Your Essential Guide to Surviving Baz Luhrmann's `Australia'

From Cinetopia, Jim Schembri, November 28, 2008

You've been hearing about it for over a year. You've read the stories, seen the ads, watched the interviews, downloaded the promos, heard the gossip - but now the moment of truth has arrived. It's finally time for you to join your fellow citizens and dutifully file into the nearest multiplex to bear witness to the epic cinematic masterpiece that is definitely not Baz Luhrmann's Australia.

To help you through the ordeal here is a quick checklist of items to take in with you:

A Handful of No Doz: That first hour can be really tough to get through. These should help perk you up.

Large Oriental Hand Fan: In the camp-fire scene where Hugh Jackman pulls off his shirt to reveal the kind of ripped torso you usually see only in high-end gay porn you're going to need some air circulation quick smart to keep you from swooning.

Small Plastic Beach Bucket: To catch any drool resulting from the same scene.

Keep Reading

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A Nagasaki Pot Pourri

Some more things that have caught my lens this week in Nagasaki:

Everything is cute, even poop.


There are little cats everywhere, frequently missing their tails.
Everything is decorative, even man hole covers



Interesting menus

Interesting marketing strategies:

Things we don't get back in Australia

I found this in my hotel bathroom:


It features a heated seat, and various kinds of spraying facilities, including some kind of oscillating option. I haven't tried them to be honest. Right now I'm content enough to giggle at the pictures.

I have also been into a few public toilets while walking around Nagasaki today, and I don't mind saying they are a darn sight nicer than your average public loo in Australia. Not all public loos come with sprays, but they do all come with a speaker, that says something (in Japanese) to you the moment you sit down, followed by a recording of a toilet flushing sound. This is not an optional extra. It seems that even if you are not embarrassed enough by the tinkling sounds made in a toilet, nobody else wants to hear you do it.

Changing the subject for a moment, look what I got out of the vending machine this morning:

It's a can by the way. But it has a screw top lid. All the advantages of a can, with the convenience of being able to save some for later (although the can couldn't have been bigger than 200 ml)

Also, later in the day I got this, totally sucked in by its clever slogan:

I must say, I do like the vending machine culture around here. You can get coke, water, beer, cigarettes, iced-tea, iced-coffee, fermented bean juice, underwear, whatever you want. About every 50 metres. Actually, I didn't see an underwear vending machine in Nagasaki, but I've heard about them in Tokyo.

Culture Shock

I arrived in Nagasaki yesterday for a conference. Unfortunately I'm staying in a different hotel from the rest of the conference mob (i.e. the only other people in Nagasaki that speak English). So I'm about 2 km down the road at the ANA, feeling slightly bewildered and to be honest, a bit culture-shocked.

I thought I was going to be able to use my Visa card for everything so I wasn't too fussed about getting some Yen before I left Australia. But I was very wrong. I haven't seen a single opportunity to use a Visa yet, and neither have I seen an ATM willing to take my Australian bank card. So money was my first problem. I solved that by getting money from my Visa account. This of course means you instantly start paying interest. So I decided to quickly head back to my hotel, jump on the internet and transfer the money over to pay off the visa account.

My laptop battery died before I had a chance to log in. No problem I thought, I'll just plug it in using the handy plug converter I brought with me. It wasn't handy at all as it turns out. I was under the impression that Japanese plug sockets were the same as North American but they are not. They do not have an earth pin. Therefore my handy plug converter with its earth pin would not plug in. Bugger. So I went down to the hotel reception and tried to ask if they had a plug converter that would work for me. Eventually they came back with this:

What am I meant to do with that? No seriously, I tried to ask them. They shrugged. Okkkkkaaaaayyyy. I was a teeny bit nervous about being electrocuted , but I plugged in my converter and then my laptop cable.


And amazingly, it worked. I may have been culture shocked but I wasn't electric shocked. The laptop charged and sparks didn't fly. It doesn't seem right though, does it? Does it? Leave a comment if you know.

I was so tired from being awake for 30 hours that I went to bed at 7 pm (but not before I exchanged the buckwheat filled pillows with fluffy pillows) and woke up at 5:30am this morning. I faffed around for a while with my free internet connection and my charged laptop, before heading off down to get my western breakfast. And I was hungry for waffles.

Breakfast was a bit weird, but dining alone always is. Firstly, not only was I the only westerner in the restaurant, but also the only woman. Luckily dining alone was no big deal, since about half the tables appeared to be business men dining alone.

