If you want to know how Kevin Rudd treats women then read this. Continue reading
What Pisses me off
What’s with the mothers and their battering prams?
I find myself cringing as a couple of yummy mummies head towards me with their prams. It wouldn’t be so bad if they looked where they were going.
But they don’t.
Here they come, oblivious of anyone one else on the planet. They won’t see me because they are talking to one another and it wouldn’t matter if there was an abyss lying before them. They would keep on hurtling towards it because they just don’t give a damn.
If I don’t jump to one side they would mow me down with their battering prams. And they wouldn’t even notice.
And if they are not having a chat then they are texting on their smart phones. You often see a solitary pram pusher looking down at the phone, walking along blindly while her baby screeches its head off.
Now it’s times like these that I wish there were some abyss in front of these creatures. Of course this will not happen [unfortunately] but it explains the smile on my face as I imagine them texting whoever. “Fell down a hole. Thank God my phone is okay.” And then they might remember the pram.
I don’t give a damn about football!
If you choose to live in Melbourne, Australia, you will be living in the most liveable city. So they tell us in their logo.
What they don’t tell you is that this city is a sportocracy. You had better watch sport, breathe sport, and follow your favourite team or else. If you actually confess like the witches of Salem might have done that you don’t care, you will be shunned or drawn and quartered. Or even thrown down a well to see if you sink.
All this and worse will happen to you because you will be accused of being an heretic. In summer you will have to talk cricket and horse racing. In winter it’s the good old football and heaven help you if Monday morning comes, as it does after Saturday and Sunday, and you are not prepared to discuss the scores.
Now you would imagine that the followers of football and other games are athletic. You might imagine that they partake of exercise now and then. Maybe on their birthdays perhaps. But no, that is not the case for the majority of fans. Their athletic prowess consists of painting their faces in the team colours and then carting food to the matches where they will hoot and chant in support of “their team.”
So it’s really nothing to do with sport and everything to do with belonging. These fans want to belong to a tribe of supporters of a certain group of gladiators, say. They want to be in on something that will make them feel as if life is not so dreary.
And there’s nothing very wrong with that except that in Melbourne you will be given the results of the sporting match before you hear of any other news.
For those of us who really, honestly don’t give a hoot about this tribalism, things can get pretty tedious.
I am now aware that there is drug cheating going on in football. Now there’s a surprise! I am aware of someone called Andrew Demetriou whose name is mentioned more often than our publicity-seeking Prime Minister’s. No mean feat I tell you if you are familiar with Kevin Rudd.
What I am truly surprised about is that there is surprise at all?
After all, sports is about big business, big money, brief careers during which you have to earn as much money as you can because in a few years’ time you will be forgotten.
So why not do everything to achieve success for yourself and your team?
Do we honestly believe that people will stop cheating in this world of supplements and sophisticated sports medicine?
You can’t stem the tide now even if you have a thousand inquires into cheating etc.
But if it’s a circus you want then by all means follow sport. It’s just another religion.
And anyway, it’s safer than holding demonstrations in some square or other, I guess.
Yom Kippur! What a day for an election!
You can really see the hand of Foreign Minister Bob Carr in setting the date for the coming Federal Election. How about the holiest day in the Jewish calendar? Well, that’s what the Prime Minister of Australia has done. It shows how little respect she has for the Jewish community.
I bet that she would not have dared to choose the most holy day for Muslims to hold an election.
p.s When a Jewish member of parliament queried the selection of the date on Judaism’s holiest day, Julia Gillard said that it was hard to choose a date because of some international commitments and, wait for it…Football finals. She chose football over franchise.
Why you cannot trust Calypso mangoes
I have to speak out about the disgusting TV ad promoting Calypso mangoes. Picture this…
A little old lady is shopping in a supermarket. She pretends to try to reach an item on a high shelf but can’t manage it. Why? Because she wants to distract a fellow shopper, an obliging tall man who has Calypso mangoes in his trolley. Why? Because she wants to steal from him.
I kid you not.
So when he turns his back on her to reach her item on the top shelf she steals four Calypso mangoes from his trolley and chuckles. To make matters worse, she tells him he is a nice man. So much for the storyline of this TV ad.
Impressed?
Well, I’m pretty turned off by the unethical behaviour of the old woman. She has stolen from the Good Samaritan. She depicts old people as being dishonest. She is certainly giving the wrong message to any child who watches this ad. And in my opinion, she makes me wonder about the ethics of a product that promotes such despicable behaviour.
Are the growers of Calypso mangoes to be trusted when their ad is based on theft? Who approved of this ad? Was it One Harvest itself which is showing it on its web site. Who has the final say as to what is acceptable to be aired on TV?
Or don’t they give a damn?
I, for one, do give a damn and will never buy a Calypso mango. It would go against my moral code.
Lawson’s Bread no longer worth the extra cost.
Four years ago I praised Goodman Fielder for making Lawson’s bread. There is no doubt that it is tasty and wholesome. Apparently, many people agreed with me because they have been buying it. At the time I thought it was expensive, around the $4.25 mark. That was very dear compared with other breads.
As time went on, Lawson’s has risen in price. Remember that it’s just bread made by the big company, Goodman Fielder, and bread should not be pricing itself out of the market. But that is exactly what Lawson’s has done. It now costs 37 cents a single slice which is prohibitive.
