A loon a day keeps the gloom away, but sometimes it's possible in a day's general reading to feel persecuted by an abundance, a surfeit of loonacy.
Here's Alan Davies in Don't get taken for a ride: airport rail link not needed, mounting the case for Melbourne not to have a train ride to its airport, but instead to pack the business class and tourists into buses, in order to establish Melbourne's status as a third world destination:
... the new rail lines to Sydney and Brisbane airports are not performing well. Brisbane's Airtrain has low frequencies and stops operating at 8pm. At one stage Sydney's Airport Link was in receivership due to low patronage.
Dear lord, that it's come to this. There's somebody in the known universe who thinks that Sydney has actually got a credible airport link which somehow, inexplicably and mysteriously, suffered low patronage despite offering an excellent service. Every so often, I catch the airport link to Green square, and marvel that it has any passengers at all ... with its graffiti laden carriages, its ineptly cobbled together small and useless luggage racks, and its exorbitant additional tariff for people who can't afford the cost saving benefits of ganging together and catching a taxi ...
I immediately discounted everything Davies had to say, because only a desperate man would look to Brisbane (oh what a train, sorry duckie, service is off right now) and Sydney as part of an argument. Why not look to Japan, where they do trains in style. Foolish Melbourne and its foolish planning consultants ...
And then on a whim, we dropped in on an old chum, Hal G. P. Colebatch, and Obama, the British, the Gulf, and Afghanistan. It's old news now - our attendance at the pages of The American Spectator verges on the slack - but Colebatch is deeply concerned at the way the socialist is putting the boot in to poor old BP:
... his attack on BP -- sometimes giving the impression he thinks it caused the oil-spill deliberately -- has hit the ordinary British citizen hard in the hip-pocket. BP shares are in free-fall and a large number -- probably a majority -- of British superannuation and retirement funds have invested heavily in them: Obama is immediately felt to be not so much behaving undiplomatically -- that's something far away for diplomats and readers of the high-brow press to sort out -- but as directly pushing individual British people: "You! You! And You!" into poverty-stricken old ages -- and to be old and poor in Britain is no joke. BP has seen its market value drop by 40% since the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. Obama seems determined to talk its share price down further. Previously it was Britain's biggest company and worth £122 billion, but now more than £49 billion has been wiped from its value. It is also facing a multi-billion dollar bill for the clean-up operation.
It's outrageous. Poor old long suffering BP, putting its best PR foot forward, and copping this unseemly bucketing, and the poor old Brits, and remember they won the war against the Nazis, in the Battle of Britain, and then the Yanks turned up to claim the glory.
Soon enough no doubt it will emerge that the lickspittle fellow travelling Kenyan Islamic communist - why won't he reveal his birth certificate - actually organised the oil spill, as a way of defaming big business, and now the poor buggers are left to the arduous task of cleaning up his mess, with no glory and a lot of abuse.
Further, it is an obvious course for traders to dump BP stocks due to fears of ongoing costly legal action and possible punishment by the U.S. Government -- normally governments don't talk, or give an impression of lusting to "punish" large companies owned by friendly countries. The only outcome -- financially, politically, economically, and strategically -- can be negative and damaging.
As for the oil in the gulf? Pshaw and piffle, a mere trifle between chums. So what should be the payback?
The British response to Obama's continued attacks has already gone well beyond the niceties of diplomatic language and the next step looks all too obvious: pull the British troops out of Afghanistan, both to save money and in a retaliatory gesture.
Ah, so some good will come of the oil spill in the gulf after all. Meanwhile, if you tend to doze off during a read of Colebatch, his readership offers a splendid insight into the collective hive mind with some tremendous commentary. Sure you get incoherent raving of a totally inconsequential kind:
What a hysterical wretch. No doubt an American, perhaps a shrimp fisher person of some sordid kind.
But then you mainly get sharp, incisive insights that sum up the reality of the situation:
Everything I read here about Abu Hussein al-Nairobi or al-Mombassa or whetever Kenyan hellhole this Muslim was born in - I agree with. But still - it is a mistake to forget that this empty suit is a great danger to the USA. He is a dedicated communist, he has his 35 komissars as advisers in the White House (unelected and unconfirmed by the Senate but who have executive powers over the federal departmennts); he has his system of local soviets in place financed by his stimulus bill to the tune of $8.7 billion (ACORN brownshirts, SEIU and AFSME and AFL-CIO union goons, teacher union agitators and lobbyists) who are ready to demonstrate, intimidate, beat up opponents, and perform voting fraud by the millions of votes. He already nationalized automobile industry (GM and Chrysler), insurance and mortgage companies (AIG, Fannie, Freddie), health care industry, certain banks, he is looking for excuse to nationalize oil & gas companies, coal mines, electricity companies through his cap & trade nonsense (you know - globaloney cooling scam)... He will not part peacefully.