The western food was certainly an interesting experience. They didn't have waffles. What they did have were a few tiny pieces of "pork in bacon" and "pork in sausage", with so few pieces available that I didn't feel comfortable taking more than 1 piece of each. They had "sunny side up" (i.e. eggs) served in little muffin cases! They had something akin to muesli and yogurt, upon which I poured blueberry sauce. That was good, but it would have been nice if the bowl was 10 times bigger. They also had croissants, but in fact they were more like bread rolls shaped like a croissant. So anyway, it wasn't the kind of buffet where you eat so much that you skip lunch. No, I was hungry an hour later. And by then I had found myself a Starbucks, where they spoke Engrish, and they handed me a menu as I walked in the door. The day was starting off quite well.

Heck if he were my kid I'd...

Slap his stupid yellow sunglasses off!

Update:
The public has spoken. As I write this more than 414,000 people have slapped Corey. You can too.

Eurovision 2007

I was wondering where to begin my discussion of the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, held this last weekend.

Instead I'll just let Go Fug Yourself tell you all about it.

Live and die by the gun

From The Age, April 19 2007

The right to bear arms is enshrined in US politics and culture. The latest massacre will do nothing to change that, writes Gwynne Dyer.

YOU can imagine lots of countries where a candidate for the presidency might lie about owning a gun so as not to alienate the voters, but only in the United States would he lie and say he does own a gun when he doesn't.

That was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's sin earlier this year — and he compounded it by claiming that he was a lifelong hunter. Diligent reporters checked and found that Romney had never taken out a hunting licence anywhere. (Where were they when President Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction"?)

The notion that the voters might punish a candidate for not owning a gun would seem simply bizarre in most jurisdictions, but it is a serious political reality in the United States. That's why hardly anybody in the US is using the latest mass slaughter by some enraged loser (33 dead at Virginia Tech) to argue for more gun control. There's not even pressure to renew the federal law banning the sale of assault rifles, which was recently allowed to lapse.

Gun control is a dead issue in the US, and it isn't coming back. There is a sound political reason for this, and there is also a rational explanation for it (which isn't the same thing). The political reason was simplicity itself: the Democratic Party realised that it wasn't going to win back a majority in either house of Congress if it didn't stop talking about gun control. The party's leaders looked at the political map after the 2004 election, a sea of Republican red with a narrow strip of Democratic blue on either coast, and realised that their problem was more than just George Bush's fatal charm. They weren't winning in "heartland" states because they were seen as trying to take Americans' guns away.

There are other issues even in Montana, of course, but enough people care passionately about their guns in Montana that it's hard to get elected there if you are seen as anti-gun. So now the Democratic Party's national platform commits it to uphold the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — and in the 2006 election it won both the Senate seat that was being contested in Montana and the governorship of the state, for decades a Republican stronghold.

The campaign manifesto of the new Democratic senator from Montana, Jon Tester, claimed that he would "stand up to anyone — Republican or Democratic — who tries to take away Montanans' gun rights".

The new Democratic Governor of Montana, Brian Schweizer, says that he has "more guns than I need but not as many as I want … I guess I kind of believe in gun control: you control your gun, and I'll control mine." It's a whole new image for Democrats, and it won them control of both houses of Congress in 2006. (Yes, the war helped, too, but by itself it wouldn't have been enough.)

The Democrats were not going to lose the coastal states (where the effete intellectuals and most of the old urban working class live) even if they did drop gun control. They were not going to win in the heartland (where the born-agains and the Marlboro Men live) if they didn't drop gun control. So they dropped it, and now no large party supports it. That's the politics of it, and you can't argue with that.

There is another, quite rational reason why gun control doesn't get much traction in American politics any more. It's simply too late. This is a society that owns about equal numbers of wristwatches and guns: about a quarter-billion of each. There's no going back — and if practically everybody else has guns, maybe you should have one, too.

As various commentators will be pointing out soon, if just one of those 32 murdered students had been carrying a concealed handgun maybe the killer would have been stopped sooner. It's perfectly legal to carry concealed weapons with a permit in Virginia, but not on college campuses.

This loophole must be closed. At least, that is the way the argument is usually put in America, although the reality is not one gun per citizen over the age of 12, but some citizens with a great many guns and most citizens with none at all.

More fundamentally, the gun-control argument may be missing the cultural point. Most Swiss and Israeli households with a male between the ages of 18 and 45 also contain a fully automatic weapon, because the national military mobilisation model in those countries requires reservists to keep their weapons at home. Yet the Swiss and Israelis don't murder one another at a higher rate than people in countries such as Britain or Turkey, where there is relatively strict gun control.

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people" is the best-known slogan of the National Rifle Association, the most effective pro-gun lobbying organisation in the US. But it's really a cultural thing: the British have bad teeth, the French smell of garlic, Americans tend to have more bullet-holes in them than other people. The slogan should actually go: "Guns don't kill Americans; Americans kill Americans."

---
And in a related article: Bush defends the right to bear arms

Little Orphan Angie

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper, March 31 2007.

