well my ‘tenure’ here at griffith uni on the glorious gold coast is just about over. i cant believe how quickly that semester went by. i guess that old saying is true, time flies when you spend your life in an alcoholic stuper.

i might be going away for awhile, so here’s some good reading in the meantime… seriously, a lot of good stuff.

Salon.com has some terrific articles lately, you gotta watch a brief ad to get a one day subscription:
Welcome to Canada - This is a definite read for any Canadian, its a response to the apparent flooding of potential American immigrants to Canada (which Laura has a little insider info on), going over some reasons why our country is so great (and a few why we arent), made me appreciate the ol red and white… for instance,

“Part of the reason is the parliamentary system, where the parties and their platforms outweigh cults of personality.” Excellent point, never thought of it like that.

“Canada keeps cranking out social experiments way too daring for Americans. Same-sex marriage? Legal in six provinces. Guns? Gotta be licensed and registered. Kyoto? Check. Executing prisoners? No way. School funding? Tying that to local property taxes would be illogical, so poor neighborhoods get the same school funding as rich ones, or more. Cannabis? Canada was the first nation to allow marijuana as medicine, and our Senate says pot should be legal. ” Sing it sister!

“Canada isn’t just the efficient society. It is “perhaps the most efficient on Earth,” which is why “life in Canada is so good.” ” Testify!

“The New Cold War” - A good companion piece to the ‘yay canada’ article, this is a ‘yay europe’ article, why the EU is the new “good superpower”. I now have a hope that America’s cruel tyranny over the world just might have a chance of succumbing to the likes of mighty canada and europe, haha.

And then we get this from Salon as well, “Perverse pleasure is the best revenge” - “Get back at red America — with kinky sex, pretentious French movies and a hasty divorce.” I love it. “We — whether we are in red states or blue — need joy, ecstasy, or at least distraction, to keep us off the ledge and maybe even irritate the evangelicals at the same time.” And then proceeds to give some examples… check it out…

Mark Momford - is hilarious, read his column every week like sheleena says. this week, “Down With Fancy Book Learnin’
What’s it mean that the big cities and college towns of America all voted blue?” which raises the very good point that “it’s not blue state versus red state after all, but more like blue urban versus red rural, skyscraper versus church house, Chez Panisse versus Denny’s”. it seems elitist to say, but it really appears as if the dumb people won the election, just look at the map. and its not just the big cities, but university/college towns too: “All towns known to be relatively quirky and progressive and safe and kid friendly and beautiful and all-American and replete with big universities and mediocre Thai restaurants and underground music scenes and healthy smatterings of gay culture and lots of gul-dang book-learnin’, and every single one of ‘em seems to be right in line with the big cities in understanding that Bush is utter poison to anything resembling true juicy spiritual hope or intellectual progress or really exceptional semidrunken sex.”

It goes on to talk about how the cultural war is the real war in america right now, and why didnt the cities most likely to be attacked by terrorism (NY, LA, DC) vote republican? “Yessir, I guess they showed those goddamn liberals. Guess they showed those damn college boys who’s boss. Guess they showed those of us who are most at risk of terror attack and most open to change and most welcoming to the various variations of love and marriage and art and culture in this country who really owns the big stick. ” excellent read.

another go at this smart vs dumb/metro vs retro issue is “Confessions of a Cultural Elitist: Win or Lose, Kerry Voters Are Smarter Than Bush Voters” - “By any objective standard, you had to be spectacularly stupid to support Bush.” its unfortunate but true. “Would Bush’s supporters have voted for him even if they had known he was a serial liar? Perhaps their hatred of homosexuals and slutty abortion vixens would have prompted them to make the same choice–an idiotic perversion of priorities. As things stand, they cast their ballots relying on assumptions that were demonstrably false. ”

and a website, Retrovsmetro.org, examines the issue pretty thoroughly.

and its been a great day of reading (and finishing my essay, and watching spirited away, and learning the opening guitar part of “crazy on you”. fuck yeah), the highlight of which this fantabulous interview with jacky white, ie the best voice in rock n roll today - seriously, take a gander into the mind of a genius. i think he’s so brilliant because he got to see bob dylan in concert at age 10.

and on an unrelated america-is-dumb note, apparently if your a highschooler you cant sing dylan’s “masters of war” without having the secret service treat it as a threat to the president’s life, and apparently you cant make a movie about sexual liberation without getting picketed by ridiculous churchies. good gracious: “”Alfred Kinsey is responsible in part for my generation being forced to deal face-to-face with the devastating consequences of sexually transmitted diseases, pornography and abortion” are you serious?? “Instead of being lionized, Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist.” seriously people, find some important issues to be upset about.

(i was watching demolition man the other day *dont ask* and it was shocking how accurate of a prediction it is! the “moral” ridiculousness, like getting fined for swearing, the robots that people turned into with too much conformity, and it totally predicted president schwarzenegger! they should show demolition man to every american and be like, this is what you get from the patriot act and an obsession with celebrity)

and i thought this was hilarious, a fantastic “dis” of linkin park, courtesy of our witty little pitchforkmedia.com writers: “Linkin Park, those perennial rap-metal darlings whose widespread popularity rivals this year’s election returns for most depressing indicator of current American public opinion.”

on that note, im out like a trout. my darling tiffany is coming so i might be busy for a couple of weeks…

oh yeah, im moving to sydney to live with my fat sister (dont worry, she’s pregnant, im sure she’s “glowing”).

address:
10 MacFarlane Pde.
Sylvania, NSW, AUS
2224

phone: (011 61) 02 9544 6607

peace bitches.

