Real Tart

There’s a case running here at the moment involving former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld - who has admitted to perjury over a $77 traffic fine. This bloke used to be one of the country’s top judges.
He’s been sitting in the dock because he tried to get off the speeding fine by saying a female friend of his was driving the car. Trouble was, at the time she was dead. Yes indeed.
Ian Barker, QC, for Einfeld, told Justice Bruce James that, "in the scale of things", the offences were trivial, but the consequences for his client were "catastrophic".
The court also heard today that Einfeld was still receiving a pension of more than $200,000 a year for being a former judge, and that Einfeld had sent people to prison for perjury.
Mr Barker said the defence accepted that the crimes of perjury and perversion of the course of justice usually attracted a full-time custodial sentence.
But "there had to be flexibility" in deciding whether a person in Einfeld's position should go to jail, he said. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he.
Yesterday the defence said Einfeld would be very depressed if he had to go to prison and his depression would be likely to get worse.
Really. Are there people who go to prison and like it? I mean, come on! Of course it’s bloody depressing – it’s bloody prison!
We’ll see, but my money’s on a suspended sentence.  

We are the champions...

Much as I like to cut Americans some slack, as they would say, I just can’t believe some aspects of Obama’s speech yesterday to Congress.
Here’s what he said about the US auto industry: “And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."
Where on earth does he get these ‘facts’? Henry Ford did revolutionise car manufacture by mass-producing the Model T, the first assembly line car, but there is no way Americans invented the car, not unless he thinks Louis Renault (er, actually a Frenchman...) and Gottlieb Daimler (last time I looked, he was German) are somehow American!
He also said that America had given the world more prosperity than any other nation in history. News to those folks in the Roman Empire I’d imagine and to not a few Greeks, Assyrians and Chinese.  You know, people who invented things like writing paper, chairs you could sit on, currency, and special egg fried rice.
One thing the Americans definitely have given us is the worst economic meltdown in history.
I think I can safely say the whole world thanks you so much for that.

Sorry, dropped off for a bit there.
I’ve been building a large ocean-going vessel so I can float away once the rain stops and I can come out from hibernation. Honestly, it has been of biblical proportions, while an hour’s flight away my friends in Melbourne are still staring down the barrel of a fireman’s hose (the fires, madam, the fires...).

Anyway, Five is in his fifth week of school and loving it immensely. It’s all changed since my day – it appears they actually have fun there. Five told me yesterday, “Dad, Deanna is so...ohhh, so...ohhhh, beautiful, but she is not my girlfriend. Just because I like her doesn’t mean anything much, dad.”
No, really. Yesterday another girl came up to him as I was talking to his teacher (the fragrant Mrs Lavinia Violet, I kid you not) and lifted her skirt to show him her underwear. You know, as you do.
Meanwhile, I’ve signed up for him to do religious guff once a week. You know, Tom always let me make up my own mind so I’m happy to let the nipper make his up too. Thing is, it costs $4 a year for a teacher with glittering eyes and the sort of level of energy which makes me suspect he will soon self-combust (if it happens, it’d be a miracle, I assume...) to tell Five stories written by God know's who.
But if you opt for Catholic instead of Protestant guidance, it costs an extra 50 cents.
I assume that’s because you get a Pope as part of the package.

Well, I had to. You know the past few weeks it’s been mid-40sCentrigrade, really stupidly hot. So now it’s all changed around and it’s been pouring with rain non-stop for a week and the temp is down to 17C. Amazing.
So, I stoked up the combustion stove and we sat around toasting marsh mallows.
All this week it’s going to continue raining and I suspect for some time beyond that too.
Now, I tell you this because if you live in Britain you may well have come across Aussies who look at you all smug when it rains during Wimbledon and say things like, “so, this is what you call summer!” When they start, direct them to me.
Of course, I’ve still been getting it in the neck. On the weekend a friend called and I said I’d had the fire going and she said, “Yes, it must remind you of home.”
“Yes, I said, BUT WE DON’T HAVE FIRES ON DURING THE BLOODY SUMMER!”
Anyway, I have to say I love the rain, so there.

I never thought I'd end up like my parents.
You know, with their endless diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up, what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.
Uphill. Barefoot.
Both ways.
I remember promising myself I wouldn’t do that.
But now I’m older, and of course, wiser. And I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.
I mean really, you've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damned Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!
I mean, when I was a kid, we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, We had to go to the library and look it up ourselves. In the card catalogue!!
There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter. With a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way to the village and put it in the postbox and it would take like a week to get there!
Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to give us a kick up the arse! Nowhere was safe!
There were no MP3 players or Napsters, whatever they are! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the nearest town and visit the record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favourite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would all unravel. And it didn’t matter how long you took respooling it with a pencil (which we also used for writing, as there were no computers), it never worked properly again.
We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!
And we didn't have Caller ID either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school,your mum, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics!
We had the Atari 2600!
With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'asteroids'. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever!
And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!
You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You didn’t channel surf because there were no remote controls.
You had to get off your arse and walk over to the TV to change the channel!
There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoilt little rat-bastards!
And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the oven ... Imagine that!
Honestly, you kids today have got it too easy.
You're spoilt. You wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1976.

