The Cattle All Have Brucellosis

Australia is not a dictatorship. So why is the government - and specifically it's Prime Minister - acting like one? No, they haven't taken over in a violent coup and hoisted their own flag. That's not the behaviour I'm talking about. I mean the obtuse policy choices that make the world (or a decent media) go What? or roll their eyes and say Oh those crazy Russians/Nth Koreans/Chinese. The kind of stuff Sacha Baron Cohen should've been lampooning in The Dictator had that movie been any good. I'm talking about: Knights and Dames, constantly being flanked by beautiful women or insisting female ministers be chaperoned, posing in gaudy military hardware, threatening violent confrontation with other heads of state, refusing all interviews except those with pro-government media and demanding all media to play for the home team, country wide simultaneous singing of the national anthem and near daily announcements of brain-fart policies that are immediately backed down on. Then there's the more nefarious stuff: Changing laws specifically for friends and family, the nationalistic Border Force, using the courts to tear down their enemies, "If you don't like the $7 tax we'll make it a $20 tax", dynamiting the country into the shape of his own head^, being pro-torture, not to mention gleefully locking people up for years without trial and giving themselves the right to summarily remove a person’s citizenship. This is in a single year. Please don't mistake this as a partisan attack. This is very personal. These, somehow elected, people ain't no good.

Then there's Labor who like burrowing owls huddle together in their pit until they're literally forced out by an LNP gaffe. Then it's Shorten in the media trying to beat the Libs on the low ground. And he's shit at it. Mad As Hell's Shorten's Zingers making that abundantly clear. This is the part where I'm supposed to say "it gets better". But much like that internet campaign, it's a lie. The whole herd is sick and should be fed into the grinder to make fertilizer.

 
(Ok. Ok. There are a few in the lower ranks of Labor and the Greens that are ok. And Mike Baird seems alright)

^Ok, that's from an episode of Duckman. Doesn't seem out-of-place in this list though.   

A Final Picture of Paul McCartney

When you're an insomniac with depression* late night is the worst time. When lying in bed under the glow of some infomercial - as that's all that's on and you don't deserve good TV anyway - it's hard not to let the darkness in. The thirtieth viewing Chef Tony's Miracle Blade cannot take your mind off your mind. So you think. And think. And you think about maybe not bothering with tomorrow. And you think that, yes, self-balancing accugrip handles are a kitchen revolution. To be left alone with your thoughts, in the dark, is one of the worst experiences you can have.

Then came channel Eleven and with it The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. A show that at its worst was a distraction and at its best was life-sustaining. I've written a bit about the comforting effect TV has had on this lonely guy from country Australia. Like this thing on Letterman. The difference between those shows is Ferguson's was made for me.

The Late Late Show seemed specifically designed for insomniacs with a weird, dark, off-kilter sense of humour like me. And it had a way of creeping up on you, even on terrible no good days, and pulling laughter from deep inside you. It would ambush you into feeling better.       

And it wasn't a talk show. It was something else. It was a thorough deconstruction of the talk format and terribly unserious about itself. It stands up to repeated viewings; the same can't be said for any of its peers.

It was something special. And now it's gone.

The final Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson will air @ 11:30pm tonight on Eleven 

*I promise I'll think of a new opening line in the new year      
            

            

Disabled Should Be Seen And Not Heard. And Also Not Seen.

You have a mental illness

You are pushed back into the workforce

You cannot get a job

You get no welfare assistance for six months

You can't afford meds

You have an "episode"

You ________.

This is the uncertain life Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews wants for those with "episodic" disabilities. That is disabilities whose symptoms are unpredictable or symptoms that wax and wane; like Bipolar, CFS, and schizophrenia (among many, many examples). The way Andrews' sees it if you're not in constant agony or totally mental 100% of the time you shouldn't qualify for the DSP. Only crippled 51 weeks a year? How dare you ask for government assistance, you fucking scumbag.

