Gregoryno6:

Your obligatory serving of season-appropriate lighthearted blasphemy. C’mon, how many years in a row can you watch Life of Brian?

Originally posted on Fake News Down Under:

Biblical researchers have raised the possibility that Jesus Christ spent time in Australia before he became the next big thing.

View original 258 more words

But if he doesn’t get to my place, I won’t be upset.

From an old collection of National Lampoon cartoons. What’s changed in thirty years, huh?

It’s a long way down.

For extra fun, click on the Captions button in the lower right corner. Next to the clock icon.

http://youtu.be/KQXBbC3g-t0

These guys are employed by the government! Well! That’s certainly a surprise!

Paco carried on his blog the story of yet another TSA public relations triumph. A woman who suffered a stroke some years ago was kept off a flight from Los Angeles to Phoenix because her driver’s licence was expired.

Furthermore she was unable to speak when the TSA creep demanded she give her name.  Despite the pleadings of her sister, the lady was forced to Plan B: a bus journey of eight hours.

The TSA is all ‘Could have been handled differently’ and ‘We’ll do better next time.’ Which doesn’t fool anyone. Certainly not me Not since I was given access to this transcript from a TSA recruiting session.

“Let’s talk about people skills… Stanley, how would you describe your people skills? Strong, average or poor?”

“People? I [deleted] hate people. All the [deleted]s ever do is give a guy like me a hard time. I’m there to do a [deleted] job and they should just leave me the [deleted] alone. If they can’t get their [deleted] heads out of their [deleted] [deleted] assholes far enough to see that, [deleted] them. They [deleted] deserve what they got comin’.”

“Stanley – (enthusiastic handshake) – welcome to the team!!”

Meanwhile, in Washington, there’s action underway to claim back monies supposedly owing for decades. When the original recipients are found to have died the government’s organs are putting their hands into the pockets of the children.

If this proves successful – that is to say, if the bureaucrats can bully their targets into submission without too much court time – the next phase will be to begin exhuming childless debtors. Johnson, go harass the corpse in 41A, please.

Still, it robs conservatives of the claim that lefties all move in lockstep. It was OUR government, in 2009, that GAVE money to dead people.

And now that we’re back on this side of the Pacific we can take a moment to laugh rather than grit our teeth. Bob Carr, who was temporarily an inept Foreign Minister under Jooolya, had previously been an inept premier of the state of New South Wales for more than a decade. Carr was renowned for his high opinion of himself. When I say ‘high opinion’, in Carr’s case, I mean stratospheric. And now Bob has written his memoirs – only, the marketing isn’t going quite as he would have expected.

As the Morning Mail explains:

…the [Sydney Morning] Herald had misread its readership. It assumed that an article which touched lightly on Carr’s smirking ego, but praised him otherwise, would be fully endorsed by its readership. There would be sackloads of letters and emails about how much Bob the Builder was missed, and how they longed for his return. 185 comments later the Herald realised that their assumption that green/lgbt/left readers were in the majority was probably wrong. The comments had made that assumption very doubtful.

Follow the link to read what happened then.

There have been a few comments even from right-inclined observers that the whole diary was a joke from the start. Bob was just sending himself up! Having a laugh at his pomposity-loaded persona!

Like they say… they’re not laughing WITH you. In fact, they’re not laughing at all.

Bob’s done his, and Jooolya’s memoirs are in the works too. All we need now is Kruddfuhrer to complete the unholy trinity and the $2 shops will be overflowing.

Maybe the Greens could actually make themselves useful and sue the publishers for this egregious slaughter of trees?

 

Gina Elise is a lady of multiple interests. If she’d pursued dancing we’d still be waiting for the next step in pin up calendar evolution.
We were that close, people. THAT close.

The Dawson Angel, for those who came in late, is the figure that towers over the resting place of Michael Dawson in Melbourne Cemetery.

I wasn’t able to discover much about Mickey D from the internet, and I surmised that this huge sculpture was his way of leaving a mark on the city. A man who feels he wasn’t appreciated in life may want to correct that imbalance after he’s gone. A hundred years ago, when inner Melbourne was far less built up, the Dawson Angel might well have been visible from a mile or two away.

But my friend Elizabeth has done some searching of her own and found mention of Michael Dawson in the history of  Brunswick.

One of the first persons from Ireland known to settle in the area was Michael Dawson. He came from a family of landowners in Tipperary, and his name is perpetuated in Dawson Street, which leads to the heart of Brunswick’s civic precinct. He arrived in the colony in 1840 and started building hotels and renting them out. By 1843 he was able to buy Thomas Walker’s huge allotment, which ran from Sydney Road to the Moonee Ponds Creek in the south-west of Brunswick, and he called the locality Phillipstown, after a place in Ireland where a political riot had occurred.

 On part of the land he developed the Phoenix Park estate, named after a famous park in Dublin, and on it he erected the mansion known as Dawsonhurst.

 The Phillipstown name endured into the twentieth century and its last official use was when it was published in a post office directory in 1917.

Dawsonhurst in its heyday on the Phoenix Park estate.

Dawson’s home was built in 1848 but didn’t survive him long – it was demolished in 1883, only seven years after he died.

The Angel was cut from specially imported Italian stone, and did not gain his position until some years – a few decades, actually – after Dawson’s passing. Elizabeth also notes that Mrs Dawson and the Dawson children began a legal battle over the will in 1876. The fighting began pretty much as soon as the old boy was in the ground. If not before.

My original guess was wrong. The Dawson Angel wasn’t Michael Dawson’s final vanity – he was a much later arrival. Given the familial war over inheritances it could be that the Angel was simply a means of getting rid of the money and thus ending the arguing. Whatever the motivations, the Dawson Angel is an unsettling presence in the Cemetery. But since he unsettles only the living, there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

Comment from my friend Elizabeth in Melbourne, regarding my recent separation – accompanied by an appropriate link.

“Boss… your wife goes off like a firecracker in bed.”

 
Hm. Better make that ELEVEN worst things.