Some links added by me - for non-Australian's who don't know what a Daddo is.

The red carpets of Hollywood are crawling with a new stolen generation. Daniel Burt wants in.

AN ORPHAN IS NOT JUST for Christmas. They also make a great Easter gift. Soon, every celebrity will have one and the Third World will disappear, one boutique baby at a time.
If compassion were bird flu, Angelina Jolie would be laying eggs and begging for crackers.
Her latest recruit is a Vietnamese boy named Pax. Officially, he's the luckiest kid on the planet, but just wait until Pax hits his teens. You thought things were emotionally twisted for Oedipus. Having "the talk" with your mum never felt so wrong.
As for me, at the risk of jeopardising my inheritance, if it meant getting adopted by Angelina, I would happily murder my parents.
Hollywood's other do-gooders must be shattered. It's no longer enough to fly to Chad, grab a photo op with a cripple and be home in time for the Botox appointment. Where once celebrities spoke out against child labour, now they are adopting the workers.
Being in such high demand, orphans are getting picky. Many refuse to live with anyone who is not an Oscar nominee. I heard of one Kenyan kid who threw a tantrum when he learned that his new parent had only been up for Best Sound. Another had the indignity of being acquired by the winner of a Golden Globe. Her lawyers are in negotiations.
Celebrities seem to jump straight in the deep end. Why not start with an electronic pet? Like most orphans, they are compact, make funny noises and are made in Asia. Ensure you can tell the difference. One A-lister bought an orphan and spent 25 minutes looking for the "off" switch.
But these children are more than breathing toys. They constitute a new stolen generation, pilfered not by governments but movie stars. To safeguard against accusations of bias, many personalities endeavour to adopt children from every continent. Angelina wants a "Rainbow Tribe", the racial equivalent of collecting the whole set.
Celebrity lounge rooms become mini-United Nations. Parents don't reduce pocket money; they impose economic sanctions. Preventing fights becomes peacekeeping. And as with the UN, when it comes to housework, nothing actually gets done.
These kids go from dirt floor to red carpet. With so much at stake, I wouldn't be surprised if they puffed up their sympathy CV. Believe me, prospective parents, do your homework. What I thought was a diseased Cambodian toddler turned out to be a 33-year-old Adelaide IT worker with gout. The slob drinks straight from the carton.
Everyone knows famous people should get what they want. But competition is fierce and most are too busy to read every sob story. That's why orphans worldwide should be given tickets in a celebrity lottery. If your number comes up, you get to go home with Paris Hilton. Different categories mean B-grade celebrities get B-grade orphans. Booby prize gets a Daddo.
Some people deride celebrities who adopt the disadvantaged. They question motives, sincerity and aptitude. These cynics themselves haven't been altruistic since 1983, and even then it was walking home a drunk girl in the hope she'd ask them inside.
We commoners claim to lack the wherewithal for such charity. But all we need is a more extreme incentive. I suggest changing every African kid's name to iPod. Not only would we spend big, we'd also splurge on accessories.
Prevalence, however, ruins allure. Glossy magazines thrive on quirky cases of infants being plucked from obscurity. The public laps it up and intrusiveness is happily masked as goodwill. In reality, the constant threat of paparazzi is LA's answer to the ebola virus. And our abiding interest fuels its spread.
I wish the best of luck to Hollywood's new offspring. If there's ever an orphan shortage, give me a call. I can make a fall down the stairs look like an accident.

Language barriers

Moving back to Australia has (on the whole) been a good decision so far, despite various problems that just never seem to end.
But let me tell you about the problems I’m facing with my accent. My accent is getting very confused, and so are the people that have to interpret the words coming out of my mouth. It started off as a northern England accent many years ago and along the way has picked up bits of Australian , and most recently bits of Canadian (although no Brit, Australian or Canadian would be able to identify with my accent). In different places that I’ve lived I have had to adjust my pronunciation of certain words in order to make myself understood (and I’m not talking about tom-ay-toes and tom-ar-toes here, because I refuse to get into that).
There are several examples, but let’s discuss coffee for a moment, in particular mocha, which I am prone to ordering on a fairly regular basis. In Australia they pronounce ‘mocha’ with a short vowel sound, which would rhyme with ‘locker’. In North America it is pronounced with a long vowel sound, rhyming with ‘poker’. It didn’t take me long to adjust the pronunciation of that word when I arrived in Vancouver – it was a necessity because they didn’t understand what I was asking for otherwise. But back in Australia I am having immense struggles remembering to order it with the short vowel sound – it just sounds too weird to me now and I can’t believe I ever pronounced it that way before. The other day I asked for a mocha but accidentally pronounced it with a long vowel sound. The girl taking my order looked confused for a second but then set to work making it. However, a mocha she did not make. In fact I ended up being served a latte! How can she think that I asked for latte? It doesn't sound anything like mocha no matter how you say it. This morning I again asked for a mocha with a long vowel, and I got a very blank look from the barista. He just stared at me and after about 5 seconds said, "I don’t think we serve that". So, realising my mistake, I tried asking for a mocha with a short vowel, and he told me that they did make those.

