SATIRE: Let's play 'Pick the Arab'

SATIRE: Let's play 'Pick the Arab'

White Guys
Anders Behring Breivik(above)
Martin Bryant (below)

 In case  you haven't been in on the joke I need to let the cat out of the bag and tell you that we've been playing the 9/11 Game for 10 years.

Also called Pick the Arab  the rules  are quite simple: blame Towell Heads, Dune Coons, Hajis and Ragheads for...well, that's up to you.

Example:Blame them for... the wholesale price of fertilizer.

Since Pick the Arab  includes an offshore user interface, the thrills just keep on coming.

Wasting hundreds of thousands (without one's morals being challenged)  has never been easier  and daily body counts keep you up to date.

Just get a load of these figures.

Iraq: 62,570 to 1,124,000
Afghanistan: 10,960 to 49,600
Somalia: 7,000+
Pakistan: 1467 to 2334

Like  shooting turkeys in a barrel.

No wonder the Islamic types get a  bit testy and we need to be  vigilant if they leave the console and move into the neighborhood.

So when 92 of our own are slaughtered in Norway,  who can blame us for thinking that it's Islam at work?

A natural mistake.

Who woulda  thought that Anders  Breivik was a white guy? A very white guy -- as white and as blond as our own  Martin Bryant.

It's all a bit embarrassing.

Aside from taking out this year's Tour de France Australia  held the record for the number of casualties in a  solo civilian shooting spree: Martin Bryant: 1996, 35 dead/21 wounded.

When it comes to murderous nutters  Norway's blond, blue eyed champion has  beaten our own home grown product...and there isn't a friggin Arab on hand to  blame.

How unfair is that?

Foul. Foul.

Anders Behring Breivik has let the side down and soured the war game.

Maybe the 9/11 Game should really be Where's Whitey?...

Players  are challenged to find a character named Whitey hidden in the group. Whitey's distinctive white skin, fair hair and weaponry make Whitey slightly easier to recognise .

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Climate Change, Social Change: Reading List

Climate Change, Social Change: Reading List

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal has collected  together articles by the main featured international speakers who will be attending the World at a Crossroads/ Climate Change, Social Change Conference in Melbourne in September-October. There are also a range of links that gather together articles that deal with particular enviromental topics.

These resources provide excellent background reading for the issues that will be discussed at the conference.

• For articles by John Bellamy Foster (including book excerpts)
• For articles by Ian Angus
• For articles on Marxism and ecology
• For all articles on population
• For all articles on climate change
• For articles on Green parties
• For articles on food
• For articles on water
• For articles on the impact of automobiles/public transport
• For articles on Cochabamba and Bolivia
• For articles on the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks
• For articles on the coming Durban climate talks in December

To find material on other issues, please use the search engine on the Links site .

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SATIRE: Carbon -- make me an offer.

SATIRE: Carbon -- make me an offer.

Look at that there. Ain't it beautiful? Lovely piece of carbon that is. When you think that this   stuff  decides our future...you can't help but be impressed. Amazing stuff. Got us where we are today.

So how much do you think it's worth? Go on, have a guess. If you wanted to bury it out back or something (say no more, right? Wink.Wink.) -- how much do you reckon you'd be saving? Two hundred dollars? One hundred dollars? 

Remember 'toxic' is gonna cost you. Much more of  this stuff and  the planet's cactus. 

So what you reckon? Make me an offer.

OK. OK.  Because you're a friend, and we look after our friends, I'll tell you what: All this carbon is going celestial today  at a  rock bottom, bargain basement price. You'll flip when you hear it... 

Seriously: How much you reckon?

OK, I'll tell you. Brace yourself. (You'll be wondering how on earth we can do it for the price.)

Today only-- because we like you -- you pay ( wait for it! ) only $23 per tonne! That's what I said: Twenty Three Dollars! 

A tonne! 

It has to be best value for wholesale, right? I tell you Coal need only go up less than two bucks per tonne. Even the friggin Chinese market is more fickle than that!  