I think that $5.45 a loaf is far too dear and so I suggest that you do yourself a favour and buy Aldi’s very comparable seeded loaf called “Baker’s Life Original”. It costs $1.46 cents less and is just as good as Lawson’s. In fact, it weighs 900gms which is 100gms heavier than Lawson’s.
Let’s see if Goodman Fielder can match that!
Shame on Kerry Stokes! Shame on New Idea!
I cannot imagine what got into the heads of the advertisers of “New Idea”. This publication is run by Kerry Stokes and Seven West Media. In an effort to boost sales of the magazine the executives have decided to stoop to disgusting depths with their latest TV commercial.
They have decided to pick on the Amish!
Can you imagine a less offensive group of Americans who don’t cause trouble, don’t get political or use violence? They don’t carry guns. They don’t blow themselves up in suicide attacks. They just want to be left alone to live their lives.
So what does the TV commercial for “New Idea” portray?
Well, it shows a young Amish woman reading “New Idea”, removing her modest cap and shaking her hair provocatively. Another scene shows a young Amish woman (under the spell of “New Idea”) lifting up her skirts and poking out her thigh the way that Angeline Jolie did on the red carpet.
All this is done in front of stunned Amish elders.
This commercial is in poor taste and extremely offensive to the Amish. My consolation is that the Amish will probably never see or hear about the “New Idea” commercial but I would like the rest of the U.S.A to be aware of the shameful mocking of some of their population.
Just as our Federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, is prepared to offend the people of New Jersey for his own political gains, I think it is immoral to make fun of a peaceful religious sect like the Amish.
My question to Kerry Stokes and “New Idea” is would you cowardly guys have dared to portray a Muslim woman doing the same as the Amish woman? I think not. The Amish are easy pickings, aren’t they?
Higgs Boson…who cares? It’s the little things that count.
So they’ve unearthed a subatomic particle. Wow! Good news for Professor Higgs who said “I told you so” when nobody believed him, but so far I’m unimpressed. I admit this is due to my general ignorance about its benefits but I don’t really care how the Earth was formed or what’s going to happen to it.
What I care about is the little things. Not the subatomic particles but little everyday things such as the annoying bags that supermarkets and greengrocers supply. You know the ones I mean. Those frustrating plastic things that are difficult to open when you want to buy some vegetables. You tear the damn things off the roll and then you fumble with every end trying to find which end opens.
Is it this end? Or is it the other end? You try and try squashing the bag in an attempt to fathom where the opening is. Then you wet your fingers because they’ve dried up. You utter some words that should only be expressed in the privacy of the Collider in Cern.
Anyone watching this display would be correct in thinking that you are struggling against the odds and the odds are winning. These ruddy bags will not open and so you try another one.
Fiddling, fumbling, muttering, you proceed to attack several of these bags and feel very inadequate. They make you feel bad and you say to yourself “Surely they could invent a better bag than this!” By “they” I mean those scientists such as Higgs who waste their energies looking for what makes the world go round instead of making it go round in a user-friendly manner.
Imagine a world where that stiff plastic packaging which cuts your fingers when you try to open it were replaced by something sensible and easier to open and yet perfectly secure. Is that so hard to do?
Imagine a world where you don’t have to fumble trying to open containers without the benefit of an engineering degree. I possess all kinds of tools which should help but don’t.
Imagine a world where you don’t have to curse those damn bags that supermarkets provide.
Imagine a world where those ring-pull tabs from Eastern Europe don’t break off just as you begin to open the can and you are left with a tab in your hand and sharp spikes ready to puncture you.
Well, guess what? I have recently discovered some greengrocery bags in Woolworths (Aussie supermarket chain) that are easy to open. They even have some instructions that read “Open this end”. How smart is that? I was so impressed that I took a couple of them home just to play with them and they work well. No fumbling needed. These bags are made in the U.S.A by a firm called Crown Poly and contain 30% recycled material. So they are good for the planet and save your sanity as well!
Imagine a world in which every supermarket offered these bags to customers.
Now that would be impressive!
Why Julian Assange is dangerous
Yesterday, we commemorated the contribution made by Alan Turing. Born exactly a hundred years ago, Turing was a brilliant mathematician who headed the codebreaking unit in Britain during the Second World War.
It was he who was largely responsible for inventing the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park, the secret British centre for codebreaking. His team could decipher cryptic German messages and this information was used against the enemy itself.
Naturally, it was crucial that the Germans not find out about the Enigma machine and so the secret of Bletchley Park was kept until well after the War when the danger was over.
It was the secrecy around the Enigma Code which shortened the War.
Which brings me to Julian Assange and why he is dangerous. In my opinion, had amoral Assange been around during this war and had he learned about the Enigma machine, I am convinced that he would have blabbed it to the World and endangered the lives of many millions of Allies.
Chadstone Shopping Centre cleaners protest
Well, well, well, who can deny that coincidences happen? In yesterday’s blog, I finally expressed my exasperation with the dirty toilets at the Chadstone Shopping Centre- the biggest mall in the Southern Hemisphere. My gripe was with the management at the Mall and not the cleaners.
This morning ABC radio has interviewed a cleaner from Chadstone who is about to start a long protest march from the Mall to the city with his fellow cleaners. The cleaners complain that they are having to do more and more work for less pay. Apparently, their employers, Spotless (lol) who have the contract for Chadstone are taking advantage of them.
Doesn’t look good for Chadstone management, does it?
LiliGans.com 