At the moment Andrews is focused on those with episodic mental illness, which just happens to be the group that society is most prejudiced against, the group the government can most easily attack without being seen to be beating up on crips. Mental illness is often seen to be sign of weakness. Depression for example is often derided as whinging or laziness. Mental illness is an invisible disability, episodic mental illness even more so. How can you be disabled if you don't look disabled? This is the government's thinking. And if you don't like it you can complain...
    

* * * *

A few months back, possibly to pay for the appointment of Tim Wilson to the board, George Brandis discontinued the position of Disability Discrimination Commissioner despite roughly 40% of all complaints handled by the commission involved disability. The move was widely criticized. After weeks of uncertainty Brandis this week announced Age discrimination commissioner Susan Ryan would take over the portfolio when the current position ended.

"I also expect that all commissioners, as part of their current responsibilities, will continue to address disability discrimination issues that arise within their own portfolios," he said.

The Coalition's love of one desk solutions doesn't extend to discrimination of the disabled it seems. Moving from a single commissioner to the entire board so no one knows exactly whose purview it falls under. Our one avenue of complaint is now a rat's nest of uncertainty. Slow clap all 'round, guys.

Everyone Knows About The DSP Goddam

Yesterday it was announced that some 30,000 DSP recipients would have their fitness to work reassessed. “The days of easy welfare are over” Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews said in a recent press conference.
When were those days? When were days when the DSP was easy to get? Eligibility requirements were rigorous when I applied for it many moons ago and have since been tightened under Howard and then again under Gillard. It is a difficult process. And it should be. But it’s also a humiliating one - to have to repeatedly demonstrate your inability. And now we’re being told we must submit to this humiliation once more because we may have been lying the first time around. And we must be reassessed by government doctors because our own may be lying criminals. All of this to combat growth which isn’t really happening and a budget crisis that doesn’t exist.
And worse it’s being sold as concern. It’s about supporting people into work they tell us. Because nothing says support like calling people greedy faux-crips and dumping them on NewStart to search for non-existent jobs. If it were about employment why wouldn’t the focus be on making sure employers are actually set up to employ the disabled? Of course it’s not about employment. It’s about money. It’s about taking away money from a group of people that are seen to be lazy (couch potatoes as one rather cunty newspaper would have it). A group that can’t fight back.
$766 (the maximum payment) a fortnight sounds like a luxurious amount of money especially compared to the dole. The reason for the difference between the payments is obvious to all but the most unthinking person: Living with a disability is expensive. It costs more money to have a disability than to not. The fact this even needs to be said is ridiculous. Treatment and equipment and medicine and doctors' visits all cost money. And it’s constant. A $7 co-payment will sure make that easier too btw. And who’s paying for this reassessment? Oh that’s us again good-o. Many, if not most, disabled Australians live on or below the poverty line and moving them onto the dole is not just kicking them when they’re down, it’s kicking them when they’re down and then calling them lazy for being kicked.
Yesterday I tweeted somewhat angrily that I’d refuse to submit to this reassessment but the truth is I will. We all will. The government has found in the disabled a group that will always comply no matter how offensive or humiliatingly we’re treated because we are terrified of the alternative. They have us over a barrel and they know it.
Disability Pension rorters should be stopped but scaring an already scared group is not the way to do it.