A bit more whingeing

In the interests of keeping everyone up to speed, here's a few more obstacles we're having to get past.
When we signed the lease on our house we opted into a scheme called Direct Connect (hereafter to be referred to as DC), where one phone call from them to us was supposedly all that was required to set up our phone, internet, electricity, water, and natural gas connections. In theory its a great concept as we didn’t really have to lift a finger and it cost us nothing. However, we assumed that the person at DC would actually set up the connections correctly, and that was a poor assumption to make.
First off, internet connection. DC signed us up for ADSL broadband with one of the larger IPs in Australia. We were asked if we needed a modem and we said no, because we’d brought one over from Canada with us. Then, a couple of days a go I received a phone call from the IP to let us know that out modem would be delivered to us by the end of the week. I told her that we hadn’t ordered a modem. She seemed surprised and we argued about this for several minutes – she couldn’t comprehend that we might already have a modem, probably because broadband is still a relatively new concept in Australian residential internet. In the end she said she would cancel the order. A few minutes later I got a call from DC to say that the IP had informed them that we had refused connection of our internet service. I told DC that in fact we had not refused connection, just the modem. DC went back to the IP and explained the situation, and then called me back and said everything was sorted out. I went home and checked my credit card account online to discover a $227 payment to the IP. I called the IP and asked what the payment was for, and they said it included the cost of modem they had sent us. Exasperated, I explained the situation and was told that they would refund the cost of the modem to my credit card, which has not yet happened. And the final straw...this morning a courier arrived with a package from the IP, in which was a modem. We didn't accept it of course.

The other thing DC got wrong was that they didn’t set up our natural gas connection, despite telling us that it had been done. I discovered this when we received an overdue notice for the previous tenants’ natural gas. It appears that DC saw that our house already had a gas connection and left it at that. So we have unwittingly been using someone else’s natural gas for the last few weeks. I’m not sure we’ve actually got to the heart of the problems that could arise from this yet. I do know that I’m not paying a cent towards someone else’s bill though.

...And we're back

Wow! Hi everyone. It’s nice to be back on the internets again, and nice to see you all. It’s been a long hiatus - sarahkidd.com headquarters recently relocated from Vancouver to Melbourne, Australia, and it was quite a hectic move. I’m only now able to catch my breath. Some of you may have heard dribs and drabs of my whining in emails. But for those of you haven’t let me give you a quick rundown.