Wow, and here I was thinking that Friday might be a slow day for loons, but our good chum Colebatch is a magnet for a squawking tribe demanding birth certificates, and ranting about Obama and standing up for that upright corporate citizen BP.
Phew, is there any better way to suggest that The Australian is a centre left newspaper?
You see there you can read the irrepressible, bright and perky Nikki Savas explaining Julia, you'll have to take it like a man.
Well you can read the rest of her guff if you like - we tend to think she plays the role for The Australian that Reese Witherspoon made famous in her movie Legally Fatuous, Blonde and Dumb, but we were immediately drawn to Akker Dakker, long time fat owl of the remove, and his wonderful insights for the Daily Terror, as paraded in The hair apparent or just a pretender?
Women friends say they knew Julia Gillard would topple Kevin Rudd when she had her hair newly coloured.
Julia, they said, was playing the role made famous by Reese Witherspoon in the hit movie Legally Blonde.
Without giving away too much of the plot, it does hang on a woman’s natural concern for her new perm.
Yes, it's true, and what an astonishing revelation it is. Akker Dakker, that fatuous fat owl, claims to have women friends! But as for his claim to have seen the movie, given his attempt at a plot summary? Sorry, it sounds like another fat owl porkie. If he keeps this up, his Pinocchio nose will be able to measure the distance between the earth and the moon.
The rest of Akker Dakker's piece is a standard trawl through what's wrong with Australia - the man's a fiendish scribbling machine - but the poor possum at least realised that the fix was in, in relation to the mining tax, and so had to dig deep for compelling issues:
... Gillard is still playing the media and keeping the attention on her living arrangements in Altona, where her security detail appears to be monitoring security matters from a rundown caravan parked on a neighbouring block while both the Lodge and Kirribilli House stand fully equipped and staffed at taxpayers’ expense awaiting her presence.
Why it seems she's even gulled good old Akker Dakker on the matter.
The gesture of placing Humphrey B. Bear in the prime ministerial office is as calculated as it may have been cute, but it doesn’t detract from the notion that Gillard has only managed to make her new digs look like rented space in an airport development.
But soft, while Akker Dakker is always reliably bitter and recalcitrant, suddenly we heard the siren song of Mal Farr over at The Punch, Australia's most punch drunk conversation, explaining The true story of why John Howard is a pie-chucker. Yes, following our piece on Peter Roebuck, big Mal explains why honest John couldn't bowl a decent ball to the troops:
It was more like a cloth bag filled with rocks than a Kookaburra six-stitcher. And the pitch looked like it had been prepared for seeding.
Howard’s efforts often failed to reach the other crease and some departed their line at right-angles mid-wicket.
But Shane Warne would have had trouble shattering the stumps of the Lynyrd Skynyrd batsmen with that pill. Any backyard bowler like Howard didn’t have a chance.
So began his reputation as a pie chucker. And with it, the suggestion he bowled his way out of the ICC job.
I immediately consulted my partner on this - he once honestly toiled on a concrete pitch in Z grade - and he pointed out that the status of the pitch had nothing to do with Howard's innate ability to hit his toes with the pill, and his innate inability to perform a proper concrete pitch bowling action.
He could have bowled a full toss. And he could have bowled a full toss with a bag full of rocks, if he'd had the skill. It was a clear case of a backyard bowler who'd lost his arm, which it seems is some kind of technical term, as opposed to actually losing your arm.
His conclusion? Howard is a tosser, and as for his bowling, the excuse offered by big Mal is also a tosser ... They're both bloody pie chuckers. Or cricket tragics. Or simply tragic ...
It's at this point that I realised I'd been in some kind of reverie, a trance of loonacy, but that the vast full to overflowing intertubes never rests, is never silent, and an entire life could be wasted marvelling at the loonacy on offer ... like standing outside the monkey cage at the zoo and observing how cute and human the creatures are ...
Enough already. Enjoy the weekend, and try to make it loon free. Why not have a nice cup of tea, a biscuit and a Bex with a monolith?
Since the basic purpose of the internet is to share the knowledge and to communicate with each other, I can say that forums and blogs are playing one of the vital role in sharing the knowledge and to communicate with each other.
ReplyDelete