You'll wear it mate. Easy. Trust me. That's what mates are for.

Here you are wondering what you can do to help save the planet and we  give you a good conscience for  twenty three bucks. 

Don't thank me. That's what we're here for. 

And if it doesn't work: fuck 'em -- there's no return on sale. 

You did your best, right? You wore the cost. Paid up. Copped it sweet.  What more can be expected of  you  and still turn a profit at the end of the day? 

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SATIRE: Murdochery

SATIRE: Murdochery

What a fantastic year it has been! It should go down among the national annals as among Australia's favorites...and it is only half over! A Bradman test series. Dawn Fraser  winning  gold. The 1958 AFL Grand Final...

Wonderful memories, all.

But think 2011 and what pops up are our own  hacker heroes. 

Not only have our collective loins begat a nerdy front page news maker like Julian Assange, but  our own  first family, the Murdochs, have  shared their true blue spermatozoan  so generously in the person of Rupert. 

Niether may be thong and stubbies types but we're a multicultural country now and in today's Australia, homegrown 'Tall Poppies' are just as likely to be wearing suits  as  Speedoes and a tan. 

Our very own are front page news world wide -- even if, under Rupert, we vicariously get to own so many of those front pages -- talking the way we like to hear it.  

Strine. Wonderful she'll-be-apples Strine.

Fan-bloody-tastick! 

Aussies in suits making it big.(I'm sure Julian may have a few tips for Rupert on what he should wear to court when the time comes.)

In true blue Ned Kelly mode these blokes are making their public mark on the wrong side of the law. Not until it gets  illegal do we Australians come into our own.  All those transported  convicts must still be looking after us despite becoming a  ticket of leave country.  

Chickens come home to roost I guess.

Ask Rupert, we do our best work outside the law, making it up as we go.

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Blogs I follow

Blogs I follow

I subscribe to a lot of left blogs . Below is  a list of them. The list keeps changing as does my preferences. 

But the good thing is that the number of left blogs also keep growing.

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Ion Idriess and Norman Lindsay: white tea and damper

Ion Idriess and Norman Lindsay: white tea and damper

Got myself the very out of print 'Drums of Mer' by Ion Idriess. I cut my reading bent on Idriess. Read him all in my teens

I had forgotten all about Idriess despite occasional searches for his books -- when I came upon his celebration among Islander communities.

‎"How is it that a novelist who ambivalently assumes white European superiority while asserting the supernatural power and primal physicality of black Torres Strait Islanders, is drawn upon so confidently by Torres Strait Islander people?"

I thought: Idriess as cultural historian?

And then yesterday in the local op shop for $1 -- I'm back on Mer with Idriess.

Idriess' tales of the Australian bush and the First World War cavalry regiments suited my family's bent for bush nationalism and my own youthful yearning for adventure.

My mother's pedigree was damper and tea -- sheep, horse and cows -- and Idriess wrote to that sort of audience.

Then when I returned to the very same op shop in hope of securing more Idriess, I came away with a copy of Norman Lindsay's comic novel Halfway to Anywhere for 50 cents.

If Idriess was a teenager's addiction, I fell into a habituation to Lindsays' comic novels during the 1980s and had thought I'd read them all

I guess I'm still a little short of the full list.

The are very funny .

Lindsay is not only  recognized as the great cartoonist for The Bulletin -- who skillfully caricatured for  that magazine's themes of jingoism and zenophobia --  but also for his children's' books such as The Magic Pudding.

Both Lindsay and Idriess reflect their times -- although , to his credit, Idriess was more considerate than Lindsay of the country's indigenous population. He even wrote one novel that explores the indigenous fightback Nemarluk: King of the Wilds (1941) based on  last years of the  life  of Nemarluk.

