in the ancestral version of Last Train, Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard. It features twice, at 2:04 and 4:29.
Finally it can also be heard at 2:23 in Go to Sleep – the intermediate version of Last Train from the unreleased original version of The White Room.
The other sequence is the guitar riff from Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Love Missile F1-11. There seem to be dozens of mixes of the track (I’m personally aware of at least five) so I’ve picked one where the riff is particularly apparent, occurring in its full form at 2:51.
I cannot say what it is about either sequence that speaks to me so deeply, but should heaven exist and should I end up there I would not be at all surprised to hear either of them while passing through the pearly gates.
I discovered this weekend that the ABC – in their ongoing attempt to fill up their plethora of channels with anything they can haul out of the archives – have finally run out of episodes of Love Your Garden and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces and resorted to rebroadcasting 90’s classic (for a certain definition of “classic”) Heartbreak High.
(I am slightly miffed at the absence of Love Your Garden as I have developed quite the crush on Katie Rushworth. There’s nothing quite like a woman who’s willing to get her hands dirty while pronouncing /a/ as /ʊ/…)
As a teen in the 90s I was presumably the target demographic for Heartbreak High, but I considered myself far too cultured to waste time watching it (I was actually nowhere near as cultured as I thought, I was just a contrarian douchebag). So prior to yesterday I’d never seen as much as a single episode. I did catch an episode yesterday however and good lord! It was easily the most awkwardly 90s thing that I have ever seen!
The episode started with a girl rapping in the schoolyard with all the other students gathered around clapping in time. I can categorically state that this is not something that ever actually happened in any Australian high school in the 90s ever (if you remember differently then you are hallucinating). Her rap was about how school sucks, and the teachers don’t like this, and so after a discussion in the staff room about how awful rap music is (naturally including a claim that it’s ‘not even music’) they ban rapping. This upsets the students to the point that they stage a sit-in to protest their right to rap. After some back and forward the teachers back down and the right to rap is restored. The episode ends with an impromptu rock concert, with serious “It’s a party Marge, it doesn’t have to make sense!” vibes, and – of course – rapping.
There was a B-plot involving a guy harassing a girl (the rapping girl? I can’t remember, the characters are all so interchangeable…) to go out with him, and then roping his mates in to harass her as well. These days that would be presented as a bad thing, but this is the 90s when people were stupid. In the end he wins her over by completely changing his personal style, which is just as terrible a lesson in the opposite direction. And the style he chooses – oh good lord!
Urge to punch growing…
I did try and take a screenshot of it from the ABC’s iView service, but they’ve cunningly set the screen to blank itself when any kind of capture is attempted, so I’ll need to use the old ‘photograph the monitor’ trick so beloved of the technologically inept. In the meantime simply imagine all the worst excesses of 90s male fashion distilled into one human being. Curly hair with a lock strategically dangling across the forehead, tinted hippy sunglasses, an embroidered waistcoat, black baggy pants, multiple necklaces, the whole shebang. He looks like a goddamn clown! If anyone had turned up to my 90s high school wearing that, he would have been beaten to a pulp! I can say that with authority because – despite my status as a pathetic nerd – even I would have been lining up to deal out some justly deserved punishment.
Naturally the girl instantly falls for him – presumably because if a guy is desperate enough to dress up like a court jester to get your attention then he’ll do anything you ask.
So that’s Heartbreak High. Overall I don’t think contrarian, douchebag, teenage me missed very much by skipping it.
It’s state Election day here in Western Australia. We use preferential voting (technically Single Transferable Voting), and as such I shall be voting thusly…
Parties with good ideas, which includes the Greens.
Labor, which means my preferences will probably stop here.
Well meaning but fundamentally harmless idiots.
The Liberals (who are actually the conservatives). If my preferences didn’t stop at Labor they will undoubtedly stop here.
The Nationals, who are the hillbilly version of the Liberals.
Parties and Independents who I can find absolutely nothing about.
General Lunatics, including the “Stop Pedophiles! Protect Kiddies!” party. I am of course in favour of stopping pedophiles and protecting children, but when you name your party that and provide no public information on your policies I will consider you insane until presented with evidence to the contrary.
Dangerous Lunatics, like that Christian party who claim their leader can raise the dead, or the guy who changed his name to “Aussie Trump”.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. In the bin where they belong.
Sadly the Senior Citizens Centre just down the street isn’t a poling place this time around, so I’ll need to head over to Hillcrest – but that’s OK because there’s a better chance of getting a democracy sausage there.
The last humans to leave Low Earth Orbit were the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972. Rock band Van Halen was founded in 1973. This means that NASA just missed the opportunity to play Van Halen in the Van Allen Belt.
Original by Booyabazooka at English Wikipedia, idiot mutilations by me
Peter Dutton and His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition. Yes, it’s an old joke, but it works damnit!
It’s election season here in Australia with voters shortly to choose between the currently incumbent Labor Party under Anthony Albanese and the Liberal-National Coalition under Peter Dutton (there are plenty of other parties but the odds of any of them winning enough seats to form government are so tiny as to be laughable). Good old Pete has been campaigning for quite some time on dealing with climate change by building nuclear power stations, which is something so out of left field for Australian politics that it has a lot of people wondering what’s in the water in the Liberal party room. Well, read on and all shall be revealed!
(Note for Americans and other aliens: The Australian Liberal Party is Australia’s major conservative party, with the Nationals their hillbilly cousins. This causes all kinds of problems, most notably when the sarcastic hashtag #imvotingliberalbecause escaped Aussie Twitter some years back and utterly baffled the poor Americans)
Reason 1: The Liberals have spent the better part of the last 30 years arguing that climate change is a hoax, and renewable energy is a scam. The majority of Australians now know that neither of these things are true and are demanding action on climate, but years of denial have painted the Libs into a corner where they can’t embrace renewables without handing the Left a massive propaganda coup. So they’ve grabbed on to nuclear as an alternate ‘clean’ energy source that won’t make them look like they’re caving to the progressives.
Reason 2: Renewable energy – rooftop solar in particular – has massive potential to take energy generation out of the hands of big corporations and put it into the hands of individuals. This is a nightmare for said big corporations, who will see their profits plunge as people switch to making and using their own power. Nuclear keeps power generation in the hands of big business, which is where the Liberals’ corporate donors/masters want it!
Reason 3: Every non-partisan expert says that it will take at least 30 years to get nuclear power up and running in this country. Dutton denies this with vague hand-waving about ‘breakthroughs’, but from the Liberal viewpoint a big delay is a feature, not a bug. The longer it takes for nuclear to come online the longer the Liberal Party’s big business mates can keep on turning a profit from coal, oil and gas. Dutton’s dream reactor is the one that starts operating in the infinite tomorrow – the tomorrow that ticks over a day every day at midnight.
So there you have it, the three reasons Peter Dutton and the Liberal-National Coalition are suddenly crazy for a nuclear future. What a shower of dicks.
