waiting for the train replacement bus, thornbury

treated like crap

McGuire election paraphernalia discarded at Broady station during the week.

I must say voting today at the Blair St campus of the Hume Secondary College in the Broadmeadows by election was not a fine experience. I noted that the idea of putting the ALP last was commonly expressed in literature (most notably from an independent with a Turkish name) distributed, though the Greens to their credit simply asked to be put first and the rest didn't matter. As I said to Mia it will be interesting to see if there is a backlash considering a lot of people in our area would justifiably feel marginalised and might in this instance feel taken for granted and patronised as if they don't know the difference between Eddie McGuire and his Brightonite brother. Who will still win anyway. What a crock.

I note also that the Libs couldn't even be bothered to put up a candidate, because they are sods. Not that I would vote for them if my life depended on it so why does that bother me?

* Next day: victorious smug column by FMcG in today's Sunday Age just rubs salt into the wound, even if there was actual proof he wrote the column about what a great honour it was to win sometime yesterday evening between finding out he'd won and the paper going to print.

pikelet

Such a great video and song, it was on Rage last night. I particularly like the pigs.

more spider

8 arms to hold you

There is a spider which regularly makes a huge web outside our door every evening in summer. This morning I noticed it was communing with another spider of the same variety; they were touching leg ends or whatever it is spiders have at the end of their legs. I went and put the battery in the camera and when I got back they were enmeshed thus:
I don't know what they were doing but when I went out again about 3/4 of an hour later they'd done it. The web was more or less gone (the spider takes down most of the web each morning leaving just an overhead strand which is presumably a hassle to put up so you'd only want to have to do it once) and so were they.

not my contribution to the 'shit happens' debate

Last week - I was a bit out of the loop, not reading newspapers but checking a bit of half-understood tv news - Tony Abbott was in the stew over his comment that 'shit happens' in wartime.
I am always happy to see Abbott get stewed and made unhappy, so I enjoyed what I understood of it. But yesterday I just remembered a pathetic conversation overheard in Bermagui in the early morning at a cafe where I stopped around 7.30.
It was one of those conversations where one guy was holding forth and the other was agreeing for the sake of it. This oldish man was going on about how Abbott did not deserve to be roasted over the use of the term shit happens (though really it was the implied cavalier aspect to it that he was being roasted over, but never mind). What bugged me about this fellow was his insistence that 'shit happens' was an old Australian colloquialism.
I first heard the term in 1990. It was specifically introduced to me by a young Australian popstar I was interviewing, she was throwing out a little bit of international trend news, that people in the states now use this term 'shit happens.' It was almost a joke and it was proto-slacker. Bullshit is it an old Australian colloquialism.
If he reads my blog, mate, you're a bullshit artist.