buggery.org

There’s still time to sign up for my Pledge to raise money to help bring justice to David Hicks. It’ll only cost you 25 bucks.

Sign up today or the baby chickens get it:

Brent comes home with a new magazine last night. “You’ll like this,” he says as he hands it to me. G Magazine is “Australia’s first GREEN LIVING MAGAZINE,” according to the cover, which promises “44 ECO-FABULOUS SOLUTIONS” in food, fashion, beauty, travel and entertaining. The photo on the cover shows a happy, successful and middle-class heterosexual couple. But the masthead reminded me of something else, which I quickly pulled out of the archive.

Side by side, the two covers illustrate the multiple worlds I traverse:

Australian eco-lifestyle consumer mag. Brazilian soft-porn gay mag. Boring, successful. Boy, sexy.

The business of magazine publishing is to sell us the lifestyle we want for ourselves. There is a part of me that deeply regrets my slow, and seemingly inevitable, morph from the target demographic of one to the other. Or am I reading too much into this?

State election tomorrow.

[Via email from Greens HQ]

• YouTube - Grim Reaper [1987]
  Those were the days. Not.
  (tags: hiv aids grim-reaper tv advertising 1987 australia)

My newly-naturalised husband has just had his first experience of Australian democracy. He’s interstate this weekend for the Victorian state election, so he gets to perform his civic duty in the comfort of our own home.

Having come from one of those “just-put-an-X-in-one-box” countries, B was somewhat perplexed by our more complex “number-all-the-boxes-in-the-Fibonacci-sequence” system, but he seems to have managed OK.

As for me, I’ll be casting my ballot in person on Saturday. This makes me happy as it means I can graciously accept all the how-to-vote cards (except for Fundies First, which I’ll take, glance at, and then hand back while hissing “I don’t think so, Mary!”) and then return them, one by one, to the respective booth volunteers after I’m done numbering all the squares from 1 to 35 (and putting the Fundies last).

It’s the simple things that make life worthwhile.

We have new arrivals here at Buggery Acres – baby chickens. Yes, you heard me right, cute fluffy little BABY CHICKENS. Here they are, just moments after hatching yesterday afternoon:

Today they’re looking much less bedraggled, and there’s three of them now (and two unhatched eggs).

After the jump: more safe-for-work barnyard scenes.

(more…)

Ian Thorpe has hung up his speedos for good.

Good for him for going at a time of his own choosing, and with such grace and maturity, rather than hanging about for ever. At today’s press conference, Thorpe said he’d decided to quit swimming to enable him to move onto “a next phase” in his life.

“One other thing happened in LA, as I got physically fit, my mind also got fit, I started asking a lot of questions.

“And I started to look at myself as a person. That begged another question: What would my life be without swimming?

“It’s been a security net for me. But what it’s meant is I haven’t balanced out my life the way I should.

“So I realised I had to prove other things and let swimming take a back seat at this stage.

“I’m looking at a next phase, and that next phase means I am realigning the most important thing for me to do. Swimming falls somewhere short, which is never the way it used to be.”

I guess we’ll know in due course what that “next phase” is going to be.

No doubt he’ll continue to be a public figure and, for as long as that is the case, rumours about his sexuality will continue to circulate. I have no idea whether there’s any truth in these rumours – he was asked about them a couple of months ago and didn’t deny (or confirm) them.

If he is gay, I hope his post-swimming life enables him to come out with the same maturity and grace that he displayed today in ending his swimming career. It would be a shame for the truth to come out in a less dignified way, as it has for so many celebrities (George Michael, Alan Jones, Rock Hudson and the rest).

If he’s straight, I hope he meets a nice girl and settles d— ah, who am I kidding?

More than 50,000 Australians have signed a petition to Alexander Downer demanding that David Hicks, who has been in a prison cell in Guantanamo Bay for five years, should be given a fair trial in an Australian court. But our Foreign Minister has twice refused to meet with the people from GetUp.org.au, who collected the signatures.

GetUp are asking for donations to help pay for billboards strategically placed where Downer, Phillip Ruddock and John Howard will see them (along with thousands of other Australians). Seems like a good idea, and I’m ready to put my money where my mouth is.

But only if you do too!

I’ve lodged a pledge with pledgebank.com in which I’m promising to give $100 to the campaign, but only if ten other people agree to give at least $25 each as well.

If you can spare 25 bucks to help this campaign along, together we can raise $350 to highlight the government’s shameful behaviour towards and Australian citizen. David Hicks is spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in an illegal foreign prison. He has been in jail for five years without trial, yet there is no evidence that he ever committed any crime. We need to end this despicable chapter in our history – immediately. Hicks should be brought home and, if he has committed a crime, he can be tried here. If not, he should be set free.

If you agree, and if you can spare $25, sign the pledge.

I like this animated mashup of cartoons set to the Communist Manifesto:

(Via Boing Boing)

I’m in Sydney tonight – came up for the Making Links conference. The first day today has been quite good although from the program tomorrow looks better. The conference brings together people working in web or IT roles in community-based organisations, so there’s a lot of focus on ways of making the greatest possible use of limited resources. The highlight today for me was a presentation by Nick Moraitis from GetUp.org.au, a group I’ve got a fair bit of admiration for. It was great to see the infectious energy behind the website in human form.

It’s somewhat bittersweet being back in Sydney. It always is, but seems more so this time as it’s been six months since I was last here. King Street Newtown is as delicious as ever, and it’s easy to simultaneously enjoy the stranger-in-a-strange-land invisibility of the traveller with the familiarity of an old and intimate acquaintance.

This afternoon I stopped off at Better Read Than Dead (an essential pilgrimage site for me) and picked up a copy of Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. Having read the first few chapters tonight I’m finding it very stimulating, perhaps because of my current status as a traveller (of sorts). I bought the book because Brent and I will be travelling next year – first to London and then by train from London to Istanbul, via Paris, Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest. We’re cashing in our frequent flyer points and making as much of them as possible. I’m tremendously excited at this and, so the book purchase.

I guess I realise how much I am invigorated by travel; invigorated even when I’m in a crappy hotel on a work trip to a city as well-worn to me as this one. My eyes are open.