US Forces?

U.S. forces give the nod
It’s a setback for your country
Bombs and trenches all in rows
Bombs and threats still ask for more

Divided world the CIA
Who controls the issue
You leave us with no time to talk
You can write your own assessment

Sing me songs of no denying
Seems to me too many trying
Waiting for the next big thing

Will you know it when you see it
High risk children dogs of war

Now market movements call the shots
Business deals in parking lots
Waiting for the meat of tomorrow

Sing me songs of no denying
Seems to me too many trying
Waiting for the next big thing

Everyone is too stoned to start emission
People too scared to go to prison
We’re unable to make decisions
Political party line don’t cross that floor

L. Ron Hubbard can’t save your life
Superboy takes a plutonium wife
In the shadows of Ban the Bomb we live

Sing me songs of no denying
Seems to me too many trying
Waiting for the next big thing

I want to make it perfectly clear that when I joined the Labor Party I accepted and understood what the policy was for Australian joint facilities…and that is a policy I unreservedly accept.

Does this go for everything that Peter Garrett used to stand for? Never again will the line “How do we sleep when our beds are burning?” rouse any kind of emotion in this music fan.

Sure, as Mr Garrett is quick to point out, all the other pollies have performed countless backflips in their careers. Unlike Mr Garrett though, most other pollies weren’t handed a free ride into parliament, along with a quick rise up the ranks, due to their status as a well-loved political activist.

Shame, Mr Garrett, shame. I am taking 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 off my playlist.

Does Ricky Ponting understand the Duckworth-Lewis system?

Short answer: probably not.

But then again, neither do the Channel 9 or ABC Grandstand commentators. They were repeatedly predicting that Australia’s target would be revised upwards due to the lost overs.

Idiots.

I’m not claiming that the Duckworth-Lewis system is easy to understand. It’s not complicated, but it’s probably not something that the average cricket fan could be bothered spending time to get their head around. Surely however, professional commentators could spend half an hour of so learning the principles behind it so they don’t look stupid. Your target can only be revised upwards if your opponent’s innings was rain-affected.

Anyway, back to tonight’s game.

England scored a paltry 8/246 to open.

Australia came out, fully aware that there was a high probability that their innings would be affected, and the Duckworth-Lewis system would come into play. Had Ponting understood the D/L method, he would have impressed on his players the importance of keeping wickets in hand. Australia has a long batting line-up, but unfortunately D/L doesn’t take this into account, so the worst thing you can do in a rain affected game is to throw away early wickets.

For those of you who don’t know how D/L works, here is a quick overview. D/L takes two things (“resources”) into account:

1. Overs remaining
2. Wickets in hand

According to the D/L tables which I managed to get my hands on (which admittedly aren’t the version used in ODIs, since these don’t seem to be available), throwing away 5 early wickets has the same effect on your innings as sitting on your arse for 25.3 overs.

Hayden, Ponting, Gilchrist, Clarke and Hussey all gave away their wickets. When 9 overs were lost in the first D/L revision, the target went down by about 25 runs or so, even though Australia was scoring at 6.5 runs per over. If we had instead scored 0 runs per over, but kept the wickets in hand, we would actually have been in a far better position after the D/L revision.

Mistake number one.

When Australia came back in to bat, the score board was displaying something called the “par score”. This is the score required to win if the game finishes immediately. Australia were 36 runs or so behind the par score at this stage.

Now, the par score is calculated on our two resources. Overs, and wickets. When your start losing lots of wickets, remaining wickets becomes very important, and overs don’t really matter. This is because it’s not a lot of good having 30 overs left if you’ve got Pidge at one end, and Bracken at the other.

Thus the scene is set for mistake number two. The batsmen at the crease were Hodge and Watson, two capable batsman who probably shouldn’t be playing for Australia, but are nonetheless handy with the willow. To catch up to the par score, you need to score runs without losing your “resources”. Overs and wickets. Remember, at this stage overs aren’t really that important.

So what do Hodge and Watson do? They start tonking it – believing that the par score has something to do with run rate. The run rate at this stage was already way ahead of what England were at any stage of the match.

Of course, tonking the ball all over the park is not really condusive to retaining wickets. As the wickets fell, the par score went up, and the remaining batsmen just tried to tonk it harder.

