From the front page of the website of the Australian satirical magazine Chaser who do the occasional forays into TV with CNNNN and “The Chaser Decides”.

There’s a lot more than just this quote there. 🙂

If any part of The Chaser causes disagreement between you and any other person, the editors recommend that disputes be resolved without recourse to violence. If a dispute concerning a Chaser article cannot be resolved without physical aggression, combatants are advised to fight only at locations that have valid and paid-up public liability insurance and/or in playgrounds administered by the Department of Education or other public body. Fights should be conducted in the presence of a qualified referee and with medical help readily available. No biting, scratching, blows below the belt or nipple cripples.

As I wrote previously during the recent election the Liberal Party of Australia phone-spammed households with a message from the PM.

They are now under investigation by the Australian Communications Authority for spamming silent (unlisted, ex-directory) telephone numbers which should be only available to the emergency services.

Here’s an interesting piece of history, there is precisely one ship left from the White Star fleet, the Nomadic which was the Titanics tender.

It is now rusting on the Seine in Paris, but still has its original reception room left (and no, that’s not me in the picture!).

On the 22nd September we saw SBS’s Dateline program which had a report on the documentary Outfoxed about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in America.

Intruiged by the reports of blatant bias and propoganda on behalf of the US Republican Party (its President is Roger Ailes, who was a media strategist for Nixon and also worked for Regan and Bush Snr) I ordered a copy of Outfoxed from Amazon, which turned up on Friday.

Donna and I watched it and it’s both illuminating and truely scarey. Fox News is ruled by memos from the top giving direction to its staff about what is and what isn’t news, there are the constant reinforcement about who to vote for with repeated mentions of “Only X days to Bush’s relection” and the indiscriminate mixing of reporting and comment.

It seems that the more you watch Fox News the less able you are to correctly answer questions on the Iraq war (questions of fact rather than opinion), according to a survey carried out by PIPA (available for reading as a PDF file or as a web page from Google’s cache).

So relying on Fox News makes you dumber..

Doesn’t make me feel too good about the upcoming US elections given that Fox News is apparently the most watched news channel. 🙁

Donna and I went to visit a friend of ours, Lawrie, in Melbourne last night as he’d kindly invited us over for dinner. A nice meal and some very nice wine led to a pleasant evening of listening to old Pink Floyd (Meddle), Bach and Youssou N’Dour, chatting and playing an ad-hoc version of Whist for three people.

It was pleasantly reminiscent of old times round at Alec Muffett’s place at Church Flats in Aberystwyth listening to old Floyd and drinking his Laphroaig.

Tonights program of ABC’s Foreign Correspondent had a moving report on the Music Maker Relief Foundation, a charitable organisation set up by Tim Duffy to help older unrecognised blues artists who are over 55 and earning less than US$18,000 a year, and to record, save and promote their music.

They even have complete track samples of some of the music from the 45 odd CD’s that you can buy online to support them.

Today is obviously a day for wierd news..

A Toronto man visited his sister, to be told that the rest of the family were at his funeral and she’d identified the body.

“Mr Squares said he suspected something was amiss when he spotted his obituary in the newspaper.”.