Nemarluk (c.1911-1940), Aboriginal resistance leader, was born about 1911 in the central Daly River region of the Northern Territory. He belonged to the Murrinh-patha language group (called the 'Cahn-mah' by Ion Idriess)

 To be fair Lindsay saved his keenest racist caricatures for Asians -- esp Chinese and Japanese --  and his aggressive  defence of a white Australia. But fir my money  there were very few    draughtsman in the 20th Century who could match Lindsays'  skill for caricature. He was a technical master -- the Australian Hogarth.

On the other hand in regard to script : if you haven't read either writer you are missing out.

'Tis was a very different Australia on offer before  the broader immigrations set in after the Second World War.

But like today -- especially with Lindsay -- the game was to expel people -- Kanaks and Chinese especially -- to protect the cultural purity of the newly united Australian colonies.

If you want a taste of the contribution people from  Asia were making to Australia  across the Northern Tropics, Idriess' tales of tin mining, pearl lugging and diving for   bêche-de-mer suggest that the bush ethos was never always white tea and damper.

Norman Lindsay (1937)

Norman Lindsay ( 1917)

A further irony...

Norman Lindsay's son, Jack Lindsay,  became a major Marxist theoretician in the British Communist Party . He also collaborated on a translation of  Lysistrata by Aristophanes (1925) with illustrations by Norman Lindsay.

• A list of Jack Lindsay's works

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Jokedom: Funny ha ha -- Funny perculiar

Jokedom: Funny ha ha -- Funny perculiar

Waiting for Godot

Joke factories are all over the place. Humour making is a major industry. At no previous time in human history have we been offered -- and I say this without a hint of irony -- so much to laugh about. On a day to day basis we consume so much manufactured, professionally made comedy that it's a lifestyle essential.

How else can we be expected to get through each struggling week?

But there's funny...and there's funny.  We can all manage a titter or guffaw but aren't we drowning in comedy, living as we do in Jokedom?

This ready access to humour -- driven so much by television and film -- may be a social plus but the demand for so much of it packaged to suit a seemingly insatiable market, may mean that while we're getting so much more we may be enjoying it less.

It's not as though humour is an addiction. You don't have to watch any sitcom to get your fix for the day. Taste and preference do rule us.

But take it from me --a person who has been laughing for decades -- there seems far less substance to comedy today.

It is rule by joke factory.

In the production houses of Hollywood, teams of writers think this stuff up under the same workplace rules as anyone else. Jokes just don't happen -- they are often worked at before they are written on the cue card or shooting script.

Take Friends as an example: people sit around, drink coffee and tell jokes. Or Two and Half Men -- two and a half men sit around, talk about sex, and tell jokes.  For variety the 'situation' is played with. But the jokes keep on coming. It's production line stuff.

I'm not saying there's no humour in this or that it isn't funny. But like the delivery of so much  stand up, there's no special point to it. It's just jokes --any jokes -- designed to make us laugh. A moment of laughter.

That's the package.

The irony is that there is  funny

... and there's funny.

I'm not arguing for social conscience humour. I'm arguing for humour that has social context. That reflects the world we coexist in so that the humour generates its own relevant narrative, a comedy that lasts beyond a series of staccato one liners.

Here are five comic examples -- gems I think -- from British television: The first two are from the sixties -- At Last the 1948 Show -- and the second pair  are from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers  in the  1970s . The final example is a segment taken from Blackadder (1980s).

Enjoy.

What I'm about is trying to confront the question of why are these examples so darn good? Of course we can reference the skill of the acting and the writing, but for all their immense creativity one thing that stands out for me is that they were engaged in a different quest than the writing of a series of often unconnected jokes.

Story ruled...and a story that was explored to its utmost. It was squeezed. It went somewhere.

While I'm not sure where I'm going with this I'm working on the hypothesis that humour which relies so much on the absurd has become such a serious business that we inhabit an absurd world akin to that of Waiting for Godot  where, as we wait out our lives, we are sentenced to be entertained by a succession of jokes that lead no where. It's a sort of perennial sick joke  in itself, and we're the brunt of it.

"The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."

- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

[To be continued:This is the first part of a series on humour.]

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