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I am trying very hard at the moment not to be optimistic about the election. As I've mentioned previously , I'm convinced that if I get my hopes up they'll inevitably be crushed like a bug. But I've been thinking a little about this approach and while the lid is not yet off, I think those of us who have suffered under John Howard for the past 11 years have every right to enjoy ourselves at the moment. Look at it this way. If one stays pessimistic about the whole thing, convinced a disaster is on the horizon and the Libs win, well - it's not really going to make us feel any better about things. If it happens, it will be a disaster whether we prepared in advance or not. On the other hand, things have been going so delightfully of late (Exhibit A: Tony Abbott's meltdown yesterday ), that I think we should just enjoy the ride. It's a bit like jumping out of a plane - once you're out you may as well enjoy yourself because either your parachute will ope...

Ooh, the Australian is really warming to it's election campaign task today. In their rotating commentary headlines at the top of the page we have: " The Rorts of Chairman Rudd " by "Jack the Insider". An Hil-AR-ious piece about Kevin Rudd being an admirer of China (hence a Communist). Includes such pithy remarks as: "The Kruddster spoke in Mandarin to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao but it’s never been clearly reported in the media what he actually said. The Kruddster was trying to welcome Premier Hu to Australia. The Kruddster got through that bit. It was only when he tried to wish Premier Hu a long and prosperous life that things went awry. If my Mandarin is anything to go by, the Kruddtser professed a deep admiration for Hu’s lower colon and wished that his children be covered in hair." Oh stop it you wag! You're killing me with your wit! Kruddster! ROFLMAO!! " Labor sees the light on next Kyoto phase " by that terribly well balanced...

Last Friday night at about 8:30pm as Snooze and I sat watching the second season of The Wire and the thunder rumbled outside, my last remaining grandparent slipped quietly away in St Vincent's Hospital. She was 84. Over the past five weeks she has been fighting a battle, harder than any of us expected, against a lifetime of three-packs-a-day smoking, plural plaque and mesothelioma in her lungs contracted by washing the asbestos out her husband's clothes every day after work. He died of mesothelioma in 1980 when I was three and she just 61. 13 years ago she lost her daughter, my mother. My Uncle is the last one of that family left and he's not yet 60. Mercifully, she was was healthy up to the moment she was not. It was the flu that got her - attacked her lungs - the one part that simply couldn't fight back. She was never a 'nice old lady'. She had an acid tongue and a particular flair for passive aggression, often beautifully pointed. But the grandkids lov...

I've never been a big sun person. I mean, I love the beach and all, but I've never been one to bake myself brown with hours comatose on a towel, or with the use of *shudder* tanning oil. Despite this, I've always been a bit anxious about skin cancer. I think this comes partly from a fairly (I think) healthy hypochondria. I'm sure it also has something to do with cancer not being a friend of my family. A little while ago I noticed what I thought was a mole behaving badly. Well, not badly so much as oddly. It looked a bit unusual and seemed to hang around for quite a while (over a month). Preferring to be on the safer side of sorry, I took myself along to my GP and asked her to have a look at the spot. She took one look and said "no, that ones fine". Phew, thought I. "But while I'm here I'll just have a look around". So she poked and prodded and look at a few bits and pieces until she got to a spot right in the middle of my back. ...

It's good to know that the Climate Change debate has been resolved thanks to the staggering scientific brilliance of Cardinal George Pell . I think I read somewhere the temperature has gone up 0.5 of a degree on Mars. Well, the industrial-military complex up on Mars can't be blamed for that. ZING!! He then backed up that startingly insightful comment with this gem, demonstrating that not only is he in touch with the Big Fella Upstairs, but that he has "studied this a little bit" (!!!!): I have studied this a little bit and there's a whole history of differing estimates. Thirty or 40 years ago, actually, some of the same scientists were warning us about the dangers of an ice age, so I take all these things with a little bit of a grain of salt. They're matters for science and, as a layman, I study the scientific evidence rather than the press releases. Take THAT you filthy conspiracy theorists! Cower before him you so-called Climatologists! George Pell, as a l...