July 31: Bryan successfully defends his thesis, in an awesome display of cleverness. We celebrated briefly before saying “bye for now” to some of our dearest friends and heading off home to finish packing.
August 1: I fly out of Vancouver at some truly ridiculous hour of the morning, bound for Sydney (to spend a few days with my puppy…oh, and my parents). Bryan flies out of Vancouver at a slightly more civilized hour of the day, bound for Melbourne.
August 2: I arrive in Sydney. One of my two bags does not arrive in Sydney. I file a missing bag report, and remark upon the fact that this is twice in a row that my bags have gone missing on this flight. I walk out of the airport where my puppy awaits me (…oh, and my parents)
August 3: Bryan flies into Melbourne. One of his two bags does not fly into Melbourne with him. The missing bag contains all of his clothes, except those he was wearing. He files a missing bag report, and walks out of the airport wondering what the heck he’s arriving to. No sign of my missing bag yet.
I apply for a mobile phone contract and am turned down because I am between jobs and don’t have a permanent address in Australia – frankly, I am treated like a convict. We put the mobile phone in Dad’s name, as if I were 10 years old again.
August 4: morning. No sign of anyone’s bags yet. We spend several hours on hold attempting to find bags. Bryan is doing frequent loads of laundry.
Lunchtime. I am informed that my bag has arrived in Sydney and will be delivered to me between 2 and 4 pm.
4 pm. No bag yet.
7pm. I am reunited with my bag. No sign of Bryan’s bag.
August 5th: I wake up at 4 am, and drive with Dad down to Melbourne in ‘Little Red’ (a car). We arrive at about 3:30 pm. No sign of Bryan’s bag yet. We go to an internet café to check the Qantas lost baggage website. The guy in the internet café looks at us blankly when we ask if we can use our laptop on their wireless network – in fact I don’t think he knows what wireless is. Our campus accommodation smells funny.
August 6th: We try to convince ourselves that we’ve done the right thing, and take in some sights of Melbourne, including Chapel Street and St. Kilda Beach, which we enjoy.
August 7th: Bryan’s work visa has not been approved yet. Someone has lost his chest X-ray. He can’t start work (or be paid) until the visa is approved. We go house hunting. The houses all smell funny.
August 8th: No visa, no nice houses. We determine that we have one week to find a house before becoming homeless. Bryan is awarded a $100 ‘inconvenience fund’ from Qantas. We have to go all the way into the city to get it (that’s what I call inconvenient).
August 9th: Visa is finally approved. We drive 40 km to immigration office, and sit around for an hour or so before being given the visa. No sign of Bryan’s luggage.
August 10th: We find a nice house. A newly renovated, art deco style house with fabulous ceiling molding, timber floors, front and back gardens. The house is not cheap, ($1900/month). We are told there will be a dishwasher installed next week. Convinced on the promise of a dishwasher, we take the house and even negotiate a regular gardening service.
August 11th: We have to get two months rent together to pay in advance, but neither of us has actually earned any money yet! We try to wire money from Canadian accounts to Australian account. Australian bank says they can’t do it. Canadian bank says they can’t do it. Someone must know how to do it!
August 12th: We finally convince the Canadian bank to let us have some of our money. They give us a two hour window to get to an ATM to withdraw the money before changing their minds. We sign a lease for the house. The real estate agent is a young whippersnapper, (I’d say about 21) and drives a fancy car. He thinks he’s special. He doesn’t provide us with a condition report for the house, which we later discover he is legally obliged to do upon receipt of our bond. No sign of Bryan’s luggage.
August 14th: We get the keys to the house. Then we realize we have no furniture to move into the house, and go shopping. We attempt to buy a bedroom suite. Apparently the suite is so popular that the earliest that it can be delivered to us is late October. We consider a similar bedroom suite in another store. Same story. We order a bedroom suite and buy a mattress. Thankfully the mattress is available immediately. We also buy a fridge after recalling that (unlike in Canada) Australian rental properties usually don’t come with fridges and laundry machines.
August 15th: I go and meet my new bosses and am happy to confirm that I do have a job. Hurray. Am informed that I will not be paid for at least 3 weeks, such was the backlog in paperwork.
August 16th: We discover that the newly renovated house features a broken water heater, a leaky pipe, power outlets in three rooms don’t work, the kitchen door doesn’t have a door handle. There is also only one phone connection, and not conveniently located in a central area of the house – in fact it is placed so stupidly in the corner of the bedroom that it takes us nigh on 20 minutes to actually plug in the phone. The real estate agent says he doesn’t understand why we didn’t get a condition report, and says he’ll drop it over to our house.
August 17th: Water heater is finally repaired mid afternoon and I can wash my hair. Plumber repairs leaky pipe. Pipe is still leaking after plumber has left. No sign of Bryan’s luggage. Bryan getting bored of his clothes. No sign of condition report.
August 18th: Plumber comes back to look at leaky pipe. He repairs it again and leaves. Pipe continues to leak. No sign of dishwasher. Whippersnapper is not returning my calls.
August 21st: I start work. I am not provided with a desk or labspace, since there seems to be far too many people working there. I am told there may be a desk and labspace opening up in about a month. The security guard is not a charming man. He programs my access card wrong. I get locked out of my building. I go back to tell him the card isn’t working for me. He is not charming at all and refuses to change the programming on my card. I go back later and find a different security guard on duty. He is nice(r). I get back into my building. I decide to reserve judgment on whether I’m going to enjoy the job or not. We write a strongly worded letter to the whippersnapper.
August 24th: Its 3 weeks since Bryan reported his luggage missing. He can now file a claim for compensation. He may request up to $1600 compensation, which barely covers the cost of the brand new suit. Whippersnapper’s boss calls us out of the blue and asks if there is anything he can do to make our move easier. I tell him everything, not sure what has happened to the whippersnapper.

And there we have it. Who wants to place a bet on how long it will take us to get a dishwasher? And for that matter, for Bryan to receive compensation for lost luggage.

