May 30, 00. Aha! According to the ATO, the use of Joe Cocker's 'Unchain my heart' cost taxpayers $269,000. There's also a mail-out to households that will cost $10.2million. According to Labor Senate leader John Faulkner, the cost is up to $410million.
Which sucks, obviously, and I'm glad the Labor Party did their opposition thing, but do they in turn have to produce ads telling us how that money could have been spent on schools, hospitals, etc? At least they're paying for it themselves.
More info at http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000530/A25951-2000May29.html.
May 29, 00. Those wacky (tabacky) Queenslanders!
IMHO, the only new word is 'allowed'. Not that Victoria or any other state does any better.
Police get OK to sell drugs
Sunday Mail (QLD)
UNDERCOVER police will be allowed to sell and supply drugs under new
state laws.
http://news.com.au/0,3546,737466%255E1248,00.html
And yes, my life is so boring that the only interesting urls I have come from the news. I could crap on about how much money the government is wasting with the tv ads for the GST, but surely we'll all on top of that one. It's just too easy to point out that emotive, high-rotation ads selling us a tax we can't avoid is a pathetic way of trying to get us to 'buy-in' and not punish John Howard for it at the next election. And surely it's even easier to wonder how much bigger the 'income tax cuts for every Australian worker' would have been if they hadn't spent so much money on those ads. Speaking of which, whatever happened to their admission that not every Australian worker would get an income tax cut?
I'll leave you with something cheery and topical: Melbourne's skyline, 1956 (the year the Olympics hit), courtesy of the State Library of Victoria (the rest of the catalogue is well worth checking out): http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/pictoria/b/0/4/doc/b04648.htm
May 26, 00. You vote Jeff out, you don't expect to be voting this kind of shit in:
MOTORISTS will face a speed-camera blitz when Victoria becomes the first state to introduce 50kmh limits in residential streets.
http://news.com.au/0,3546,730614%255E1243,00.html
and "State adopts smoking ban": http://www.theage.com.au/frontpage/20000525/A17822-2000May25.html
Read right to the bottom for the 'banning smoking in cars with young children' bit. How on earth do you legislate and enforce something like that? Kids are small, right? Often you can't see them in a car cos their heads don't stick up over the ledge. So how will the police know if that person smoking in the car while waiting at the lights has kids in the car or not?
"That woman looks tired and haggard, like she's been running around after say, three small children aged between three and eight. And she's smoking! The kids could be in the car with her, but I just can't quite see. Let's get her anyway!"
This is just plain weird but at least it's not Victorian: http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000526/A18159-2000May25.html
May 26, 00. Bad guestbooks have a very special place in my heart. I've been looking for stuff on the show 'Soul Train' cos I have to do a set for winterdaze that looks like a set from the show c. 1972... crap site, but check out the guestbook for some tragic, tragic people: http://www.soultrain.com/sti/sti.html. If you can play real audio streaming media, check out the way funky dancers linked from the bottom of http://www.soultrain.com/st/dance.html.
May 14, 00. Yes, it's Mother's Day. The papers are full of articles about being a mother, having a mother, blah blah blah. If this is the one day of the year that a mother gets to have breakfast in bed and laze about reading the papers, surely she'd rather read about anything but being a mother. If I was a mother who copped this, I'd feel pissed off, like when you have a dream about going to work and then have to wake up and actually go off to work and do a whole day all over again.
And while I'm here whinging, what is with all the Mother's Day ads that have kept the American voiceovers? If a store or a website can't even be bothered giving an Australian actor work dubbing 'Mum' over their ads, why should I bother buying their products? I don't have a 'Mom'.
Besides, it's bad enough having to watch American TV when you're in America, I'd rather avoid it here.
May 4, 00. All this talk about Microsoft being broken up and the stock market thingies and whatever just goes to show that whatever happens, it'll all go Bill's way. He's very used to getting his way. Just for a joke, he made the earth spin the wrong way around, just because he could.
I'm about to have my wisdom teeth out, so expect a break of about a week.
May 1, 00. I was surfing around and came across the Primus front page. Has anyone else noticed that they've apparently changed their name to 'iPrimus'?
I wonder how much some consultant charged them to come up with that dynamic new 'e-name'.