Monthly Archives: February 2006

Mardi Gras weekend on eBay

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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.

4B 1 B

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]

A fresh lick of paint

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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.

Goodbye Movable Type, hello WordPress

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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.

Aussie gold medallist made millions with Spam and Malware

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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.

RSS readers: switch to new feed

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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.

Brush with fame

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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):

Brent & Pam

and (2) a kiss:

Brent & Pam 2

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.

Everything must go: the buggery.org yard sale

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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.

links for 2006-02-13

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Politicians say the darndest things

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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.

Misheard news

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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.

If only…

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If only our Prime Minister was as good a dancer as his Hungarian opposite number:

A video clip [1.4MB WMV file] available on the Internet starts with [Hugh] Grant in the movie Love Actually, in the role of the British prime minister peering out of the window in his room at 10 Downing Street.

But the man who then turns to face the camera is Hungary’s Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, who goes on to dance to a pop song around his study. (ABC/Reuters)

And so he does. Twirling joyfully to the Pointer Sisters’ Jump (For Your Love), no less. And they said disco was dead.

Gyurcsany (video still)

I’m half-tempted to pass this on to DudeTube (NSFW).

Homosexuality in Iraq

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Tim from Road to Surfdom points out this informative Reuters article about the status of gays in newly-liberated Iraq. “You probably aren’t surprised to learn that homosexuality was a crime in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” writes Tim. “Changing that doesn’t seem to have been a high priority of the new government.”

Saddam Hussein’s government outlawed homosexual acts in 2001, the Reuters article explains, along with prostitution, incest and rape, all of them punishable by death, presumably to appease Islamic conservatives. That law is still on the books, and while Iraq’s new constitution has protections against discrimination based on “a variety of grounds, including sex, religion, belief, opinion and social and economic status, [it] fails to explicitly mention homosexuality.”

Like Tim, I’m hardly surprised that the flowering of freedom and democracy in Iraq doesn’t go so far as to protect Iraqi gays, and I share his alarm at the account in the Reuters article of so-called ‘honour killings’, under which relatives of gays (or those supposed to be gay) are free to carry out the ultimate sentence themselves:

Article 111 of the Iraqi Penal Code exempts from prosecution and punishment men who kill other men or female relatives in defence of their family’s honour.

“He who discovers his wife, one of his female relatives committing adultery or a male relative engaged in sodomy and kills, wounds or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty,” the law states.

The article includes an interview with a man who killed his own son, by hanging him in front of his own house, and spent a month in prison.

“Iraqis are showing their courage every day, and we are proud to be their allies in the cause of freedom,” said George Bush in the State of the Union address this year. Freedom. Democracy. Liberty. Justice. Do they even mean anything at all?

Recognition at last (part 2)

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The application form for an Australian passport is the latest official acknowledgment of the validity of same-sex relationships:

Passport form

If my same-sex relationship isn’t valid, Mr Howard, how come the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, through the passport form, treats it as equivalent to an opposite-sex de facto relationship? Isn’t it a bit odd that the passport section of DFAT acknowledges same-sex relationships in this way while the consular section is actively working against them?

The DFAT passport website is even more forthcoming:

The guarantor … must not be related to the applicant by birth, marriage, de facto or same sex relationship

If the guarantor is “related to” the applicant by same sex relationship, doesn’t that imply that the relationship exists, and doesn’t this constitute an official acknowledgment of the validity of that relationship, Mr Howard? If so, how come that relationship isn’t given equal treatment under the law?

See also: Recognition at last (same-sex relationships acknowledged in the anti-terrorism bill)

Hat-tip to Kevin for the tip-off, via Brent.

Brokeback: more commentary and news

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Rodney Croome’s thoughtful, nostalgic post on the memories triggered by seeing Brokeback Mountain is beautiful and inspiring:

But I have to admit there’s still a bleak part of my soul that fears Del Mar’s tire-iron logic is inescapable, that submerged under the New Tolerant Tasmania, far away from laws, policies, pop culture, basic fellow-feeling or any vestige of civilization, inhabiting some deep place like the love it hates, inchoate violence lies waiting for the right time to strike.

[...]

You or I might end up living in a caravan somewhere, with nothing but an old shirt to weep over. Everything we love and build might be smashed to atoms on history’s anvil. But the sparks from that destruction will light a thousand new fires that burn brighter and hotter than we can imagine.

Brokeback Mountain has sent the sparks from a million shattered lives showering across the world. Now watch what wonders are forged in the flames.

In The Australian, Stephen Romei compares Heath Ledger’s performance to the young Robert De Niro, and declares:

IF Heath Ledger is denied an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain when the best actor envelope is opened on March 5 it will be the greatest robbery since Ronald Arthur Biggs forced an unscheduled stop on the London-to-Glasgow mail train.

Meanwhile, gossipy reports in the British media (via Towleroad) claim that Brad Pitt is on the lookout for a gay role:

The 42-year-old actor is desperate to cash in on the success of gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain, which is up for countless awards. Brad — who is expecting a baby with Angelina Jolie — wants to find a script which portrays the “ultimate gay love story”. [The Sun]

Supply-side economics

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Following on from my earlier post today about Bush’s State of the Union address and energy policy generally… Joe of Joe.My.God. has posted this marvellous photograph of a building in New York:

Beacon Court

Joe likes the building, and I have no problem with that – I respect his opinion – but this picture struck me as the very essence of what I was getting at with my post about supply-side economics. One Beacon Court (the building in the picture) is a “mixed use” building with retail, office and residential components. Joe snapped this picture “on Saturday night while we were bar-hopping on the Upper East Side.”

Does an office/retail building really need to be burning 200,000 watts of electricity late on Saturday night? Is there really any justification for the tonnes and tonnes of CO2 this building is churning into the atmosphere every year just to announce itself to passing bar-hoppers? Is the solution to this conundrum only to be found in pie-in-the-sky ideas like “zero-emission coal” and carbon sequestration?

State of the Onion

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Despite a passing reference to “activist courts that try to redefine marriage,” America’s annual exercise in political theatre and grand self-congratulation contained no reference to Bush’s old plan for a constitutional amendment to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. A sign that this has been consigned to the too-hard basket of history, perhaps?

The headline seems to be the statements referring to energy policy – but as always the devil’s in the detail. “America is addicted to oil,” Bush said, and that oil is “often imported from unstable parts of the world.”

Bush announced something he called the Advanced Energy Initiative, which will increase research into alternative fuels. Or will it? The technologies Bush mentioned include solar and wind power (good), “zero-emission coal-fired plants” (there’s no such thing, except in the minds of the coal industry’s PR flaks), and “clean, safe nuclear energy” (OK, now I know where this is leading). Continue reading →