I hope you are more original with your policies...

Hang on, hang on.

Haven't I seen that somewhere before?


Obama! You dastardly thief!

I hope Bob and his gang of anthropomorphised work-vehicles and equipment sue his presidential pants off!

Drama! Absurdity! The Occult! Welcome to 21st century communications policy

I hate to make a point with a sledgehammer, but Has anyone seen that play The ISP-Level Filter Trial The Crucible?

Well, according to Wiki, the play begins with revelations that most Australians some village girls may have dabbled in a bit of teh un-legal online activities witchcraft.

These were apparently enabled by off-shore hosted servers Tituba, one of the village family’s slaves, from Barbados.

Stephen Conroy Reverend John Hale is summoned to look into the incident. He is an expert in nothing occultist phenomena and is eager to put into practice a completely disproportionate response his acquired learning.

He questions the other village girls, who, in an attempt to avoid being deemed a pr0n-watcher witch, profess a blacklist of websites people they’ve seen with bit-torrent software the Devil.

The play then tells of a descent into hysteria and injustice as Conroy the villagers accuses everyone else others in an attempt to save his reputation themselves. Anyone who dissents against the irrational and deeply flawed ISP-level filtering witchcraft trials are labelled perverts witches, thus undermining any rational criticism of the trials.

As the bureaucrats Danforth says in Senate Estimates Act III, “an ISP person is either with this filtering trial court or he must be counted as having something to hide against it.”

The filteringwitch trials are the ultimate expression of knee-jerk, politically driven madness intolerance (and the resulting cut in broadband speeds hanging witches is the ultimate irony, coming from the Broadband Minister means of restoring the community's purity); the trials brand all free speech advocates social deviants with the taint of child-pr0n devil-worship and thus necessitate their elimination from the debate community.

Hysteria supplants logic and enables Conroy people to believe that everyday Australianstheir neighbours, whom they have always considered upstanding people, are committing absurd and unbelievable online crimes — communing with the file sharersdevil, killing babies, and so on.

As we all know, The ISP-Level Filter Trial The Crucible is symbolic of the religious right’s 1950s American paranoia about moral decay communism and illustrates narrow-mindedness, excessive zeal and disregard for the individual that characterised the government’s effort to secure Stephen Fielding’s support in the Senate stamp out a perceived social ill.

Should be coming to a desktop theatre near you shortly!

You won't be able to Don't miss it!

Have you heard of the youtube?*

I'm sure by now everyone's typed "Single ladies" into youtube and been blown away by random people recreating, with varying degrees of success, the lip-smacking choreography in Beyonce's film clip.

If not, for shame! And get thee clicky-clicky on this, this and this, stat!

But to add that, check out this clip of 'j-setting', dubbed over with Unk's Walk it Out (said to be Beyonce's inspiration):

As well as being 100% youtubey goodness, it also solves a long-running mystery for me - just where did Jane Turner get the inspiration for Kath Day-Knight's moves!

*Title taken from real life question asked of me about a year ago, by someone who pretends to know about computers. Oh the hilarity!

Je ne regrette rien

So it's roughly a year since we upped sticks and moved back to Sydney.

I could probably deliberate for a few hours on the costs and rewards, the things (and people) missed and the (very) hard-won gains, the lost opportunities and the surprise windfalls.

But it really all comes down to one simple fact.

Right now, at this very minute, summernats is on, and I'm not in Canberra.

As the French would say, w00t!