It's not often that the death of an actor affects me, the news of Lis Sladen's death makes me really sad. Like so many Doctor Who fans, her Sarah Jane Smith was as much a part of my childhood as the Doctor himself.
Goodbye, and thank you for being our Sarah Jane for so many years.
Kosky has admitted that private operators of public transport save the state nothing, but that that they will not return public transport to the government because of the expertise Connex bring with them. Is this woman on drugs? A troupe of rabid monkeys with ADD could do a better job. Politicians should be forced to catch public transport with the rest of us.
I've never heard of him before, but accordimg to mad bastard Danny Nalliah we deserved the bushfire devestation because Victoria recently changed it's abortion laws.
Whatever rock you crawled out from under, please scuttle back under.
Most of the people affected by all the train cancellations and delays have already paid for the privelege of waiting hours in +40 degrees for a train. This is just typical of the government and Connex's indifference to public transport users.
My family don't celebrate Christmas or buy each other presents, but we usually use the time to catch up, since we spread out across the southern half of the continent. This year was the first year without either of our parents, though, and it did feel a little strange. Dad died a couple of months before last Christmas, and in a lot of ways (due to her advanced dementia) Mum was already gone, but it still felt strange.
I suppose it's because now I'm starting to forget what Mum was like in the last few years of her life, and remember her more as she was. Before the dementia we used to talk on the phone every week or two, and if I was spending Christmas in Adelaide with my sister we'd talk a couple of times a week. She used to love to hear about the films we'd been to see together, and what restaurants we'd been to, and what my sister's dog was getting up to. But no more.
This year, my sister and brother-in-law are planning on buying a new house, so we spent a Sunday down at Aldinga Beach looking at all the display home villages for some ideas. That used to be one of Mum's favourite things to do. Hillary and I kept finding ourselves turning to other about to say "Mum would really like this one..." It was a strange experience. Sad in a lot of ways, but at times almost like Mum was with us again.
I've been sorting through the photos I took over Christmas tonight, and it's making me tear up, like the day I left to come home. Not the usual Christmas at all.
Three weeks is just not enough time off - especially when I get back to find a good month's worth of work to plough through in the next two weeks. And a co-worker who spends most of the day complaining about being bored and having nothing to do. Grrrr.
The big problem is I'm the only one in the office who really knows how to use a computer, and my co-irker is utterly useless with anything but basic menial tasks.
It almost makes me wish I'd not taken any time off - but not quite, since I really enjoyed the time with my sisters and brothers-in-law.
My sister's dog is a head-case. We took him with us to watch the fireworks on New Year's Eve and he wasn't bothered by the noise at all, but throw a party streamer near him, or blow on a party tooter and he runs in terror. He did get his revenge on the streamers later, though.
Despite the fact that I'd happily trade Christmas and Easter for Halloween, the fact is that we don't celebrate it here. I'm sick to death of hearing about it now, and I don't appreciate the LJ staff over-riding everyone's default viewing option with their illegible theme. Also it's November now, so get rid of it! Grrrrr.
I know I've been out of the loop on most things for the past year, but I've just heard about Senator Stephen Conroy's plan for a mandatory internet filter for all Australian's.
I'm torn between utter disbelief that any idiot believes this either necessary or feasible, and sheer rage. How dare some technologically inept lying scumbag politician think he has any right to decide for me what I can and cannot view on the internet.
They claim that this is necessary to protect children from internet predators and exposure to all the porn that's on the net. Did the parents ask the government to protect their children from this threat. No, they didn't. When the previous government offered free internet filters to all Australians only a small percentage took them up on that offer. A month later only about a third of them were still using it. Clearly this means the whole country requires mandatory filtering. Does the word "education" ring any bells for Senator Conroy? Clearly not.
Aside from complete violation of personal liberties, independent tests have shown that not only will it block things it shouldn't, not block things it should, it will also slow down internet speed quite noticeably. And the cost of the hardware needed is likely to send small ISPs to the wall. Apparently, it can also be circumvented entirely by setting up a virtual private network and pretending to be in another country.
So to sum up:
Most Australians don't want internet filtering
It won't work properly anyway
It can be bypassed completely by those with a bit of tech know-how
It will bugger up internet access completely by making it both slower and more expensive.
How could anyone literate not have read more than 6 of these?
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRRTolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling [well, the first one, any way; didn't care to continue] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible [part of it; large chunks of the Old Testament and most of the New] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 52 Dune - Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding 69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson [half of it] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession - AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte's Web - EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
CHANNEL Ten will become the first television network to abolish on-screen credits at the end of programs as it tries to stop viewers switching channels between shows, but the move is likely to be contested by industry guilds.
Murray may have the attention span of a goldfish with ADD, but often the credits are more interesting than the program itself. This is yet another reason why I would rather watch a series on DVD than on television. Australian television is in danger of disappearing up its own rear end.
Dannii visits Cancer Centre site ***** (Obfuscated my own protection) Health Monday 19 May, 2008
Minogue wanted to continue her relationship with ***** Health. “Dannii was delighted to meet with staff and with Cancer patients and, like Olivia, is really committed to our holistic approach to cancer treatment and to the leading research done at *****. She has agreed to help us in whatever way she can in our ongoing campaign,” he said.
It's bad enough you're in a centre named after a fourth-rate entertainer (and I use that term figuratively), but then they spring Dannii bloody Minogue on you. Why not throw in Kylie as well, and really kick a person when they're down.
Some warning for staff might have been nice. I'm still recovering from turning a corner one to find Olivia lurking the hallway right in front of me.
For decades, scientists have considered octopuses to be unromantic loners. But new research from UC Berkeley has found that at least one species of octopus engages in such sophisticated lovemaking tactics as flirting, passionate handholding and keeping rivals at arms’ length. With videos.
sad
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