End of an era

In a little over a week Bryan and I are moving on to a new chapter of our lives. Three years to the day after I moved to Vancouver to spend more time with him, Bryan and I are are moving back to Australia. To Melbourne in fact. Bryan is defending his thesis on July31st, and we are flying out on August 1st. Bryan will be starting a postdoc at Monash University in Melbourne, and I will be working at The Burnet Institute at The Alfred Hospital.
I am looking forward to going to Melbourne, despite the worried look I get on my face when people ask me about it. It will be nice to closer to my parents, the flipside being that Bryan's family are going to be far far away. It will be nice to have summers that last for 8 months rather than 2 months, and nice to drive on the left again (just as I was getting good at driving on the right). But I'm pretty sad to be leaving Vancouver - its an amazing place, especially right now in all its summery glory. It might be a cliche, but I've honestly had the best 3 years of my life here. Work has been fantastic - wonderful supervisors and fellow students/postdocs in the lab. I'll be happy if my future research group is even half as good as I've experienced here at UBC (surely nothing could be as bad as places I've worked in years gone by).
I've met lots of lovely people, and many of them will remain good friends long after we've gone.
I've lived in a lovely red house in Kitsilano for the last 20 months or so. One of our neighbours is doing a painting of the house for us as something to remember it by - I'm excited to see it.
Right now we're trying to pack up what we're taking with us, sell what we can't take with us (anyone want a microwave?), and maintain some level of normality while Bryan studies for his defence. Oh, we're also having a party on Friday night to say goodbye to everyone. It will be a good way to finish up the dregs of our liquor cabinet, as long as nobody minds drinking out of plastic cups.
Now I'm all sad. Here's a Boston terrier puppy to cheer me up:

Footnote: Bryan and I decided we'd like to get a puppy once we're settled in Melbourne. I'd love to get a Boston Terrier, but I don't think they're very common in Australia so it might be hard to find a breeder near us.

108 minutes of yoga

My upstairs neighbours talked me into going with them to the Yogathon at Plaza of Nations today. The yogathon was organised to raise money for Camp Moomba, a camp for kid living with HIV/AIDS.
I am by no means a yogi - I have a yoga mat but I've never used it. But I've done a few downward dogs and sun salutations in the past, so I decided to go, although feeling like it was going to be the most tiring 108 minutes of my life.
To my surprise, I was able to keep up with everything quite well. I knew most of the poses from other exercise classes I've done (I just didn't realise they were yoga). For the most part it was really fun, and quite energetic. But after about 90 minutes I was starting to watch the clock, waiting for the cool down poses to start. Now I'm tired and I think I'm going to be sore tomorrow.
On the way home I was very conscious of the fact that I was walking through Kitsilano, wearing yoga pants and carrying a rolled up mat. All that was missing was a chihuahua and a venti and I would have looked just like a Kitsilano soccer mom.

Now the bloody Aussies are making spoof tourism ads

Thanks to Sieu for drawing my attention to this hilarious Spoof Australia Tourism Ad.
Just so you know, it may not necessarily be work-safe due to 'language' and 'adult themes'.


The ad was made by a guy called Dan Ilic in response to all the offense the original ad caused the UK, Canada and the USA. Incidently, the UK has lifted its ban on the ad now, and is airing it uncensored, after realising that Britons aren't offended by the word 'bloody' after all.

Further to my post a few days back...

Here's the bloody offensive advertisement. And I quite like it, so there!

Now the bloody Yanks are offended

March 23, 2006

A major conservative American lobby group is set to unleash a campaign of protest against Australian tourism's "where the bloody hell are you?" TV advertisement.

The controversial commercial has made its US debut in front of 20 million American TV viewers and one influential group was not amused.

The American Family Association (AFA), which has more than two million members and leads campaigns against abortion and gay rights, was upset with the bikini-clad model Lara Bingle's use of "bloody" and "hell" in the ad's tagline.

AFA members are expected to bombard Tourism Australia with thousands of emails and phone calls in coming weeks to vent their feelings.

Members are also expected to boycott Australia as a holiday destination.

"I just feel pretty sure the typical American family who is watching TV with their children and they're exposed to this ad are going to be upset," AFA director of special projects, Randy Sharp, said.

"I don't want my children to hear that phrase.

"It's a shocking phrase because we're not familiar with it.

"I guess they use it all the time in Australia, but it's a foreign language here so I think it'll have a negative impact rather than positive."

However, Tourism Australia was not worried by the prospect of an AFA campaign, a spokesman said.

The ad's North American target market was well-educated, high-earning, widely travelled people from Canada and the US west coast, the Tourism Australia spokesman said.

"And I think we have the right campaign to do the job," he said.

"The popular series Commander-in Chief runs in all US states and features a character called Nathan 'Bloody Hell' Templeton, so it's a term understood by Americans."

Research in the US showed the ad's target market "enjoyed its humour and took it in the way it was intended", the spokesman said.

The original uncut version of the ad had been downloaded from the Internet in 85 per cent of the world's countries, he said.

British TV authorities dropped a ban on the use of the word "bloody" after pressure from Australia, but now Canadian authorities are unhappy with the way the ad portrays beer drinking.

Tourism Australia launched the ad in the US with a 30-second spot during the hit TV series Lost, which draws around 20 million American viewers each week.

The ad also aired on some of America's most-watched cable TV channels, including Rupert Murdoch's FOX News, the popular A&E channel, TNT, TBS, Fine Living and the home improvement network, HGTV.