When The Levy Breaks

Over the weekend the government failed to rule out introducing a debt levy. Of course this means they’ve all but ruled it in. What is a debt levy anyway? Simply, it’s stupid.
We know tax revenue is pooled together to pay for services (health, education etc etc) and a levy is basically a tax for a specific service or purpose - to pay for Medicare or to help with reconstruction after the recent Queensland floods. Even if we don’t access the services ourselves we know someone, somewhere is. A debt Levy does neither. No service is being rendered and you don’t get something for nothing as Joe Hockey said last week. Paying down government debt should not be responsibility of the taxpayer.
We’re told the proposed levy would only affect high-income earners and I’m all for making the top end of town pay a fairer level of tax. But should they have to bail out - which is what this boils down to - the government’s budget crisis (particularly when said crisis is, at least in part, manufactured)? I don’t see people copping that on the chin.
If they really insist on ‘fixing’ the budget the Coalition should do what it was elected to do: cut spending. We’ve seen much of that. At least not in the media. We’ve had penny-pinching from war orphans which was later abandoned, a bid to reassess DSP recipients which will humiliate people whilst bringing in a whopping nothing to government coffers, a proposed sale of the one government asset that makes money and a retooled NBN that isn’t national, uses decrepit tech and isn’t really any cheaper. We don’t know what's happening with Gonski or health but expect savage cuts.
There are cuts that can be made before insisting people foot the bill. An overly generous and expensive PPL for one. Giving Rio Tinto $100m to build a mine in South America is another. And ALL the other subsidies the mining industry receives. Then there’s the planes, my god, the planes. $12 billion for Joint Strike Fighters and knowing our luck with military procurement the canopy won’t close or one of the cross-beams will go out-of-skew on the treddle or something rendering them shiny paperweights.
‘You gotta spend money to make money’ doesn’t fly (heh) when you have your hands in the pockets of the people.

A Monkey On A Rock

A few months after my older brothers had moved out I finally got to have the good bedroom. While the room itself was actually smaller, it was at the back of the house, away from the main part of the house. The new digs afforded relatively more privacy and, more importantly, it had an antenna socket meaning I could have a television. And for my birthday that year, my fifteenth, I asked for and got one.
It was a dinky little twelve-inch affair that sat high on my dresser and watched down on me as slept. At last, I could watch what I wanted, when I wanted. Mostly. The good bedroom shared a wall with my parents' bedroom so late night viewing needed to be covert lest I wake them. The TV’s volume control didn’t have numbers it had notches and when secretly watching TV late at night the difference between notches seemed like a million decibels. Three notches was audible enough to hear and not be yelled at. Unfortunately late night free-to-air TV was/is mostly a wasteland and in Australia, in the late 90s consisted of infomercials, SBS and The Late Show With David Letterman. He would eventually become one of my comedy heroes.
As a talk show The Late show is ok. Monologue in the front, guests in the back. Of course there were stand-outs - episodes with Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray or Martin Short - essentially an hour or so of light entertainment to fall asleep to. You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s all The Late Show is.
Where Letterman excels however is when he pushes outside the format. A perfect example being “Is This Anything” - a talent contest segment where performers would do their act flanked by a hula girl, and a woman using angle grinder on herself. After 30 seconds the curtain would come down and Dave and Paul (his long term offsider/band leader) would decide if what they just saw was in fact anything. It never was. It was this kind off-kilter pythonesque humour mixed into the aging talk show format (it was already well established when Carson came to it in the 60’s and had become stale by the time he left) that made the Letterman show special.
Unobvious fake guests, rambling surreal phone bits without punchlines, the frustrated neighbour that lives in an apartment next to the studio, Mike Singletary, Alan Kalter getting beaten up and Top Ten lists where the top entry is always the least funny all had a profound impact on my teenage sense of humour. Up til that point I had been bought up on the comedy of Britain - Python, Rowan Atkinson, and The Goodies. Dave, along with The Simpsons, was my first real gateway into the American comedy scene. Fifteen years later and both shows remain part of my routine, watching Homer at dinner time and seeing Dave before bedtime. And now that’s coming to an end.
Last Thursday Dave announced his retirement and while part of me knows it’s time another part wonders if I’ll ever be able to fall asleep without him.
Thanks Dave.

We Could Be So Good Together

If only they just spoke up.

If only they had just talked to someone.

If they just got help.

Just.

Whenever there is a mental health related death there's an explosion of opining and comment on seeking help. From the naive if well-meaning fall and we'll catch you columns to the half-hearted 'call lifeline' at the end of new stories. We tell people who may be struggling to get help. Maybe we helpfully mention a phone number or URL. But as much as we'd like to think so, telling someone to seek help is not help.

