Arsehattery – and other matters of concern

I'm not ignoring the fact that I blogged little the previous week – okay, not all at. My excuse is that my parents were in town for the week for the celebration of the 50th wedding anniversary of one of my father's sisters and her husband, who live in Melbourne.

To make up for it, I'm sharing a number of great things I've found online this past few days. Ampersand Duck has made these great posters – printed on an old press, mind you – and is selling them via here website:
You can find them on AD's website here. She has, thankfully, given permission for the digital image to be used.

Barista has written a brilliant post to mark Norman Mailer's passing, including this paragraph, one of the best pieces of writing I've read all year:

In my smaller, Anglo-saxon petit-bourgeois parvenu immigrant soul, I have never been able to comprehend literary lions, those agonised, bellowing carnivores of the literary Serengeti, obsessed with fame, breeding and marrying and writing seemingly by priapic impulse. I see myself as a kind of short-sighted giraffe, munching leaves above it all, blurrily vague on the details, tripping knock-kneed and spindle-legged on bones and burrows. Mailer and his vastly gushing American mates demand their faces carved in stone on mountain tops, while I want to amount to the proverbial hill of beans. I am content to survive, and I celebrate those who want more.

Amen.

Barista's also exploring his dark side in a theory he's got – what I'd call the 'chaos theory of world domination' – in a post on the the messes the US is creating in Iraq, Afghanistan etc being deliberate.

While Barista suggests that the US doesn't have an exit plan from Iraq because they have every intention of creating a permanent presence there (in the relative security of superbases), Get Up is running a new petition campaign, fronted by two young women who have felt the brunt of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, calling on Howard to announce his strategy for extricating Australia from Iraq – one that is independent of US interests.

Meanwhile, as I couldn't make it to the Walk Against Warming last Sunday (as my parent were in town and we had family commitments), I was very happy to hear that it got up to 30,000 people in Melbourne!

To make up for now doing the walk, I'm going to get my bike fixed and starting riding to work again - as often as I can (I'm under no illusions over how unfit I am!). Stay tuned for more cycling posts.

If you're in Melbourne and looking for something to do this Saturday, and you want to tell the Howard Government and its Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews that you won't forgive its shamefully racist and opportunistic move to stop the intake of refugees from Africa because of groundless accusations of African refugees not 'settling into' the 'Australia way of life', then I suggest you go along to the 'Big Day Out Against Racism', a community festival to 'Support African Communities' organised by Racism No, who say "We reject the Federal Government's attempt to isolate and marginalise the African community in Australia, and its targeting of the Sudanese community in particular.":

Big Day Out Against Racism
Saturday 17 November 2007 at 4 pm
Nicholson Campus, Victorian University
Corner of Nicholson and Buckley Sts, Footscray
With music and more. Details on the Racism No website.