The Doug Anthony Allstars

Oh I loved the Dougs and this is from when we were first married and living in Ozzytrailier.
The thing about the Dougs is that they could sing like this and then do the most envelope shredding comedy.

On close inspection,

Mount Taranaki turns out to be made of real lightweight materials -- clinker and scoria, vaguely bound together with the bare minimum of basalt. No wonder the whole thing's just washing away with deep gullies carved by the rain. I blame deregulation of the industry, and lax enforcement of what few regulations were left after the relaxation of the construction code.

Chapter 11 [a fragment]

Two figures had made themselves at home on the doorstep. One carried a thin briefcase of elegant design, while the other clutched one of those squat capacious bags popular with doctors. Ed looked at their clothes and steeled himself against the visitors offering him religious pamphlets, canvassing for his vote in an election, or trying to sell him a second-hand car.

“Do I have the honour of addressing Edward N’Bro?” The taller one’s voice was more suitable for addressing a public meeting.

“Ed I am, of the Senegalese branch of the Clan N’Bro. Who might you be?”

“You see before you two itinerant, peripatetic members of the thespian profession.”

“We act,” explained his shorter associate, in the kind of voice you seldom hear at a public meeting, unless you have asked too many annoying questions and the large angry people have turned up from nowhere and dragged you roughly away to the back of the building. “We move about. One step ahead.”

“My name is Patella; my abbreviated and less-well-spoken colleague glories in the sobriquet of Astragalus. Like birds of passage, like gypsy moths, we wander from town to town, performing pieces from our humble repertoire, seeking little in the way of a venue, such as will assuage the humdrum lives of the local populace and bring unfamiliar joy to their hearts.”

“And lingering pain to their kidneys,” came the interjection from Astragalus.

“Like the wandering minstrel Nanki-Poo, we are but kings of shreds and patches…”

“…And the occasional organ transplant.”

My nose may be the colour of a cochineal beetle, but it is a feature not a bug

I resent the commercially-coopted drinking culture in my current city of residence, where a couple of central streets are promoted as the official slough of iniquity where people enter in the evening and from which they are evicted in the wee hours when their wallets are empty, to stagger home or yack up in a bus-stop or start fights with lamp-posts and save their yacking-up activities for the back seats of taxis. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that self-destructive blacking-out alcoholic excess is like Christmas -- it should be an outlet for personal spontaneity rather than an empty commercialised ritual.

Vittore Carpaccio -- Courtenay Place at Sunrise (Berlin Gemäldegalerie)

Officially the City Council deplores the immaturity of our drinking culture, and has reacted to the scandalous scenes of staggering and up-yacking by instituting Liquor Ban Zones where public possession and consumption of alcohol are only legal in the bars on which these zones are centred (or in the fenced-off, partly-privatised sections of footpath in front of bars). No-one could possibly have anticipated that giving publicans a monopoly over the public consumption of alcohol would have increased the amount of staggering and up-yacking. Anyway, the Council periodically extends the area covered by these Liquor Bans, and more bars appear in the Slough, and there is more public drunkenness, and let's not squabble about what is cause and what is effect.

If the current NZ moral panic about the "obesity epidemic" gets any worse, I imagine that the City Council will introduce Food Ban Zones where eating in public is illegal unless performed in a fast-food restaurant.

Gone 2 Yuggoth. BRB

We had planned to go to Roanoke for the holidays, but I fluffed around for too long and there weren't any tickets left.

From little things,little things disappear without trace.

Well, that was interesting as after the sparkling wittiness of the title,  the title posted itself so there was just a title.
*Riddled techinical staff, breakdown in sector 7G*
But what I was going to say was it's funny how the report clearing  ACORN got buried. I stumbled across it at Truthout and followed the link to a distressingly large pdf which backed up what the article said.

   A search of reports of federal agency inspectors general did not identify instances in which ACORN violated the terms of federal funding in the last five years.

Then

a NEXIS search of the ALL NEWS file did not identify any reported instances of individuals who were improperly registered by ACORN attempting to vote at
the polls.

 So, um, that's that really. I looked up CSR ACORN on the great googlization and there were very few reports of this finding. A commentator on a blog called Sweetness and Light" said "CRS non-partisan, yeah right" so I looked them up too and it seems that no one has complained about them being  partisan before. It's all a bit mystifying from out on the edge of the world. I guess that it doesn't outstack Tiger woods or TERRAUNDERPANTS MAN.
Still I understand that the GAO is investigatinalising ACORN so we should hold off until they say what they found. I bet that's what the news media is doing, eh?

Never again!