One of the things about depression is you think you deserve it. That you, horrible you, deserve every single atom of pain and sad and lonely you can fit under your ugly skin. And then some. Your brain and your soul and your bones all speak the same refrain: You are not worth the effort to help. This is where that stupid "broken leg" analogy falls flat on its face. A broken leg doesn’t leak into your brain and tell you "You deserve this. You deserve to have this shard of bone bursting through your leg-flesh and by the way hairy legs much, Mr Tumnus?". You don't tell yourself people won't believe your mangled leg story. Society doesn't tell you broken bones are a sign of weakness. That you should just think positively (at least, no non-quack will tell you that). There's no fear with a broken leg. Depression is the antithesis of that. It's a constant fear that if you snatch help from its plinth a giant boulder will chase you out of the cave. Asking for help - particularly in Australia and particularly for men - is fuckin' hard.

To put the responsibility of seeking help solely at the feet of those most likely not to is at best ignorant and at worst, well, fatal. Yes, a prerequisite of treatment is a want to get better but want occasionally needs a push. What's good about the RUOK campaign is it shifts focus from seeking help to seeking to give help. It goes some way to taking the pressure of those who for various reasons cannot speak up. A proactive approach is not without issues. The most prominent being how. If someone says they aren't ok, how do we respond? We damn well better come up with an answer. And it can't just be call here/browse here/make an appointment here. Maybe it's let's call here together. Let's browse here together. Let's do this together.

I'm not ok, I have depression

Note: This post mentions suicide and may be triggery for some.

In July I was diagnosed with depression.

It wasn't a surprise.

Truth is I've had it since I was fifteen. 9th grade. I started to cry on the bus on the way to school. Everyday. I would rummage through my school bag in order to hide my face. I would tell people I had a cold or hay fever if they questioned my red eyes. I didn't want to be around anymore. I took up smoking which, it must be said, was the lamest suicide attempt in history. When I got my driver’s license at 17 I would skip class to sleep in my car and I'd drink myself to nothingness on the weekends. Things didn't get better after high school. Eventually I had to sell my car, not because it was too expensive to run as I claimed, but because I was scared I'd hurt someone if I decided to plow into oncoming traffic. I kept shedding people to make my world smaller enough that I could just drop out of it.

Why did I live with this cunt of a thing for so long? Depression saps all your energy, your concentration, your concern for others and yourself. It took away everything until all I could do is lay in bed all day watching as many cooking shows as possible. I thought I was going to die. I hoped I would. Why bother seeking help if I'm gonna be dead soon? I thought. They say depression is prolonged sadness in the absence of reason. But I felt I had a reason (tl;dr Muscular Dystrophy). Surely I couldn't be depressed if I had a reason? Maybe I didn't deserve to have a disability, but I sure felt I deserve the sadness that went with it. And besides the physical stuff isn't going away whether I fixed the mental stuff or not. Damned if I do and dead if I don't. I needed to do something. I made an appointment two months ago and told my doctor and his response was the equivalent of "Well, duh", which actually made me feel a little better.

I'm sitting here on RUOK day, having just taken today's little pink pill, at the start of my journey (for the lack of a less X-factorish word) and for now I'd rather not die.

The Time Problem

The problem is time. Considering this blog's inertia you'd think maybe I have been suffering from a lack of time. Sadly, the opposite is true; there's too much of the damn stuff. In fact, the only time I'm in a hurry these days is when I'm trying to squirrel time away down the back of the couch or stuffing it into cupboards before guests arrive to give the appearance that I've been using it since the last visit.

Time stretches out before me in all directions like an infinite radial plain and the choice of direction is crippling: Should do this? Or that? Should I write a novel about this? Or one about that? Should it even be a novel? Short stories, then? A blog?

I make it to the first fork in the road - maybe camp there for the night - before heading home and re-rolling. And there's no penalty. Nothing is lost, only time.

This is made double by a recent and profound dislike in my own writing. I can hardly get through half a page before sighing bitterly, chucking it in for the day and mainlining episodes of Orphan Black.