Australia ended up with 8/152 from 27 overs. The sad thing is, we could have won it by scoring a mere 4/142 (according to my calculations using the unofficial version of the D/L table).

The result is, of course, history. The worst English side to ever tour Australia becomes the first side in 14 years to beat Australia at home in a one day series.

Let’s hope that it’s sunny in the Carribean.

They don’t speak for us

My friends, the world is in a bad state. The Right has taken over, bombing half the planet into oblivion while condemning the other half to a slow, roasting death. It is no longer possible to reverse the damage has been done. The Left has become a spineless, petition-waving mass quivering in the corner, destroying countless rainforests by printing their pamphlets, and doing about as much good as a glass of water in a bushfire.

The time for action has come and gone. Earth is finished.

But, there is still hope. Out of the ashes of this fallen society, the bold and brave can escape to a new world, with the help of Richard Branson and his Virgin Starfleet.

We must leave this forsaken planet, and start afresh. I call it Creating an Off-planet, Liberal and Egalitarian Society.

Or, COLES New World for short.

And on COLES New World, there will be no more wars, no more violence, and no more F$%#ing reality TV. We will need no technology, no whizz-bang adding machines, electrified refrigerators and plasma TVs. Life will be long, simple, and fulilling.

And then the people of COLES New World will get become greedy. Lawyers will spring up from the swamps, marketing executives will be born deep in the heart of our new planet, and spew forth in a series of volcanic eruptions. Naomi Robson will descend to the surface of COLES New World, spawning a cosmetics industry so large, that it devours an entire continent.

People will forget how to communicate, and demand distractions such as rising interest rates, uneducated migrants, and a Royal Family. Men with planks of wood hitting little red balls will be elevated to the status of gods, and thousands of people will flock to watch them scratching their nuts for seven hours straight.

Eventually, COLES New World will be so similar to Earth, that the two will be indistinguishable. At this time, a new breed of revolutionaries will rise up.

This time, however, they will have learned from the mistakes of their Earth-bond predecessors. There will be no petitions, no public forums, no loudspeakers, no marches, and no posters.

They will need but one course of action to right the wrongs perpetuated by the rich and powerful.

They will start to fuck shit up.

And when this happens, the people will realise the importance of the little man. For the rich may have the money, the big houses and the fast cars, but without a working class to support them, they have nothing. Without a working class, there is no Perrier water to drink, no Optimax to fuel their black BMW four-wheel-drives, and no servants to make the cucumber sandwiches for their next dinner party.

Without a working class, society cannot function. How then, can the rich continue to lord over the rest of the population from their ivory towers?

The media. Control the media, and you control the population.

In fact, what do we actually get from the media? How do the likes of Fairfax, News Ltd, Channel Nine and Co. increase the quality of your lives?

They don’t.

If I was to go round to the headquarters of every major media organisation in the world tomorrow, and blow them all up, who would suffer?

The rich. The powerful. The people who want you to believe that everything is rosy, and all we need to worry about is the next interest rate rise, or the next boatload of Indonesians trying to take up some of the oh-so-limited real estate space in our tiny country.

Fuck them!

For too long now, this country has been in the grip of Packer, Murdoch and Co. They control the government, they control the population.

Nothing lasts forever.

The Virgin Lounge

Until a week ago I had never flown with Virgin in my life. Now, I am a convert.

I have been sitting in “The Lounge” at Adelaide airport for the past four hours, consuming unlimited beer, food and internet access, all for the princely sum of $30. Given that a stale, mouldy sandwich costs $10 at your average airport, I’d say that this is a pretty good deal.

Sure, you don’t get complimentary processed cardboard with Cacciatore sauce on Virgin flights, but the $5 beef and ham sandwich combo I had on the way down here was actually legally classifiable as food!

So take the $100 bucks you save from your next Qantas flight, spend $30 at The Lounge before departure, $8 for food and a cuppa in the air, and you’re still better off at the other end. Go Virgin.

Footnote: unfortunately, noone paid me to write this review. I badgered the girl behind the bar, but apparently I’m not quite famous enough to receive special “VIP” service. Either that or she’s having it off with the cleaner.

