Blog Storm

What I love most about December 25th, apart from the free gifts as a result of the amusing bastardised confluence of Judeo-Christian mythology and capitalism, is that it signifies exactly one week until the first day of the new year. I realise that calendars are arbitrary quantitative methods for recording the passage of time, but New Year’s Eve and Day both fond memories for me nonetheless (moreso Eve because I normally spend most of Day semi-comatose), and everything does seem somehow refreshed and revitalised when the sun creeps back up over the Pacific Ocean for the first time of the year. Anyway it’s late, and I have to get some shut-eye, because I don’t plan on getting much tomorrow night. Enjoy yourselves. I certainly will be. =D

Too late!

[What did you do in 2003 that you'd never done before?]
Nothing particularly unique I can remember off the top of my head, I’m afraid. This wasn’t exactly a trailblazing year for firsts.

[Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?]
I don’t do that shit.

[Did anyone close to you give birth?]
Yes! My auntie. Baby cousins are excellent, even if they live in another state, and cause your paternal instincts to start itching uncontrollably when they visit.

[Did anyone close to you die?]
A few relatively distant family members, but nobody I knew very well. I suppose you could count my cat Charlie.

Yellow Submarine is criminally underrated in my view. People tend to look upon it as a bit of a drugged-out, self-indulgent joke but, while the first two adjectives are largely accurate, “Hey Bulldog” begs to differ on the latter. I remember listening to the album over and over again when I was five or six years old. No wonder I have such an impeccable taste in music considering I was wearing out my parents’ Beatles and Hendrix vinyls while my peers were memorising the Hokey Pokey.

I’ve always considered Catholics to be, in general, slightly nuttier than their Christian brethren with their cute superstitious biscuit-chewing iconolatry and romantic Original Sin/confessional wackiness (I’ve often viewed artificial religious tangibility (Scripture documents, clothes, ceremonies, beads, positional infallibility clauses, Popemobiles, priceless artwork, millions of dollars in property, etc) as inversely proportional to philosophical credibility; the scale of which ranges from Buddhism (”A Bit Silly”) to Islamic Extremism (”Insane”)/Flat-Earth Christian Evangelism (”Just As Insane But Funny And Mostly Harmless”)), but more charming and marginally cooler as a whole (fuelled in no small part, no doubt, by The Godfather trilogy). Anyway, this is just a memo to the anonymous self-proclaimed proud Catholic who tried to put forward the argument that atheism was the height of arrogance and ignorance: think before you type. Bigoted anti-intellectualist opinions are separate from rational counter-arguments. My last retort still remains unanswered after three days, and I doubt that will change, either through stubborn ignominy or sheer confusion (I get the feeling my reliance on logic and epistemology over ad hominem rhetoric was totally lost on him). Not that I’m surprised. I’ve even had agnostics trying to use the exact same assertion on me. Really, is it that hard to figure out? If “theism” is defined as “god-belief”, the antonym of the term IS THE ANTONYM OF THE DEFINITION. So what, therefore, is the definition “a-theism”? “NO GOD-BELIEF”! THAT’S IT! For fuck’s sake man, dogs know it. Learn to master the English language, it exists for your benefit as well. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 21.5 years, it’s that common sense isn’t so common.

Edo is a funny gentle look at
Edo is fake
Edo is great with others
Edo is hot
Edo is mad about motorbikes
Edo is such a star
Edo is dumb
Edo is very big and strong
Edo is dead magazine
Edo is leaving
Edo is gay
Edo is mending his broken heart
Edo is dead article
Edo is dead is not dead
Edo is a celebration where people bring offerings to the monks
Edo is ejaculating on the hot opened vagina of a prostitute with a big sexy tits (Wha… that was ages ago…)
Edo is a domesticon *laughs at Edo*
Edo is an offspring born of parental pride
Edo is 6ft 1 inches tall (Uncanny)
Edo is bullied by an older boy
Edo is preaching at a church in a village
Edo is sizzling
Edo is having difficulty with vowel sounds
Edo is your god
Edo is ’sexiest man alive’
Edo is a desperate man who craves the one thing that he can’t seem to find
Edo is jesus
Edo is sooooooooooo sweet that i want to crap my pants
Edo is a fake id after this post

I’ve always viewed American politics from the role of bemused outsider watching a trashy reality tv show, sort of half-heartedly willing on the more leftist political elements purely for the sake of fuzzy trans-Pacific ideological affinity, but I’ve just today come to the conclusion that taking a closer and more involved analytical stance would be in my own best interest. Prime Minister John Howard’s strategy of undermining the potential voter base for new Opposition Leader Mark Latham in Parliament over the past two days has centred mainly around the latter’s references to President Bush earlier this year as “the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory”, suggesting that an elected Labor government under his leadership would be dangerously erosive to the vital Austro-American alliance. Notwithstanding how, conversely, the importance of obsequious fawning is to said association, it made me realise just how much of an impact the US Presidential elections in November 2004 should have on the Australian Federal election, due to be held roughly within a month of the former. If Bush were to be confidently reinstalled for another term, Australian voters may be swayed towards the conservative end of the spectrum to avoid any friction between the two nations, particularly if there’s another major terrorist attack in the next 11 months. On the other hand, if Bush were to be ousted by a Democratic candidate, Latham’s comments would be seen to be vindicated and, perhaps, more justified. If Howard had any sense, he’d bump the elections forward slightly to prevent this scenario from eventuating. All I have to do is cross my fingers that the election date is nice and late, that he doesn’t read this entry, and that you Yanks do your best to restore my desperately flagging confidence in your proclivity for common sense on a large scale.

