Rubrica

Cartoon: Matt Golding It seems the Nationals plan to "hide" former leader and serial drongo, Barnaby Joyce, for this year's election campaign, restricting him to campaigning within the boundaries of his electorate. Clearly, Barnaby has become a party liability, although his popularity in his rural heartland remains high. Mind you, restricting Barnaby to New England still means he has a lot of ground to cover. It's the twelfth largest federal electorate by area and covers a vast swathe of central west and northern New South Wales.  Of course, the Nats could hide Barnaby permanently by just disendorsing him. Find themselves a candidate who won't embarrass the party by getting pissed and passing out on the footpath in the middle of Canberra or knocking up a junior staffer while trumpeting CFV*. Ah, yes. Good old CFV. The public fallback position for all conservative pollies while they're privately pursuing anything but. They roll it out regularly in order to poi...

  Grace Tame knows the value of publicity. It's what makes her such a damn good activist and advocate. She was awarded the 2021 Australian of the Year for her work campaigning for survivors of child sex abuse and removing the Tasmanian 'gag' laws that enabled her abuser to get away with child sex abuse for years. She concluded her 2021 acceptance speech with the words: "Hear me now. Using my voice, amongst a growing chorus of voices that will not be silenced. Let's make some noise, Australia." Ms Tame is still making noise and more power to her for doing so. Her appearance at the Australia Day morning tea with the Prime Minister, his fiancée and various other invited dignitaries, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words Fuck Murdoch caused a sensation. Good. That's precisely what she intended. Predictably, reactions to her appearance have been somewhat over the top, with words like "controversial" and "sensational" being thrown arou...

Florence est morte . Alas, poor Florence ... I came out to the living room yesterday morning to find Florence, my resident huntsman (huntsperson?) spider in her usual position high on the wall above the bookcase. But instead of her typical noble bearing with legs outstretched, her legs were curled in towards her body. She remained that way all day, and this morning, there was only her little corpse, curled up on the floor. I'll miss her. I hope she left some progeny in my house to continue her good work. Huntsman spiders are vastly underrated as household pets. They find their own food, don't wake you up at 2.00am because they need to go out, they're quiet and respectful of your personal space. They eat insects that might not be welcome in your house, small lizards, mice, birds, maybe the occasional chihuahua or other smallish dog breed ... They're also playful, in their own way, sometimes appearing unexpectedly from behind curtains or under cushions. If you're won...

  In 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary proclaimed unfriend as its Word of the Year. It's a rather brutal notion that one can simply delete a friend by clicking on a button. Yet it also brings into question our concept of what it actually means to have a friend in an age of technology. Before social media, when all our friends were people we actually knew, one might fall out with a friend or simply drift apart due to geographic distance or different life paths. "Oh, yes," you might say of a certain former friend, "we were friends once but we had a falling out over what constitutes an appropriate pizza topping and as far as I'm concerned, he and his disgusting pineapple pizza deserve each other." Or, "Yes, I was quite good friends with her, but after she joined that religious cult and moved, we just stopped seeing each other. I wonder how she's going now?" There are other friends with whom we remain close for our entire lives regardless ...

We're only days into Trump 2.0 and already I'm opening the news sites in the morning with a sense of foreboding. A grim but eerily familiar foreboding that requires looking at the headlines through one's fingers while muttering, "oh for fuck's sake what's he done now"? Or, as it will be referred to in this blog for the next four years, #ohFFSwhatshedonenow. That more than 50% of the US voting public opted for a convicted felon as their Head of State and Commander in Chief points to a lot of complex problems within American society and politics that will, no doubt, be the subject of many analyses over the course of the coming years. Cartoon credit: Deccan Herald Trump is basically your standard megalomaniacal bully with a god complex. He is a cult leader who has set himself up as a messiah. What is different, and more worrisome, about his second term, however, is that now he's hellbent on revenge, and like any vengeful god, he wants his enemies gone. Th...