buggery.org

If you’re quick, you’ve still got time to bid on an eBay auction which offers the opportunity to

Come with two young gorgeous gay guys for the best adventure on the gay calendar, for a fabulous, Mardi Gras experience in Sydney 06- the world’s largest and most awesome gay event. We would like to give you a unique weekend Friday to Monday with all the tourist things and the gay side of Sydney, excellent food, and dining out all culminating in the world-famous Parade and Party. We can organise everything before the weekend including flights and costume (if desired).

I’m not quite sure what to make of this — the pictures accompanying the eBay listing show two different bedrooms (presumably the lucky winner gets to sleep in one of them) and the pic at right of the sellers’ “naturopathic steam room and … petting zoo.” What the kitten is doing in the cupboard I cannot say.

Come out of the closet, pussy

Given that the deal includes flights, accommodation, costume (if desired), three days of entertainment, sightseeing, “a sumptuous seafood extravaganza at an Aussie friend’s house, or if you prefer a traditional Aussie barbie” and entry to the party (tickets to MG this year are $120) is seems like quite a bargain with just one bid lodged for $9.99.

Less than 24 hours to go before the auction closes, so you’ve still got time…

[Thanks, Kabi]

OK, so I think we’ve pretty much made the transition, and it’s gone reasonably smoothly. I hope you like the fresh look. Comments are very much welcomed.

What’s new?

Back in the old days, buggery.org used to have a section called “The Lash”, an accumulation of writings predating the blog. While The Lash and the blog existed happily side-by-side for a while, they are now one and the same: you can now find posts on buggery.org going back as far as 1996. Much of this is travel writing of varying quality. A few of my favourites include Desolation Sound (1997), Lesbians! (2000) and of course my journey to the public toilet where George Michael was arrested. You can listen to some radio work, read about my appearance on a TV game show, view some slideshows, and more.

My del.icio.us feed is now integrated into the site. You can see the latest items in the sidebar at right (under ‘Elsewhere’).

Still to do:

• There are still about 1000 broken links scattered around the site; I’m working to correct those now.
• Most of the static content from the old site still needs to be shifted over. This will happen progressively over the next few weeks.
• The qWords database needs to be recreated – this section of buggery.org (my compendium of names, slang expressions and so on) will soon have it’s own domain, qwords.org.
• Lots of little things.

Thanks for bearing with me during the changeover. I’ll post something more substantial soon I promise. In the meantime, do me a favour and leave a comment so I can see how the comment moderation on this thing works. A trackback would be cool too.

Just a quick post to say that I’m nearly finished preparing the switch-over to WordPress. The new site looks good (well, I think so) and I’m enjoying working with WordPress (although the amount of work involved was considerably more than I initially anticipated).

If all goes well, the changeover should happen by the end of the day.

Update, 12:34 AM (Tuesday): Um, I think we’re there. Probably a mistake to go live just before going to bed for the night, but here we are. Apologies for any broken links or technical mishaps, hope you like the new décor. A more complete explanation of what’s new, what’s changed, what’s been deleted and what’s still in progress, tomorrow.

Dale Begg-Smith, the Canadian-born Australian who won our third-ever gold medal at the winter Olympics overnight, is a 21-year-old multimillionaire who made his fortune through pop-up advertsiing, spam and malware.

The SMH is carrying a story about Begg-Smith’s business interests. Apparently at a post-event press conference in Torino,

He refused to reveal the name of his business, nor details of its operations or size. He did say it had “two or three” employees and that it wasn’t really an issue with skiing because it had been wound down.

The SMH names Begg-Smith’s company as CPM Media, which is responsible for a couple of distinctly shady pieces of malware — “2nd thought”, described as a “browswer hijacker that will reset your home page and often redirect your searches to porn sites,” and FreeScratchAndWin,

an IE spyware Browser Helper Object dressed up as a web ’scratchcards’ game. (What exactly is available to be won, and whether anybody has ever won it, remains unclear.) It also highjacks your home- and search-page settings to point to xzoomy.com, and complains if you try to change them back. Opens pop-up adverts every few minutes. The software’s terms of use advises that the software can track users’ web usage.

Looks like that gold medal is a little tarnished already, and it hasn’t even been officially presented yet.

If you’re using a newsreader to read buggery.org, you can (and should) change the URL for the news feed now. (If you’re not using a newsreader, and especially if you’ve no idea what a newsreader is, you can ignore this boring technical post.)