And that’s saying a lot, considering the near-8 years of insidiously dreary, cobwebbed conservative Federal rule trampling my will to get out of bed in the morning. I realise I’m probably biased because the guy is my local member who grew up around Sydney’s lower/middle-class western suburbs like me (he also went to my high school), but I don’t care. A passionate, charismatic young liberal firebrand infamous for his recent criticisms of the Australian government’s embarassing sycophancy to American foreign policy (amongst other great lines, referring to PM John Howard as an “arse-licker” and his entourage to Washington as “a conga line of suckholes” (admittedly tame by my standards, but infinitely stronger than the threadbare PC doubletalk employed by all experienced politicians, and the sanctimonious moral mock-outrage which rippled through the media was hilarious to witness)) and his ability to systematically alienate the stuffed-shirt wowsers who prefer their politicians three shades blander than a wet noodle with his no-bullshit, shoot-from-the-hip approach, he’s a breath of fresh air into a deflated Labor Party being seen as steadily less relevant in our subtly (yet tangibly) xenophobic, moderate, defense/security-obsessed and easily alarmed and manipulated post-September 11 society. Crean (the ousted leader) is an intelligent, dedicated MP who thoroughly deserves to retain a portfolio in the cabinet, but he just wasn’t leadership material. The tame lack of conviction and concrete ideological differentiation in his speeches and interviews was an increasing source of frustration for me as his approval ratings continued to dip and, with the next Federal election assured within the next 12 months, a change was vital for the sake of a strong Opposition. But it’s Beazley (ex-leader and unsuccessful re-election candidate for the second time in 6 months) I feel the most sorry for. A brilliant, articulate man (and Rhodes Scholar) who forever won my respect with the tears he shed as he addressed Parliament a few years ago, apologising on behalf of the ALP over the crimes of the Aboriginal “stolen generation” (a topic Howard and his private-school cronies still refuse to touch with a 20-metre pole), he was simply the wrong guy at the wrong time, robbed of a well-deserved election win in 2001 when his health and education policy-driven campaigns were successfully hijacked by the Coalition governent’s obfuscatory fear-mongering surrounding a single boat of asylum-seekers from Indonesia (later demonstrated to be a complete and utter lie, yet the government escaped responsibility through acrobatic back-flipping and buck-passing). I don’t normally get personally emotional about differing political ideologies, but you have no idea how over the moon I’ll be when the most arrogant, deceitful, manipulative and short-sighted government since Federation gets booted out the back door of Parliament House by an Australian voting public who should, SHOULD, know better than to be led by the nose down the same cynical, self-serving democratic path well-trod by the trans-Pacific “aluminium” tetra-syllabicators over the past three years.

I can count on one hand the number of nightclubs I’ve been to in my life. Not just because I dislike dance music (or, for that matter, dance music with the bass cranked up to filling-vibrating levels (not that I have any fillings, but I digress)), but in conjunction with the fact that every aspect of the nightclub atmosphere is a sensorially oppressive experience, from the dark, smoky environment randomly peirced by flashing neon colours, the press of writhing, convulsing, drunken individuals who seem to coalesce into some anonymous, heaving singular organism, at all times punctuated by the crushing gravity of repetitive, thudding tumult assaulting your eardrums from every direction. But it was my friend’s 21st last night, and she decided she wanted to go club-hopping in the city afterwards, so who was I to be a fly in the proverbial ointment? Although I must admit, there is something postmodernly romantic about stumbling bleary-eyed back out into an inner-city street under an azure Sunday morning sky and groggily hailing the nearest availiable taxi, with the prospect of comatose unconsciousness while the rest of the hemisphere goes about it’s business. And there’s a certain tangible uterine mentality underpinning the whole dance scene (a conclusion arrived at during what I refer to as my “observant, introspective philosophical” stage of an all-nighter, where the levels of blood alcohol and sleep-deprivation are such that internal dialogue is congruous to original abstraction, without yet descending into gibberish; i.e. around 6am), but it’s just something I can’t ever envision myself embracing with any level surpassing that of curious, detached objectivity. Give me a pub with a Guinness tap, a big-screen tv set to a cable sports channel and an above-average cover band onstage any day.