Bad bad bushfires in South Australia – it looks like 9, possibly 10 dead and maybe 14 missing according to the ABC, making it possibly the most lethal bushfire in Australia since the "Ash Wednesday" fires in 1983 when 75 people died, 47 in Victoria.

There are more updates at Google News.

The Australian Governments official Tunsami Assistance website has been launched. Includes hotline numbers, lists of appeals from charities, etc.

Australia has it’s very own “abominable snowman” legends of a creature called the Yowie, predating European colonisation. One guy, Timothy Bull, the National Museum of Australia’s resident cryptonaturalist,has taken it upon himself to investigate and has even written a book on the matter.

However, Cadbury Schweppes objected to him trying to trademark “Tim the Yowie Man” as Yowie is a brand of chocolate, and so opposed it forcing him to fight it through the legal system. Apparently they were concerned that children could confuse him with a chocolate!

In a good show of common sense the tribunal stated that:

“children are more sophisticated consumers than the opponent [Cadbury Schweppes] gives them credit for.”

Shame that Cadbury-Schweppes & their lawyers couldn’t find some too.. 🙂

The rise and rise of the premiums for public liability insurance has been going on for a long time now (that article was written in 2002) and now it’s getting even further out of hand.

The Tasmanian town of Maydena has had to close all recreational facilities because of a doubling in premiums for public liability insurance.

So no town hall, swimming pool, playground, garden centre and tennis courts..

For those outside of Australia it’s probably hard to grasp that pretty much the entire state of Victoria stops on the first Tuesday of each November for a horse race!

The Melbourne Cup has been running for an unbroken spell of 143 years since 1861, which is pretty good going considering the first horses weren’t introduced to Australia until 1788 by the First Fleet.

We didn’t watch the race, it was wet and windy so we were working on rearranging the Nobody Nowhere site.

There is an ABC report on the race if you’re interested..

Came across an interesting report on the ABC News website saying that Platypus has 5 chromosomes determining gender as opposed to virtually the rest of the animal kingdom which makes do with 1. There are further articles on this at the ABC Science News website and at New Scientist.

There was this interesting quote in the New Scientist article:

Another intriguing discovery from the study is that one end of the platypuses’ chromosome chain shares similarities with mammalian sex chromosomes, while the other end shares characteristics with the sex chromosomes of birds.

Robin Williams was right.. 🙂

So the Australian public has handed the Liberal party another 3 years in office, swinging firmly to the right. 🙁

They’ve voted against the environment and for postponing the inevitable and continuing to log the old growth forests in Tasmania for wood chips and paper, rather than investing in other industries and diversifying. All they’ve succeeded in doing is swapping stopping logging because of new national parks for stopping logging when they eventually run out of trees.

They’ve voted against integrity in political life, preferring to stick to the “I’m all right Jack” mentality of the conservative side of town.

The scariest thing of all is that the new far-right “Christian” Family First party that has had candidates and volunteers espousing homophobic views such as lesbians should be burnt to death and religious hatred and fear seems likely to gain a seat in the Senate on the back of Liberal preferences, thanks to John Howard saying he’d rather give preferences to them than the Greens!

But this is democracy, and to those who voted for the government all I can say is that I hope you’ll be happy with the country, and the world, you’ve voted for.

– Angry & Saddened of Melbourne

Well the election here has sunk to new lows, the Liberal party has called in the telemarketers to phone us up in our own homes to preach to us so that we may be converted to their way. Spamming people by email wasn’t enough for them..

The ABC News report gives the background for those who’ve not heard it. The Sydney Morning Herald has a poll gauging peoples responses, whilst I type this there have been 9051 votes, 90% of which voted for the ” I hate unsolicited marketing calls” option. 🙂

Reportedly folks with Caller-ID enabled are seeing these calls labelled as originating overseas, be good if anyone was able to confirm this though!

The ABC is reporting that the Liberal Party issued ‘misleading’ how to vote cards and the Australian Electoral Commission has ordered them to be removed and withdrawn.

Reports say the cards were apparently printed on green paper, without a Liberal Party logo. The greens have issued a statement giving their side of the story.