You know, there’s always one.
Australia’s Catch the Fire Ministries has tried to blame the bushfires disaster on laws decriminalising abortion in Victoria.

The Pentecostal church’s leader, Pastor Danny Nalliah, claimed he had a dream about raging fires on October 21 last year and that he woke with "a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb".

I had a few dreams last week. I dreamt Bill Clinton and I were going to a party. Bill was late and when he turned up in his big limo I had a go at him. He was suitably chastened; I called Five to come and have a look at the chipmunks who were building a city of mud; Amy Winehouse asked me if I could write another song for her; my brother cycled past me singing in Italian and I laughed myself silly; a duck bit me; Angelina Jolie said, honey, turn the light out.

...it would look something like this if you compared it with the fires that have been burning in Victoria state over the weekend where around 200 people have now lost their lives.
 
It’s equivalent to fires wiping out several of the larger Cotswold villages and their surrounding hamlets/farms (ie: Victoria’s Marysville, Kinglake and the Yarra Valley), while other big fires simultaneously razed, say, an area of Dorset (the Bendigo fires) and the whole of rural Kent (Gippsland), while another fire front was threatening the Peak District (Beechworth and the Australian Alps).

In other words - the whole of the State was under threat and you simply didn't know where the bushfires would start and then, more to the point, where they would spread because of the wild, galeforce winds on Saturday coupled with temperatures that for days had sat in the 40s (over 100 Fahrenheit)

On the geography of Victoria, relative to other Australian States it is small in size, so relatively it is more densely populated than other parts of the country, and the towns and townships (villages) are closer together but the topography and other natural features (lakes, rivers, forests) often means there isn't as broad a network of roads as you would find in Britain so the means of escape is limited.

Now, add to this, that 60% of Queensland (north-east Australia) has been under water all of last week (ie, the whole of England) following intense low depressions/cyclone activity, and I think you’ll get a bit of a feel for how it’s affecting us all.

The good news is, here on our mountain we had 19C today and some heavy rain and fog, and that’s set to continue for at least a week, so that’ll stop any fires developing here.

Meanwhile, in Victoria, it’s still hot and windy and several fires are building in intensity with a number of towns threatened...

So, as you may have seen on the news, over 100 people have lost their lives in the bushfires sweeping across Victoria on the weekend. Honestly, these fires are so powerful and move so quickly there's often nothing you can do. Some of the people were burned alive in their cars as they tried to flee. It's absolutely tragic.
The PM, Kevin Rudd, has now sent the army in to help, though why they were not used as a matter of course I don't know. I imagine some questions will be asked about that at some stage.
Of course, several of the fires appea to be the work of arsonists who when caught - and they will be caught believe you me - will be charged with murder. Honestly, I would not like to be in their shoes...
I spent most of the 47C weekend sniffing the air and on Saturday we had some smoke misting the air but I'm not sure where it came from but we had no dramas just where we are.
Today it's incredibly humid but the temp has dropped to 21C, as it does, so it's a bit more bearable.

On a lighter note, I went to George's 40th this weekend. I'll tell you more about it tomorrow because I really need to spend some time on my thriller today, but suffice to say he had near-naked girls serving canapes and drinks, a light show they could probably see from Pluto and sufficient loud music to get the boys in blue around on no less than three occasions...Definitely a mid-life crisis, if you ask me.

Sorry, I’ve been inside the double-door Electrolux for the past week trying to keep cool.
This weekend, in typical Australian boasting fashion we will once again be absolute tops at something – this time, according to Channel Ten (the same people who said Hugh Jackman was the world’s top actor – news to de Niro, I’d imagine...) we will be living in the hottest place on earth.
Look, I don’t want to argue that one too much though I’d have thought there’s a spot somewhere in the Gobi desert that’s a tad warm too, but this weekend is a scorcher.
All week it’s been 40C and it’s just dreadful. Really you can’t do anything except put the air conditioning on and hope the power doesn’t go off – which it did yesterday for 20 minutes.
This weekend it could reach a record-breaking 50C which is not funny. You just can’t do anything but stay indoors and try and breathe really slowly.
We had leaflets through the door this week from the fire people saying if we want to stay and defend our house in the event of an expected bushfire we should make the decision now, or else go and stay somewhere else for the next few days – like Yorkshire, presumably.
Of course we’ll stay and hope the power doesn’t go off if the flames come because then we won’t be able to pump any water.
That aside, Five has just started school which he loves. They’ve been battening down the hatches there too, telling the kids on Friday that they wouldn’t be allowed to go outside all day – you know, because they don’t want deaths on their hands.
In The Independent last week there was a story which you woulnd’t read about here that said Australia might well be the first country to implode under the effects of global warming. I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, a big bit of our ‘industry’ is farming and some places haven’t had a drop of rain for, wait for it, 10 years.
Rivers are running dry down south, even big ones like the Murray-Darling, while up in Queensland they’ve got more rain than you can shake a brolly at and whole towns are under water. Some of them, like Cairns, are having food delivered by helicopter or boat because there are no roads still passable by truck.
Anyway, we’ll see. But I hope you’ll excuse me, I’m just off to sit in the fridge for a while.