Last week @AdviceToWriters tweeted a Howard Ogden quote "Hating your own writing is necessary but not sufficient". To me, it means hating your own stuff is a given and not a sufficient enough reason to quit. I need to remember that next time I'm picking fragments of my laptop off the floor.

The Blankets Were The Stairs

CAUTION: CONTAINS WANK.

Twitter is an easy target. A week doesn't go by without someone making a snarky comment about the social network. Whether it is:

- A random old person in the street

- A newspaper Op/Ed columnist (technically the same as above)

- Someone on Facebook (!)

- During the "Best of Social Media" segment on the late news (!!)

- A TV Child Psychologist on the televisual rat’s nest that is Today Tonight/ACA

- Shouted from an apartment as you walk a dog.

There is no dearth of uninformed opinion being expelled from the mouths and fingers of moronic Crum Bums who don't understand what Twitter is.

Twitter is a blanket. It is a vast amorphous patchwork quilt of thoughts and people and ideas and ideologies. All you have to do is stitch the right squares together and wrap yourself up in it to feel its warmth. Like to have an itch to scratch? Sew in some scratchy material - like the stuff Xmas jumpers from Grandma are made from - to rub against. Sure there will always be those who try to sew their odd-smelling damp rag of a patch into your blanky but that can be fixed with judicious use of the block button, which in this metaphor is, I dunno, one of those thread unpicker things? Block and replace with parody felt or squares with pretty but nonsensical horses on them.

And take your blanket with you - pretend you're Linus or Arthur Dent*, always have it on you. Pull it out when you're cold or bored or when in need of an argument (though not Abuse, that's a different room) or a distraction. Do it, it's fun.

Twitter, when used correctly is warm and makes you a better person - it's like The Fonz's jacket or, for a more topical reference it's like... Fonzy's jacket. (Did you ever see a Happy Days where Arthur didn't have the jacket? He's like a more evil version of Bob from Twin Peaks or for a more topical reference, Voldemort. Now, imagine if the villain in Harry Potter was Bob.)

But Twitter is also another country. Get directions. You don't heli-drop into the Hungarian highlands without some kind of guide (unless you're Wesley Snipes, but chances are you're not. If you are reading this, Wesley, I hope you have your blanket with you. It may even be a tax write-off, if you're into that kind of thing). It has its own customs and vernacular that may be difficult to grasp at first - which can make it seem cold. Thankfully the locals speak your language and are mostly nice and know how to sew -they will help if asked, they will tell you who to follow (#FF) and they will point out the damp rags.

Join me next week when I compare tumblr to a tumble dryer (get it?)

----

*: Yes, Dent had a towel not a blanket whatevs.

50 Funny Women Off The Top Of My Head

That place for grandmas and advertising, Facebook, is once again a-buzz with the Women Aren't Funny schtick - well, as a-buzz as it can be between the pay-to-win 'videogames' and iPad 'competitions'. This is quite obviously hogcock. Women are funny. This is not a debate. However, if you were to point this out even with a comment as innocuous as "What are you doing?" you’d be shouted down with cries of "White Knight is gonna White-Knight" and demands to name a funny woman.

Yeah well, here's fifty:

Lucille Ball
Katherine Parkinson
Olivia Colman
Carol Cleveland
Roseanne
Sarah Millican
Dawn French
Jennifer Saunders
Tina Fey
Julia Davis
Kitty Flanagan
Roz Hammond
Sue Perkins
Jo Brand
Betty White
Emma Thompson
Portia De Rossi
@Brocklesnitch
Judith Lucy
Lily Tomlin
Marieke Hardy
Katy Wix
Miranda Hart
Deanne Smith
Andrea Anders
Judy Greer
Connie Booth
Nina Conti
Nora Ephron
Cal Wilson
Tress MacNeille
Kat Stewart
Julia Zemiro
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Maria Bamford
Goldie Hawn
Shelley Long
Peri Gilpin
Megan Amram
Amii MacDonald
Jane Turner
Gina Riley
Lisa Kudrow
Shappi Khorsandi
Meera Syal
Jennifer Crittenden
Allison Janney
Hannah Gadsby
Kristen Schaal
Tamsin Greig
Helen Fielding
Mindy Kaling

Again, this is just off the top of my head. There are of course hundreds of other women who are professionally funny and to suggest otherwise is either incredibly disingenuous or unreasonably ignorant (there was a time when folks were rightfully ashamed to broadcast their ignorance. Sadly, that's gone the way of the dodo (or Google reader)). THERE ARE HUNDREDS of them. From all generations and in all genres. FFS some are the best in their field regardless of gender (Ball, MacNeille).

