Tiny penguins!
Yesterday we made the trek from Melbourne to Phillip Island to take in one of Australia’s more peculiar tourist attractions — the Penguin Parade. About two hours south-east of the city, Phillip Island is a small speck of land in Western Port Bay which is home to a large colony of Little Penguins (a.k.a. Fairy Penguins, Eudyptula minor to the taxonomists). For the best part of a century tourists have been travelling to the island to see them return to land after fishing in the southern ocean and Port Phillip Bay.
The humans gather in a fenced enclosure on the beach just before dusk, while the penguins wait a few hundred metres offshore. When the sun sets, the penguins make their way, in groups of a dozen or so at a time, to the shore, where they gather, tumble in the gentle surf (they are tiny – just 13 inches high) and then, once they’ve summoned the courage, they waddle up the beach as fast as their little flippers will carry them, back to the sand dunes where they make their nests.
Tiny penguins! Hundreds of tiny penguins!
The tourists ‘oo’ and ‘ah’ as the tiny bodies whizz past them. They titter and coo like young mothers. The words ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’ spill from even the most jaded lips. Occasionally, one of the wee birdies loses his nerve halfway up the beach, turns and flip-flops his way back to the safety of the water. The humans go ‘aw’ and murmur encouragement to the little blue-and-white fellow: ‘you can do it’.
No man can serve two masters
“You cannot serve both God and mammon,” according to my primary school Catholic indoctrination, yet the man who has been “appointed” to head the still un-legislated-for Fair Pay Commission says he will be taking his instructions directly from the Industrial Relations Commissioner in the Sky:
GOD will guide the man charged with setting the minimum wage.
The head of the proposed new Fair Pay Commission, Ian Harper, revealed yesterday that he wants to use the post to do “God’s will” and will rely on his faith and values to make fair and balanced decisions for low-paid workers. [The Age]
If the Fair Pay Commission wants to be fair dinkum about its role (both statutory and theological), it would be setting a maximum wage as well as a minimum – after all, the tax-dodging spivs and multi-squillionaires at the top end of the scale are doing their share of holding Australia back, too. Seeing as how it’s harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is to drive a camel through the eye of a needle, the pious Ian Harper might like to lead the way by refusing to take a penny more than the minimum wage he is setting for millions of others.
The worst form of torture
Is there some natural law that says the more cheesy, annoying and puerile a song is, the more likely it is to get stuck in your head after one chance listening? Yes, there is, as it turns out.
After watching the 50th anniversary retrospective of the Eurovision Song Contest on Sunday night, for the last several days I’ve been trying to dislodge the execrable Makin’ your mind up, winner of the 1981 ESC by British bubblegum foursome Bucks Fizz. Truly one of the most revolting pieces of processed cheese ever to be composed in the name Euterpe (and a Eurovision classic), the lyrics are utterly nauseating:
You gotta speed it up, and then you gotta slow it down
Coz if you believe that our love can hit the top
You gotta play around
But soon you will find that there comes a time
For making your mind up
This, believe it or not, comes from the country that gave us Shakespeare, Byron and Shelley. Admittedly, 1981 was not a year of high art anywhere, but I don’t see why I should be so tortured 15 years later.
Then, last night, thanks to the ABC’s marvellous Spicks and Specks, something has finally elbowed Makin’ your mind up out of my brain. I guess I should be thankful, but I could do without waking up with this going through my head:
Oo, ee, oo ah ah,
Ting tang, Wala wala bing bang,
Oo ee, oo ah ah,
Ting tang, Walawala bang bang
Somebody kill me please.
(The song, for those who asked, is called Witch Doctor, by David Seville, released in 1958. The question on the show was “two points if you can sing the next line from this song: oo, ee, oo ah ah (etc)”.)
links for 2005-10-26
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The US ABC network has ordered a script and five episode outlines for America’s Next Muppet, in which viewers may join in choosing the newest member of the puppet family that includes Kermit and Miss Piggy, a network spokeswoman said today.
Muzik
We may be about a billion years behind every other country in the world, but as of yesterday Australia has an iTunes music store. Wacky-do! Now I can buy craptacular legal (ish*) DRM-nobbled music direct from the reseller.
* I say “ish” because as I understand it Australia’s gloriously byzantine copyright laws still make it technically a crime to copy music you already own onto an iPod you also own. Presumably the wallopers have better things to do than enforce this ludicrous law, as I see hundreds of white-earbud-wearing crims every day on the tram.
Is the tide turning?
From the ABC News website today:
- Anti-terrorism laws lack UK-style safeguards: expert (6:44am)
- Beattie warns terrorism laws ‘unconstitutional’ (8:12am)
- PM denies terrorism laws unconstitutional (10:43am)
(Coming soon: PM suspends constitution; cites pressing need to combat terrorism)
I should also mention the speech by J.M. Coetzee, the South African author who won the 2003 Novel Prize for literature, the other day. Speaking at a reading of his new book, Waiting for the Barbarians, in Sydney:
Coetzee said the South African police “could do what they wanted because there was no real recourse against them because special provisions of the legislation indemnified them in advance”.
He went on to tell the packed auditorium: “If somebody telephoned a reporter and said, ‘Tell the world — some men came last night, took my husband, my son, my father away, I don’t know who they were, they didn’t give names, they had guns’, the next thing that happened would be that you and the reporter in question would be brought into custody for furthering the aims of the proscribed organisation endangering the security of the state.”
The 2003 Nobel laureate ended his introduction with: “All of this, and much more during apartheid in South Africa, was done in the name of the fight against terror.”
While Coetzee did not specifically refer to the Howard Government, there was no question his pointed speech was directed at anti-terror laws due to be introduced into federal and state parliaments next month. [The Australian]
Everything can be measured in dollars
My blog is worth $18,629.82.
How much is your blog worth?
links for 2005-10-22
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“[A] culture of fear begins to supplant John Howard’s relaxed and comfortable Australia. The prospect of a terror attack on our shores is only one of a long list of threats…”
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Scientists from Brazil and the US say new research suggests deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has been underestimated by at least 60%. (via AntiMinke)
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The Australian Defence Force (ADF) says same-sex partners of soldiers, sailors and pilots will now receive the same range of family benefits available to personnel in recognised heterosexual relationships.