Tool Lyrics

A little something for tool lovers like me…

All you need to do is post the following code on your site:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://marsupialmusic.net/stu/scripts/fortunes.php?file=tool"></script>

You can also add the Tool lyrics to your Google home page.

They have the authority to kill a minority

Until now.

Are these the cold, dark eyes of a killer? Queensland’s Director of Public Prosecutions Leanne Clare said last year: no. NSW chief justice Sir Laurence Street then said: yes. The Queensland Police Union are incensed that something as insignificant as the death of an aboriginal man in custody could lead to a cop being thrown in gaol.

So is Leanne Clare corrupt, or just incompetent? I’m sure if we opened up a royal commission into the affair (given the right terms of reference), the answer would be the latter.

The question remains: will justice be served? Or will the political wheelings and dealings leave another bad stain on the anglo-aborginal relations in this country? Let’s hope the fucker gets locked up. If it was an aborigine beating a police officer to death, what do you think would have happened?

I would like to close with some words of inspiration from the one and only Dr Dre.

The jury has found you guilty of bein a redneck,
whitebread, chickenshit muthafucka.

Fuck the police.

Forty-six & 2

I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be paranoid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through.

Let the world tour commence

That’s right, devoted readers. My world tour commences today with a trip to Melbourne, followed by Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane next week. Start small and work your way up, I say. Besides, I’ve heard that there are foreigners outside Australia.

Sarah will be joining me on the first leg, so hopefully we can hit some decent pubs and crank out some beer reviews! I love those little beers that they serve down there – you can drink thousands of them!

Rann vs Turnbull

5 days out from the first sitting of parliament for 2007, the political arm-wrestle over possibly the most important issue facing Australia has begun. In the blue corner, the newly promoted Malcolm Turnbull, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources. In the red corner, Mike Rann, Premier of South Australia.

Round One.

“I’m not prepared to run up the white flag on South Australia’s future,” Mike Rann said.

“I’m not prepared to trade away South Australia’s constitutional rights lightly, so what I’m in the process of doing is bargaining.”

Rather limp and inocuous comments here, which is exactly what we’d expect from an old incumbent like Rann. He doesn’t appear to have any clear offensive strategy, and this talk of bargaining is quite ludicrous given the nature of the modern political game. It’s all or nothing Mike.

“Mike Rann’s position is quite baffling and it seems as though he’s miffed that it isn’t his idea,” Mr Turnbull said.

“He reminds me somewhat of a drowning man who’s thrown a life jacket and throws it back because it doesn’t match his tie,” Mr Turnbull said.

“I mean, this is a life saver for South Australia and Mike should recognise it.”

Good to see Turnbull wading in here with fists flailing. He’s scored a couple of crucial early points here, and if he continues along this line could really come out on top in this battle. First round points go to Turnbull for sure.

“How can a man drown if there is no water to drown in?”, Mr Rann asked.

Or something like that – I haven’t been able to source an actual quote for this one, but I heard it on the news this morning and it should be in the ABC’s podcast. This is a pretty lame comeback, even by state politician standards.

Mr Howard then weighed into the argument, replying to Rann’s initial request to form an independant body.

“It’s basically surrendering the responsibility that I was given by the Australian people,” Mr Howard said.

“I was elected to try and solve the nation’s problems, I’m trying to solve one of the nation’s problems with this proposal.”

Turnbull seems to have decided that his initial blows were enough to win him the fight, and has sent in his boss to deliver the coup de grace. Rann, however, still had time for one last attempt to win the battle.

“This is an extraordinary example of arrogance by the Federal Government,” Mr Rann said.

“There’s absolutely the taste of Malcolm Turnbull in all of this and so whatever happens you know that he won’t be drinking treated water, he’ll be washing his hair in Perrier water in Piper Point.”

Got him! Out of nowhere, Rann steps up to deliver the goods. A direct attack on the class divide between Middle Australia, and the politician in charge of their water.

So, Mike Rann wins this day’s scuffle. We’re still waiting for Peter Garrett to have his say, but as a federal Labor politician, he’ll probably be about 3-4 days behind everyone else. Until then, keep praying for rain, because the politicans sure as hell aren’t going to deliver.