I knew, and I said at the time, that an aquatic and God-kite flying, 'Riddled' Christmas Party would turn out badly.
The hire boat lady is very cross, what with being shot at by devils on sea horses, and we may not get our bond back.

Present company

Some will, of course, have purchased and sent their Christmas presents to Smut Clyde. However for those who have tarried, I have the perfect idea:

As any fule know, Molesworth was a grate arkyteck and S.Clyde is a dedicated fan.

The noble tradition of Walter Mitty versus the terrorist menace

When our work requires us to fly, we are always prepared to defend our fellow passengers from hijackers or would-be suicide bombers. Though the number of fellow passengers is never large, what with the Riddled executive Learjet.

If you heed the advice from some nimrod passed on by World-o-Crap, you would also familiarise yourself with the counter-attack possibilities of stout ballpoint pens and rolled-up in-flight magazines. You would go on to

Introduce yourself to the other men on the flight. Ask them about their destination, work, and family. ... Did they play football in high school or college? ... If they’re wearing short sleeves, take a look at their forearms.

and generally do your best 'to make the men feel comfortable'. I for one am certainly looking forward to finding myself on the receiving end of these conversational gambits next time I travel by air, though airline cabin crew probably discourage the male bonders from progressing to the stage of forming an impromptu drum circle.

Someone must verbally take charge; otherwise people will not respond. That means the person who responds to the terrorists first must tell every man what to do to defend the women on the plane.

This is all very well, but there is no guarantee that suicide bombers will limit themselves to planes. Any situation where a number of people have gathered is a possible target. Bars, for instance. I'm heading down to The Old Entomologist for a pint or three of Pooter's Porter, and if I find a suspicious number of swarthy individuals gathered there I will practice verbally taking charge and telling every man what to do to defend the women.

Don't wait up for me.

With apologies to the adult diaper industry

The indefatigable Nate Silver does some calculations about Terrorism on airplanes in teh US.

Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000.(his bolding)

I'm sure that a news industry whose job it was to tell people information that was based on fact, and a political class that was intent on conveying the reality of a situation to it's constituents, would have this on front pages and mention it in interviews whenever the topic came up.

Loss of sponsors and budget cuts

did not perturb the New Zealand cricketers, for it is not who wins or loses, or who has the best uniform, but how you play the game.

ſpam ſpam ſpam

Gutenberg's movable-type printing press was no exception to the general rule that any new medium of communication is soon adopted for the purpose of publishing porn.

It is not so well-known that spammers canny entrepreneurs were next to grasp the potential of the new medium for advertising their product, and the synergy from the untraceable cross-border money-transfer facility provided by the Fugger banking family. Anyone foolish enough to divulge personal details in order to receive the promised free subscription to Aretino's Loveſ of þe Godſ found his or her inbox clogged with offers of dodgy hair-regrowth concoctions with unexpected side-effects,inflatable heifer-skin sex dolls
and vibrators feminine massagers [Iſ ȝour man working too hard at þe office or ſpending all hiſ time wið þe boyſ?].Because Riddled is all about good taste and decorum we will not reproduce any of the contemporary fliers for mandrake extract [Doeſ ſhe laugh at ȝour little red rooſter and take recourſe to her feminine maſſager inſtead?]; instead, here's a money-back guaranteed nostrum for stopping your pet lion from throwing up snakes. Evidently this was a widespread anxiety of the period.

Assuming that spammers are accurate observers of their environment and are governed by the efficient market, it follows that spam at any time is a snapshot of the prevalent cultural insecurities of the moment; this is why my inbox is clogged with offers for cut-price sheep drench, homeopathic grass-grub control, and bigger trebuchets.

New Years Resolution: Don't go to the movies with Niles Gardiner

1. Because he looks like he's been embalmed by an over-enthusiastic undertaker.
2. Because he would find some way to whine about every movie ever made unless an American alpha male killed lots of people in it.
Here is his critique of Avatar
A sampling of the adolescent bleating :

In fact I would describe it as one of the most left-wing films in the history of modern American cinema, and perhaps the most commercially successful political movie of our time

He bases this on

I was disturbed by the cheering from the audience towards the end when the humans – US soldiers fighting on behalf of an American corporation – were being wiped out by the Na’vi

Yes it would have been better if the Navels, or whatever they are, had been turned into Blue Slushies by brave Quarterback types. And a movie's political stance can be judged by how the audience reacts to what they imagine is happening because you can instantly tell what they are cheering for and why.
Isn't the hero a Marine? I dunno much about it.
For a quick solution to  holiday season overeating go and read Nils Desperandum's (see what I did there?) guide to the top10 Conservative movie of some time or another (who can be arsed to remember).