The new feed address is http://buggery.org/feed – for the time being this redirects to the existing feed, but when the new site goes live in a few days it will fetch the new feed. Switch your newsreader subscription now and the changeover should be smooth as a baby’s bum.

Note: the URL above links to the feed with full content, not the summary feed. After the switch, there won’t be a summary feed any more, sorry about that.

It’s late, and we’ve had as rather eventful night, in which my husband received:

(1) (on behalf of the David Williams Fund) an oversized novelty cheque from Pamela Anderson (on behalf of the MAC AIDS Fund):

and (2) a kiss:

The woman in the black cocktail dress on the left of both pictures is Jo, from MAC Cosmetics, which raised the $65,000 handed by Ms Anderson over to help people living with HIV/AIDS in Victoria, and at whose invitation we were invited to this event. Thanks Jo.

More pictures tomorrow.

Its spring cleaning time here at Buggery Mansions. Subject to a few experiments going OK in the next hour or two, I’m switching from Movable Type to WordPress and binning most of the 9426 files currently littering the buggery.org web space.

Many of those 9426 files are either out of date, unlinked, ignored or otherwise in need of attention … hopefully this process will enable me to sort the wheat from the chaff and get this house in order.

I’m posting this mostly as a heads-up to those readers who use the RSS feeds, for which the URLs will change after I’m done. I’ll try to make everything happen seamlessly, but if the site goes quiet on you for more than a day or so, you might need to update the feed URL in your newsreader.

Now, where’s that broom?

Update: Wednesday morning

We’re nearly there but there are still a few bugs to iron out. Should be OK to go live by the weekend. I <3 WordPress. Incidentally, while copying the posts from the old to new sites, I stumbled upon a very old post about switching from GreyMatter (remember GreyMatter?) to Movable Type. La plus ça change…

RSS users may want to note the address of the new feed which will be http://buggery.org/feed (RSS) or http://buggery.org/feed/atom (ATOM). Those feeds are not yet live.

• Out of the closet
  “I will not talk during the film … my mobile phone will most definitely be turned off … In short I will be the perfect cinema patron. It’s just that I will be wearing a wardrobe.” (Daily Telegraph, via antiminke)
  (tags: culture cosplay)
• Government stifles climate debate: scientists
  Three Australian scientists have accused the Federal Government of trying to censor their public comments about climate change. The story is on Four Corners, which makes a welcome return this week.
  (tags: environment climate csiro tv politics)
• It may be love, but it’s not necessarily equal
  Whatever the states might do for gay couples, Commonwealth legislation does not recognise these relationships. So same-sex partners miss out in any area - such as super - over which the Commonweath has jurisdiction. (Sun-Herald)
  (tags: glbt finance superannuation)

Danna Vale is opposed to legalising RU486 because it will turn Australia into an outpost of Islam:

“I’ve actually read in the Daily Telegraph where a certain imam from the Lakemba mosque actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time,” she said.

“I didn’t believe him at the time but when you actually look at the birthrates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence.”

Mrs Vale says apart from the morals of the issue, she is concerned about what she says are the implications for Australia’s future.

Danna probably doesn’t read buggery.org, but I think it’s worth pointing out that:

1. About 1.5% of Australians identified as Muslim in the 2001 Census; by comparison, 67.4% identify as Christian;
2. Assuming that the availability of RU486 leads to the abortion of every non-Muslim foetus conceived in the next fifty years, the number of Muslims would need to rise by 7.27% per year [1] before Australia achieves a majority Muslim population.
3. Australia’s current population growth rate is 1.2% per annum [2].
4. Danna Vale is a moron.

Obviously the RU486 bill (which is only marginally about abortion; the real debate is about whether the TGA or the Mad Monk should be responsible for deciding which drugs are safe for Australians to use) is going to pass tomorrow, otherwise there’d be no need to resort to desperate tactics like playing the Muslim terror card.

[1] The statistical formula used to arrive at this figure is ((50/1.5)^(1/50))-1.

[2] Source: ABS.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has accidentally shot and wounded a man in a whale hunting accident.

I’m sorry, I’ll just read that again.

Turns out Cheney was hunting quails (or Quayles?), not whales, but my hearing’s obviously not getting any better. The 78-year-old multimillionaire lawyer that Cheney mistook for a small chicken is doing fine, unfortunately, after being rescued by the medical team and ambulance that follows Dick Cheney at all times, just in case he shoots something he oughtn’t.