The ad has not upset America's broadcast regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but all it takes is for one viewer complaint for the FCC to launch an investigation.

FCC spokesperson Rebecca Fisher said she was unaware of any complaints.

The Mississippi-based AFA's campaigns have had enormous lobbying success in the US.

Last year the group called on its members to file formal complaints against US TV network CBS for a "teenage orgy scene" depicted in Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia's hit TV series, Without A Trace.

The FCC last week fined more than 100 CBS affiliate stations $US3.6 million ($A5 million) for airing the orgy scene.

The AFA website congratulates its members on the campaign with a "You did it!" headline and a link to send the FCC a thank-you message.

The AFA is also calling on its members to lobby Pizza Hut to ban a "sexually suggestive" ad featuring pop princess Jessica Simpson, in which she feeds food into a teenager's mouth, causing the boy to faint.

Sharp said he enjoyed the Tourism Australia ad until the end when Bingle asks "where the bloody hell are you?"

"When you think 'bloody' in America you think the red liquid that flows from human bodies which is usually a sign of some kind of violence," Sharp said.

Tourism Australia contact details will be made available to AFA members.

"They will hear from a lot of our members who are going to be insulted," Sharp said.

"Australians are spending all of these millions of dollars inviting us, and if we go over there are we going to be exposing our kids to foul language and images of bloody?

"We don't want our kids to hear the term 'bloody'.

"We certainly don't want our kids to hear profanity."

AAP

British censors balked at 'bloody,' while CBC had a problem with 'hell'

From the Globe and Mail, March 21 2006

CBC quibbles with risqué Australia ad

Keith McArthur, Marketing Reporter

If it's not the bloody, it's the hell.

When British censors banned a controversial Tourism Australia ad campaign this month, they did so because it used the word "bloody" in the question: "So where the bloody hell are you?"

Now the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation says it won't run the ad during family programming because of the word "hell."

"It just shows you the different taste levels of audiences in various cultures," said CBC spokeswoman Ruth Ellen Soles.

" 'Hell' is a problem for us in terms of kids and family viewing. It comes under the category of 'taste' and in these situations we listen to what our audience tells us."

Britain's Broadcasting Advertising Clearance Centre initially ordered Tourism Australia to edit the word "bloody" out of its ads, but the ban was lifted over the weekend.

Tourism Australia also plans to air the ad in Canada. Last week, it submitted the commercials to the CBC and to Telecaster, which screens commercials before they appear on Canada's private broadcasters.

The CBC said the ad can run with the vast majority of its content, but not on the two programs it characterizes as "family" programming: Be The Creature and The Wonderful World of Disney,

which air late Sunday afternoon. And it won't be allowed in family Easter specials.

"We've also told the agency that we'll be monitoring audience reaction and if we get a significant number of complaints, we'll rethink running it," Ms. Soles said.

The head of Telecaster said that although it has approved the ads, it will flag them to make sure individual broadcasters know they contain objectionable language.

"Those are words that we would generally have problems with. They're on our list of bad words because we don't want kids picking up on that," said Jim Patterson, president and chief executive officer of the Television Bureau of Canada, which runs Telecaster.

But Mr. Patterson said Telecaster doesn't have any problem with the phrase in the context of the commercial.

The ad shows a sequence of vignettes in which various Australians tell potential tourists how they've prepared the country for their arrival: "We've poured you a beer," "We've shampooed the camel," and "We've saved you a spot on the beach."

A bikini-clad model then asks potential tourists: "So where the bloody hell are you?"

"The idea is that this is the way Australians talk to each other when they have a barbecue. . . ." said Luke Jones, director of Canada for Tourism Australia.

"That's kind of the invitation we wanted to extend to our visitors as well."

Mr. Jones said Tourism Australia has doubled its marketing budget in Canada. He said the "bloody hell" ads will likely run in Canada later this month or in April.

A major marketing campaign, involving print and Internet advertising, will run next fall when Canadians are planning their winter vacations.

Should Canadians be offended by the slightly risqué phrase, they can complain to Advertising Standards Canada (ASC), which monitors advertising through a complaints-driven process.

"If we got a complaint we would certainly look at what kind of program and the time that the ad was running. If it was adult programming after 9 or 10 p.m., it might be looked at differently than if it was something earlier in the evening when families typically watch shows together," said Janet Feasby, a vice-president with ASC.

Tourism Australia plans to use the "bloody hell" slogan everywhere except Singapore, where local laws required it to be replaced with "Where are you?"

Australian Tourism Minister Fran Bailey initially rejected suggestions that the "bloody" phrase would offend some potential viewers, calling it "the great Australian adjective."

And Prime Minister John Howard was on the defensive because the campaign came weeks after he criticized the use of foul language on television.

