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Oh hey. Hi there. Wossup in da hood? Me + inspiration right now = Hah! Still. One must battle on ir regardless. I think lack of holidays over the last three years is starting to catch up with me. The good news? Holidays are on the way. Yesiree - I am off to far flung and exciting lands of exoticness mid April for a whole month of holitags - barely three weeks away. WOOT I tell you! I've been trying to summon the energy to write about David Hicks and why John Howard is going to win the next election (see voter 'care fatigue' and incumbency - I'll get there eventually) but it's too depressing. All I really want to do right now is sit on the couch and watch old seasons of the West Wing. DON'T JUDGE ME! I can't maintain the rage every day of the freakin' year. Not sure about youse, but the daylight savings changeover has buggered me around. I'm still getting up and going to bed far too early. Oh well, if it means I can take photos like this and...

I imagine many of you read or are at least aware of Larvatus Prodeo , the Australian group blog founded by Mark Bahnisch from Griffith University. Though I rarely comment on LP (or anywhere for that matter), I'm a regular reader and often enjoy the stoushes in the comments. As you will know if you're an Itemisation regular, education policy ( particularly in history ) and the Culture Wars are pet interests of mine. In short, the conservative line for the last ten years or so is that the education system in Australia has been taken over by filthy 'leftists' who are injecting TEH CHILDS with all sorts of nasty Marxist ideas. It is a line frequently peddled by all the usual polemicists on the right, but the cheerleader for conservative education reform is Dr Kevin Donnelly. Dr Donnelly is an 'educational consultant' who (among other things) first came to prominence as an adviser to the Kennett Government Education Minister Don Hayward. I first noticed him in t...

About this . Could it be cricket's Escobar ? This on the other hand... Talk to anyone who knows anything about the speed of the interwebs in this country and you'll discover that we are rapidly becoming a stagnant backwater in things technological. With no plan whatsoever to rectify this situation coming from the surplus-obsessed Liberals, could it be that the "Future Fund" may actually be turned to something useful under KRudd? I like the cut of his item.

Last night I went to a concert at a church in Camberwell to listen to 16th century choral works by Byrd, Morley and Weelkes to name a few. *ignores puzzled faces* One of the performers was my dear Papa and before the show, he discovered something very odd. Under a park bench in the quiet, manicured gardens of the basilica, sitting side by side, he found two gold rings. One a plain gold band with an engraving on the inside, the other more ornate and filigreed. They looked very much like the wedding rings of a single couple. Pondering the strangeness of the find, Dad picked them up to examine them further and it became even stranger: the engraving on the man's ring was marked with the date of my Father's first birthday. ... Why were they there? The engraved date speaks of a wedding during the Second World War, maybe a romance blossoming during time on leave, or convalescence. In Australia or Europe, Africa or the Americas there is no indication. Perhaps the bands of a coupl...

So it turns out one of the first inmates at Guantanamo Bay to be tried under the military commissions, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was responsible for pretty much everything bad that has happened in the last ten or fifteen years . According to numerous news outlets, Mohammed has confessed to being behind the attacks on September 11, the Bali bombing, the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993 and having personally beheaded Daniel Pearl, an American journalist. But it doesn't end there, he admits to plotting to kill all sorts of people, from Bill Clinton to the Pope and an intention to blow up a whole lot of other stuff like US embassies, the Panama Canal and Big Ben to name a few. All up, according to the Pentagon, a total of 31 terror attacks either planned or executed. It is also rumoured that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was behind the JFK assassination and if you play the episode of the Simpsons where Monty Burns gets shot backwards at 9 minutes, 11 seconds, Mohammed can clearly be seen ...

If you didn't see Extras last night, you missed this. Oh how I laffed. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Ian McKellan.

So on the weekend, I lurched into my fourth decade. The last few days have been spent with my dearest friends in the largely loving arms of the Port Fairy Folk Festival . Heading down to stay in Airey's Inlet on Wednesday last week, we arrived at Port Fairy at lunchtime on Thursday and staked out a big spot in anticipation of the 20 or so people and 7 or 8 tents that were still to come. As anyone who has ever camped at the Port Fairy Folk Festival will be able to testify, this is no mean feat. By the Saturday morning the campsite is so full that tents get parked in the most precarious of places. New arrivals stalk the camping area searching desperately for the smallest plot to plonk their shelter and we had to work hard to keep the space for friends arriving on Friday night. Nonetheless, success was had. There were many highlights of the weekend, but among the more amusing had to be seeing Lior get almost pulled off the stage by drunk 14 year-old girls, a very boozed and very...

This is unreal! Gizoogle any webpage you like, sit back and enjoy the results. Here is Itemisation Gizoogled " I reckon it M-to-tha-izzight have sum-m sum-m ta do wit tha alcohol escap'n whizzay tha bottle was opened allow'n tha wizzle inside ta freeze rapidly - but that's pizzy poorly-educated speculizzles. "

Something odd happened last night. *cue X-Files music* Snooze and I were just settling down to dinner when we opened a bottle of wine. It had been in the freezer for maybe two hours because it was essentially room temperature when we got it home. When it came out of the freezer, we could clearly see some little bits of ice floating in it, but only a couple of bits. But here's the weird part. Snooze pulled the cork and within seconds the whole thing froze solid in front of us. So quick was the process that Snooze actually put it back down on the bench and backed off fearing some kind of winey explosion (not of the Andrew Bolt kind - ZING). It settled down to just a solid block of ice and no explosions were had, but it was very bizarre. I reckon it might have something to do with the alcohol escaping when the bottle was opened allowing the wine inside to freeze rapidly - but that's pure poorly-educated speculation. Any science nerds want to have a crack at solving this one? ...