(Clockwise from back left) My dad, my brothers Peter, Bill, John and David, and me. Sometime in the 1960s, some beach (Tathra?).

Postsecret is a collection of people’s anonymous secrets, recorded on postcards.

A report released today found that Australians use more ecstasy than anyone else in the world (“Australia leads world in ecstasy use”, ABC). This is despite the finding that seizures of illegal drugs have gone up significantly in recent years – the recent seizure of more than a tonne of ecstasy tabs in Melbourne will ensure that this year is an even bigger bumper year for the drug cops.

Hardly a day goes by in this country without the TV news featuring images of the latest bust of some scarily large quantity of illicit drugs, and of course the recent trial of Schapelle Corby and arrest of nine other Australians in Indonesia have had blanket coverage.

What is clear is that, no matter how successful the authorities are in stopping drug shipments and arresting the perpetrators, the simple fact of supply and demand means there’ll always be someone else who’ll try to beat the system, quite likely on the very next plane or boat. The demand for drugs is strong enough in Australia and in most countries that the potential profits will always outweigh the costs.

And, of course, the people arrested are almost never the Mr Bigs of the drug underworld, but foolish, desperate and – in the eyes of their masters – expendable – couriers. The stories that are trickling out from the nine Australians arrested in Bali this week show just how callous and predatory this business is.

Whether Corby or the other Australians are guilty of the crimes they are accused of, they are the unfortunate victims of becoming caught up in a enormous, powerful and sophisticated business which is driven by huge demand for products which are obscenely profitable. Prices and profits are driven up by the regime of prohibition and, for the people at the top of the food chain, the risk of conviction is virtually zero.

The last thing the drug barons want is decriminalisation: it would bugger their business model.

A day will come when Australia and other countries finally face the reality that they are fighting a losing battle, and perhaps then we’ll see some enlightened policy in this area. In the meantime, the Schapelle Corbys of this world will continue to suffer.

It may be MY birthday but YOU get the gifts! The nice people at flickr have given me TWO free one-year “Pro” memberships to give away. The pro memberships cost USD $24.95 per year and allow you to upload up to 2 GB of photos per month plus other allegedly-cool features.

If you’d like one of these, tell me why in the comments. A link to your existing freebie Flickr account would be nice.

But wait! There’s more! I also have 100 GMail accounts to give away. Just ask.

Today, April 19, is obscurely known as Primrose Day in the UK, in memory of former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who died on April 19, 1881, and who, we’re told, was fond of primroses. Sweet.

It’s also Bicycle Day, a day of great importance to psychonauts, who like to remember that on April 19, 1943, Dr Albert Hoffmann was the first person to deliberately ingest LSD.

The ancient Romans knew April 19 as the last day of Cerealia, the feast of Ceres, goddess of grain and motherly love. In more recent times, April 19 was the date of both the Waco massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing, two of the darker chapters of modern American history.

Australians may remember April 19 as the day on which Captain James Cook first caught sight of the coast of Australia, in 1770. This may or may not be an event of great significance, depending on your view of the treatment of the land and its inhabitants since, and whether or not you want to persist with the fiction that Cook “discovered” Australia. In any case, Land Ho!

Today would have been a bittersweet anniversary for recently-deceased Prince Rainer of Monaco, as it was his wedding anniversary to Grace Kelly, and it’s the anniversary of the death of Charles Darwin, a day to remain vigilant and mindful of the role of science, not superstition, in explaining the natural world.

Speaking of superstition, today is the feast day of St Expedicius, patron saint against procrastination in the Roman Catholic Church. If he weren’t a mythical figure, St Expeditius would be frowning at the fact I’ve gone on so long without getting to my point, which is coming.

April 19 is the birthday of Jayne Mansfield, Eliot Ness, Dick Sargent, Paloma Picasso, Ruby Wax, Dudley Moore, Dickie Bird, and me.

Leave your birthday greetings in the comments and make me smile on my day.

(Most of the details above from Wikipedia)

The People’s Republic of Buggeria is a large, environmentally stunning nation, notable for its absence of drug laws. Its compassionate, cynical population of 23 million are ruled with an iron fist by the socialist government, which grants its people the freedom to do whatever they like so long as it doesn’t involve getting richer than anybody else or challenging the government.

It is difficult to tell where the omnipresent, corrupt, socially-minded government stops and the rest of society begins, but it juggles the competing demands of Social Welfare, Education, and Healthcare. The average income tax rate is 50%, and even higher for the wealthy. A very small private sector is dominated by the Information Technology industry.

Meat is a luxury afforded only to the wealthy, public nudity is compulsory, same-sex marriages are increasingly common, and the latest Harry Potter book is a bestseller. Crime is totally unknown. Buggeria’s national animal is the lazy shag, which frolics freely in the nation’s many lush forests, and its currency is the boink.

Following a link from Hans, I’m now the supreme ruler of a fictional nation in the South Pacific. Buggeria is not the first country I’ve founded (starting fictional nations was something I did fairly frequently in my rather unusual childhood) but it is the first to outlaw the wearing of clothes in public (sunscreen, however, is freely available and fully funded by the governement).

Naughty-jug-eared-permaculture-loving-tedious-widowed-father-of-two and cheeky-jumper-wearing-aunt-peeling-horse-faced-upper-crust-bint going at it.

(Aunt peeling? I’m sure I misheard that…)

(Flash Animation by Peter Nicholson)

Having spent a large part of this weekend either deleting Trackback spam, installing software hacks to prevent Trackback spam, and generally getting extremely frustrated by Trackback spam, I’ve decided (and I’m not the first) to block Trackbacks altogether.

I don’t have the time or the resources to stay one step ahead of the spammers, so I quit. They win. Game over.

The signal-to-noise ratio on these things is like 1:10000, so having turned them off I already feel ten pounds lighter.

Meanwhile, quite a number of the technical difficulties on this site have been ironed out. Not all of them, but we’re getting there.

My beloved iBook went into a coma on Thursday night and has gone into the intensive care ward at my local Apple Service Centre. I am 51% confident of a full recovery, but in the meantime my computing capabilities are limited to an aging Wintel shitbox affectionately referred to as “The Buggeryserver”.

If you emailed me in the recent past and haven’t heard back, it’s because I don’t have my laptop and don’t have access to any emails or email addresses. Hopefully not for long.

The good news is that said iBook is still in warranty. Had this happened two weeks later I might have faced a very sticky situation.

Added to that, the transition to new server has created a few problems hither and yon. Gallery doesn’t work, e-cards don’t work, Qwords doesn’t work. All these problems can and will be solved, in time.

Once I get the 99,999,999 spam Trackback pings deleted, I may have something to say about the Pope.

The cryptic voodoo that relocates whole domain names from one server to another seems to have done its work overnight, so buggery.org is safely ensconced in its new home. Some pages have small errors on them, some pages don’t work at all, but the main part of the site is operational. I’ll attend to the outstanding problems today.

My new hosting account provides me with lots more disk space and lots more traffic quota, which means I won’t have to pay exorbitant per-megabyte fees just so you can read my jottings. There are also a few new features, such as the fact that you can now access the site via the url http://buggery.org, a full four characters shorter than the old URL. Purists, feel free to include the “www.” if you desire.

More on this and other, actually interesting, topics after I walk my dogs.