"I think it is a colloquialism. It's not a word that is seen quite in the same category as other words that nobody ought to use in public or in the media or in advertisements," he said last month.

"I think watching that young girl walking up the beach . . . is a very attractive image and I don't think people will see that is in any way bad mannered; quite the reverse."

The campaign

Tourism Australia is using TV and print ads to ask potential visitors: "So where the bloody hell are you?"

The payoff

The controversy has led to millions of dollars worth of press coverage for the campaign, as thousands of Brits went to wherethebloodyhellareyou.com to see the banned ad.

The reaction

Australia: At home, critics said the risqué Australian slang could confuse foreigners more used to Paul Hogan's invitation to "throw another shrimp on the barbie."

Britain: Britain's television advertising regulator initially banned the ad because it used the term "bloody." The ban was lifted this weekend.

Canada: Canadian broadcasters say they will air the ad, but the CBC won't let it run during family programming because of the word "hell."

Weapons of mass destruction

Dick Cheney can count himself bloody lucky that Harry Whittington did not die (although he's been on shaky ground at times) as a result of Dick shooting him in a "hunting accident". If Mr. Whittington had died either directly from the shooting, or from the heart attack he suffered 3 days later, what would have happened to Cheney? I'm guessing nothing. Mr. Bush is apparently "satisfied" with Dick's explanation of events, but I'm very concerned at the Administrations' blasé attitude.
Yes, Dick has become even more of a joke throughout the world than he was previously; example (as heard by me, mere seconds ago, on Nova 969 Sydney following a Tupac song) "Yeah, poor Tupac, he's not with us anymore. He went hunting with Dick Cheney and never came back".
But not one person or reporter that I know of (correct me if I'm wrong) has suggested that hunting and/or gun laws need to change to minimise the number of people being shot by their hunting mates, or anyone for that matter.
How about some *real* gun licensing laws for starters. Maybe if Walmart weren't selling guns and ammunition to convicted criminals...I don't know, seems like a good place to start. Walmart have altered their gun-sale policies slightly now, which caused locals to rush out and grab up all the guns they could find in case of a shortage. Really, there's something wrong with the logic circuits there.
Australia really tightened up their gun laws very soon after the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania, where 35 people were killed and 18 were injured by a single person. There was big grumbling about the reforms at the time as I recall, mostly from gun-owners who were going to have to store their guns in secure gun-cabinets rather than on the coffee table or under their pillows. But the legislation went through, and Australia is now a mucher safer place to live.

Update Feb 18 2006: Oh good, Harry Whittington has *finally* apologised to Dick Cheney for allowing himself to be shot: "My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice-President Cheney and his family have had to deal with," he said. "We hope that he will continue to come and seek the relaxation that he deserves." The apology was long overdue, but I guess he had trouble speaking with all those pellets lodged in his face. No really, do you think someone paid Harry to be nice about this?

No Lawyer Left Standing

Impatient with efforts to close the courts to litigants, the Administration literally fired the first shot in its groundbreaking "No Lawyer Left Standing" initiative. Vice-President Cheney, hunting on a private lawyer ranch near Kingsville, Texas, bagged an impressive buck (Harry Whittington, UT Law '50).
Under the new program, hunters may take one white shoe in-house lawyer or three outside lawyers daily. The limit has been suspended for trial lawyers. "We've just got to thin the herd," said the Vice-President. "We've tried tort reform and caps on damages, but people are still suing." Cheney added, "It's easy and fun. In Texas, you can shoot in almost any direction and hit a lawyer." *


Thanks to Mr. Barry, who may or may not be aware that I lifted this from his blog.

A new flag for Australia?

Recently the Sydney Morning Herald invited designs for a new Australian Flag

I was interested in this because I don't think the Union Jack part of the current flag holds much meaning for the majority of Australians. Not even for myself, who was born of the United Kingdom. Here's the current flag, for the unfamiliar:


So, what was suggested? Here's my favourite, designed by North Sullivan:

North Sullivan removed the Union Jack, but kept the "original stars and layout, balancing that with a larger Federation Star acknowledging our Green and Gold colours".

There were other very good (or at least interesting) designs. But here's a design that made my jaw drop, designed by Tony Eames:

Tony ironically suggests a more Americanised flag with the Southern Cross replacing the Union Jack but with the stripes of the US flag filling up the rest of the space. As he says: "Having loosened the colonial apron strings that bound us to mother England, John Howard's Australia is energetically forging a new destiny for itself as America's eager Deputy Sheriff in the region and beyond and our flag should be amended to reflect this new reality."

Something is wrong with this, very wrong!

Disappointed in Arnie

Tookie Williams Executed






















I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision Mr. Schwarzenegger. I just don't believe you based it upon moral reasoning.