“so how many exams do you have?”
“none, i only have to write 4 essays”
“what? no exams?”
“zero”
“so technically you could just write all your essays today and be done school?”
“i suppose, yeah”
“you should totally just write one a day for the next few days and can be done before we even start exams!”
“thats a terrific idea, i might do that”

3 weeks later

“no i cant play century club tonite i still got an essay to finish… no man i cant… ok fine i’ll be right back with beer”

“no i cant go to brisbane with you guys and stay out all nite and catch the 6am train back to the gold coast… seriously, not this time… ok let me go shower”

and here i am, essays long overdue, just slept from 8am till 4pm, and still not working on my last essay because my prof doesnt really care when i hand it in. i need a solid due date so that i can stay up the night before to finish it.

“no im not going to fisho’s today, this is getting ridiculous, i have to finish this thing, theres no way im going… yeah it is pretty nice out… ok we’re only going for a few beers though right?”

well another eventful weekend here on the glorious gold coast. it was dave’s birthday yesterday, and if youre a frequent reader of this here blog im sure youve heard of him before. he’s the dude that is almost always involved in anything crazy that happens around here. the nite begins with some shots of absynthe, apparently its legal here, i dont know if it back home or not. anywho, that shit messes you up, although i didnt see any green kylie minogue fairys… stupid moulin rouge… so we went to this place called “swingin safari”, which weve been meaning to go to for awhile cause it has costumes for you dress up in. what we didnt know however, was that nobody there actually dresses up, everybody there seemed “too cool”. but thats obviously not gonna stop us, so we were the ones everybody at the bar was staring at. costumes might not be the right word, its more just a huge rack of random thrift store kinda stuff. i had a nasty purple wig, a dress over my clothes, and a denim jacket, it was a pretty sweet getup, hot as balls though. carter always makes fun of me by saying shit about denim and canadian tuxedos and whatnot, so i figured i’d just embrace it. so we’re all dressed up like assholes right, and who do i run into but one of my sisters friends reidy. he was up from sydney for some wedding anniversary or something, and we tried calling my sister and tim but they didnt pick up. i think they have some ridiculous messages on their phone. meanwhile everybody else left to go to another bar thats like 20 minutes away so me and pat decide to walk there. oh, and i put back the wig and dress but kept the denim coat, its so money, i love it. luckily, the beer store stays open pretty late so we grabbed a tallie in a paperbag for the road. we eventually make it to howl at the moon (the crazy piano bar), sneak in somehow, and join the party where the yagger bombs are flowing like wine. at this point, im out on the dance floor with my bleached denim jacket, collar up of course. then, im not really sure what i was thinking at this point, but i dance with some “woman” for like a really long time. my roomate estimates her somewhere in the 30-35 range (carter likes to say 50, but i dont think i could get that drunk). anywho, i think i might have made out with her a little on the dancefloor. apparently i like cougars, who knew? so then we go home, where i eventually pass out on the couch and dave put a “i love george w bush” sign on me and put chopsticks up my nose for a photo op. it was his birthday, he shoulda been the passed out guy, oh well. i woke up at the crack of noon to a crazy torrential downpour. the gymnasium/games room and the underground car park have like 3 feet of water in them, the river outback is like 8 feet higher than usual, and its raining like crazy. so thats my weekend… hopefully some denim jacket pictures will surface…

and here’s some good reading:
Bin Laden’s Video Transcription - bin laden is pretty smart, this was a pretty surprising read. he’s pretty dead on about a lot of things. i of course dont support his whole bleed till bankruptcy thing, but me and ol’ bin laden seemed to be pissed off for the same reason… and both like farenheit 9/11, haha
Reason 1 and Reason 2 of why I’m so worried for this world because of Bush’s re-election: more war and less civil rights.
No Longer a Christian - For my religous readers, who often question why im so against religion, here’s a good article about how the christian right in america supports war and how fucked up that is.
Evidence mounts that the vote was hacked - i wonder if stuff like this is gonna get anywhere, it probably wont get picked up by the major news media, but this is pretty scary. and it makes a lot of sense.

and this is one of the funniest things ive seen in awhile, im way behind on this one, but its the dave chapelle rick james thing. definitely worth watching. “what did the fingers say to the face? SLAP!” haha

the more i look at this, the more i like it. we get all the cool cities, new york, los angeles, san francisco, seattle, boston, detroit (well maybe not detroit… but they did produce the stooges, mc5, stevie wonder, madonna, the white stripes, the yeah yeah yeahs and uhh eminem and kid rock, so its not all bad). and what would we lose? bush, the rednecks, the neocons, the churchies, and texas. florida is a bit of a disappointment, but we’ll let them keep something. we’ll split up the military and we’ll just dispose of the weapons we get and disband the troops. we’ll take our half of the space budget and spend it on getting rid of homelessness. we’ll have no tax cuts for the rich and spend the tax money on aids relief for africa. lets start a petition to make the united states of canada, or canamerica, or what have you.

le revolution! gay marriage and timbits for everyone!

hi-larious.

(from this blog)

ps - “bomb ohio” - also hilarious.

well, kerry concedes. a part of me still feels like something went wrong. i mean, there were reports of such long lines, yet the voter turnout is pretty much the same as 2000, what gives? what happened to all the new voters everybody was talking about? but, im just being naive, its over. i feel like the world was dangling on a tight rope wire above a pit of fire. a kerry victory meant we would continue to dangle, a bush victory meant we would fall.

welcome to hell.

am i over-reacting in being so depressed/angry that i wandered around the neighbourhood barefoot with a guitar on my back and a six pack in my hand, eventually settling into a parking garage to sit and write a song in my sombre state?? am i nuts?? cause i think i am.

well its been a long day, i was up at 10am when the first polls started to close, maintained hope during the ohio crisis, got pissed (in 2 ways) when i started to accept defeat, and now its 4am.

good.
god.
damn.