There are two kinds of men (and it is men) that think women are not funny: Those that opine that men are funnier than women then use this 'evidence' to extrapolate further to imply women aren't funny at all. Christopher Hitchens falls into this category. The other category is apes men who don't like women. The first can be corrected - I mean that in a cruel Victorian posture teacher kind of way, not a Nazi Germany way. The second group will eventually discover fire and die out from smoke inhalation.

In this time of imdb, Wikipedia and YouTube there is no excuse to be ignorant of funny women. Here’s fifty to get you started.





 

Children Die In Hot Cars. So Do Sandwiches.

Picnics don't exist. Now, before you go all jazz hands and I wake up one morning with a shredded tartan throw in my bed what I mean is they don't exist in the sort of idyllic Norman Rockwell, Sense & Sensibility way. For one, there are insects, ants and bees mostly. And wasps. Don't think there won't be wasps. Secondly, something they neglect to mention in their vivid depictions of breezy luncheons is fields, or any expansive grassed area, are nearly always muddy - moisture being prerequisite for grass. A blanket in a field is not entirely dissimilar from the skin that forms on the top of a Latte or that crust on the top of the sewage trap on a dairy farm (for two universal analogies). Plus there's a high probability of an arctic wind - the kind that gets deep into the bones. In fact, for regular, down-home country people the difference between picnicking and being a tramp is blankets. And bindles. And I'd rather give both to an actual homeless person than participate in one of these alfresco shams.

I have no doubt that in Austen's time picnics were probably quite nice. Not having to prepare and transport food yourself would make for quite the leisurely afternoon of flattering young ladies with tales of derring-do or, if you're an old woman, planning your daughter-based pyramid scheme. But in her day people had grounds and people had people to tend those grounds - "grounds people" I believe they're called - who could search out a few square feet of unsodden terrain for brunching on. It's funny that those who had grounds had no jobs and people that didn't were actively employed. Hahaha.

Maybe my experience is not everybody's experience. Maybe my antipathy towards outdoor lunching stems from teenage trauma - if acute boredom can be deemed traumatic.

I was seventeen when I attended my first and only non-compulsory picnic. Someone had the idea for the picnic - probably me as I had just read Washington Square and imagined myself as one of its characters (possibly Catherine)

We decided to be classy. This meant beer in bottles rather than the canned variety. And with seventeen-year-olds being famous for their sommelier abilities; there was wine. Two bottles of pink fizz and a cask of the fruitiest of Lexias - which having travelled in the back sill of the car was as tongue-blistering as it was tannin-heavy. Being the designated driver, which I must say was news to me at time, of course meant basically no drinking (one already hot beer nursed for hours somehow makes you more sober). And when you're not drinking your sloshed friends can be incredibly boring.

The highlight of the day was when my good friend John*, cigarette in one hand chicken wing in the other jokingly calling another picnicker a "cock" over his shoulder as he relieved himself, only to have said cock shove him forward so he got piss all down himself. He spent the remainder to the afternoon pointing his crotch in the direction of the sun and demanding new pants.

The Observer Effect, in science, is the theory that you can't measure the outcome of an experiment without changing the outcome. Maybe that's the same with picnics: planning a picnic spoils the picnic.   

Oh and as we were packing up Sally* got stung by a wasp. I guess that's the real moral of the story: DON'T THINK THERE WON'T BE WASPS.


*: Names changed to protect the urine-encrusted and throbbing