Too Much Information

Parents, husbang and child all asleep, and I've been reading blogs, finishing the wine and periodically throwing myself in the new supersonic 10 ft round blow up pool in the backyard. I saw the "five weird things about me" meme at Pavlov's Cat and Moment to Moment and couldn't resist:

1. Sometimes, if it is really extremely hot, I have been known to put my foot in the toilet and flush it. I developed this habit shortly after I moved to Brisbane in a mid-nineties summer , having lived in Canberra for five years before that. I know this habit is weird because of the look on the husbang's face when he told his mother about it.*

2. I get very cut if people don't move out of the way of emergency vehicles with sirens on. I acknowledge there is a small chance that they are in a hurry because the doughnut shop is about to shut. But I don't think we can have a civil society where people obstruct emergency vehicles, even misguided ones.

3. I call cotton buds "ear sticks" and use really enormously large quantities of them. I am having an operation soon which will hopefully render this uneccessary.

4. If my car doesn't start - which is not infrequent - I rub my palms together so that the energy points in their middle heats up and put them on the bits of the dash that I feel need it, and ask it to start. Mostly it works.

5. At least a couple of times a week I am so overcome by joy to be with my son, and at the person he is, that I start weeping. At the time of writing, he appears psychologically undamaged by this. He really is that cool a kid it would bring you to tears to be his mother.

OK, really am going on holiday now.



* Luckily I was able to maintain my dignity by retaliating with a habit of of his which I found to be something of an argument-settler.

Merry EndofYearMass

See you in a little while. Happy Holidays to all. Remember to think of the children and be kind to each other.

Here's what are now called "Christmas dogs" in our house. They are apparently related to Santa in some fashion we've yet to determine.

Disgust on demand

How boring is it, during a stoush, to continually be required by other commenters to denounce particular acts or views? For the sake of convenience, I now provide the following:


Also available in "The Left".

If you are one of the two or three people who haven't had their turn yet, the image generator is here.

Note to self

Re: packing

When going somewhere 4 hours drive away for the weekend to attend a big do with the outlaws, remember to pack:

- underpants for self
- child's clothes, toothbrush, pyjamas, undies, hat, copy of "Dinosaur Roar", etc.

This will smooth your journey considerably.

Treasure

Thank God Peter Costello is turning out to be such a gigantic pussy.


Quick! Look, up there! It's the ambition of a frustrated man!


Kimmy! Look at moiye!
Get it right Kimmy!
Don't fuck it up!

New blogs I am enjoying, and suggest you do too

There's the charming and incisive Pavlov's Cat, former Psephite comicstriphero going solo and the beginning of Mindy's journey to build a house in a new town,Blog on the Landscape.

Do yourself a favour, kids.

They are always with us, but the truth will set them free

I don't usually get to watch Lateline since having a child has ruined me for late nights. But after Bumblebee-sitting last night while Ampersand Duck went out to celebrate her wedding anniversary*, I caught Lindsay Tanner pointing out something sensible and important. Talking about the appropriateness of Rob Gerard's appointment to the RBA while his company was involved in a massive and prolonged tax dispute, he said:

There's a really fundamental question of values here, Tony, and it's at the core of the Liberal Party and it goes back a long way, and that is that there's a blind spot about tax avoidance by rich people. They reckon it's OK for rich people like Rob Gerard to get away with whatever they can get away with, it's just all part of the game. We had it when John Howard was Treasurer, with bottom-of-the-harbour schemes, and they think that's alright. There's a deep vein of attitude in the Liberal Party that that sort of thing is OK, yet ordinary hardworking Australians are getting taxed till the pips squeak and they don't care about people like Mr Gerard getting appointed to the Reserve Bank board while they're in the middle of a giant tax scam case.

It's the core of my rejection of vile Toryism - it's all about making room for people to become hugely wealthy. It's not about ensuring no-one has to be poor. (Obviously my heart doesn't bleed for AWE taxpayers like Tanner's does. The needs of people poorer than them is what weighs on me.)

You can see the same attitude in the assertion made by John Humphreys who proposes, through the CIS, a new tax plan which deals with the issue of high effective marginal tax rates at the lower end of the scale but at the expense of a minimum wage protection.

I offer no apology. We distribute more of our welfare budget to the poorest 30 per cent of households than almost any other country, and support for groups like single parents is generous by international standards.

A slightly lower welfare payment is a small price to pay for better incentives, more job opportunities, fewer bureaucratic hassles, a stronger economy and higher long-run living standards. If cutting unemployment benefits seems inequitable, how much more inequitable is it to continue with the current policies that keep people unemployed?"

A slighter lower welfare payment can cruel a kid's chance to go on an excursion at school. A low wage shit conditions job doesn't help them much either.


* While Ms Duck is an exemplary mother, I am considering reporting her to the welfare for allowing an 8 year old boy to go to sleep every single night listening to Queen. Every. Single. Night.