Yesterday, January 26, was Australia Day. (Who knew?) But better late than never, here is a hilarious performance of “Down Under” by the Russian Alexandrov Red Army Choir.
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This original version hasn’t got quite the same brio, but it is subtitled. Unfortunately, I still don’t understand most of what they’re saying.
Living in a land down under
Where women glow and men plunder
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover!
Call someone an Australian in today’s politically correct Britain and you can get arrested and fined for racial abuse.
Daily Mail:
A woman has been found guilty of racially abusing her New Zealand-born neighbour – by calling her an Australian.
Petra Mills called Chelsea O’Reilly a ‘stupid fat Australian’ during a drunken tirade outside her home.
The insult was witnessed by police officers who Mills herself had called after a domestic row with her husband. Czech-born Mills, 31, was arrested and charged with racially aggravated public disorder. She denied the charge but was found guilty at a trial this week.
Miss O’Reilly, 21, who has dual British and New Zealand nationality, told magistrates: ‘She called me a stupid fat Australian b****. Because of my accent there can be some confusion over my nationality.
‘She knew I was from New Zealand. She was trying to be offensive. I was really insulted.’
The incident happened in Macclesfield, Cheshire, on September 4 after Mills had been involved in a row with her husband, Michael. Iain Mutch, prosecuting, said Miss O’Reilly and Mills had been neighbours for 18 months…
Mills also admitted assaulting a police officer by kicking him. She was fined £110 for racially aggravated public disorder and £200 for assault, and ordered to pay both victims £50 compensation and £500 court costs.
2004 Penfolds Block 42 Cabernet Sauvignon in its “special ampoule”
For the serious highroller unaffected by the recession, the Australian winemaker Penfolds has an unusual special offering. CNBC:
The most expensive wine ever sold directly from a winery will go on sale this week, from the venerable Australian vintner Penfolds. The limited edition release of the 2004 Penfolds Block 42 Cabernet Sauvignon is priced at $168,000 a bottle.
The wine’s distinctive price comes from its rarity. The wine was made from the oldest producing cabernet sauvignon vines in the world, transplanted from France to Australia in the 1830s.
Later planted at the Kalimna Vineyard in the Barossa Valley, northeast of Adelaide, the vines today provide unequaled juice, but little of it. Only 12 bottles of the 2004 vintage will be sold.
To add further cachet, Penfolds commissioned an ampoule of scientific grade glass to hold it from three Australian artists: Nick Mount, who designed and hand-blew the glass; silversmith Hendrik Forster, who prepared the precious metal detailing; and furniture craftsman Andrew Bartlett, made the bespoke Jarrah cabinet.
“Wine and art are intrinsically linked,†says Matt Lane, Penfolds’s U.S. representative, making the ideal buyer, says Lane, is “a big time, serious wine collector, of course, but also the art aficionado who wants to collect a unique sculpture.â€
The other attribute of the ideal buyer — profoundly deep pockets — is indicated by the 12 bottles’ allocation for sale: three will go to Russia, London and Dubai, three to the rest of Asia, two to North America, and two to Australia. (One bottle will be donated to a charitable organization for auction, while the remaining one will be kept at Penfolds as a showpiece.)
This news agency story is relevant even to Americans, because the American left-wing establishment is very much in favor of adopting domestically progressive policies observed in other countries. So far, speech that “offends, insults, humiliates, or (supposedly) intimidates” is commonly outlawed on university campuses, but it is by no means beyond the ambitions of American progressives to try to enact such curbs on expression here.
A popular right-wing commentator was found guilty Wednesday of breaking Australian discrimination law by implying that fair-skinned Aborigines chose to identify as indigenous for profit and career advancement.
Federal Court Justice Mordy Bromberg ruled that fair-skinned Aborigines were likely to have been “offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the imputations” included in columnist Andrew Bolt‘s two articles published by the Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne in 2009.
Bromberg ruled out Bolt and his publisher’s defense under a clause of the Racial Discrimination Act that exempts “fair comment.” Bromberg said he will prohibit reproduction of the offending articles and will consider ordering the newspaper to publish a correction if it doesn’t print an apology.
Bolt, who writes opinion pieces for newspapers around Australia and hosts a nationally broadcast weekly public affairs television program, described the ruling as a defeat for freedom of speech.
“This is a terrible day for free speech in this country,” he told reporters outside court.
Mailbox in Bullio, Southern Highlands, Australia, in the form of Ned Kelly’s armor
After he was hanged in 1880, the body of famous Australian bushranger Ned Kelly was vivisected, his skull was used as a paperweight by police for years before being lost, and his bones were consigned to a unmarked grave along with those of 30-odd other executed criminals.
The legend of the plucky outlaw remains popular in Australia and archaeologists recently searched for Kelly’s bones and used DNA supplied by relatives to confirm that they found the right ones.
The Herald Sun (Australia) reported the catastrophe:
It was certainly an expensive drop – more than $1 million worth of shiraz wine has gone down the drain after it was dropped by a malfunctioning forklift.
The 462 cases of 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz – at $185 a bottle – fell more than 6m to the ground as it was being loaded for export from Adelaide to the US.
The drop was so forceful, the bottles punched through the top of the cartons. Winemaker Sparky Marquis said the accident had cost him a third of his annual production.
“We just couldn’t believe it,” Mr Marquis said.
“This wine is our pride and joy, so to see it accidentally destroyed, and not consumed, has left us all a bit numb.”
Pictured above is a saltwater crocodile named Brutus, missing his right front leg, who regularly performs for tourists on the Adelaide River, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Darwin.
Adelaide River Cruises specially advertises jumping crocodile cruises, and the crocs (compensated with free meals of buffalo meat) obligingly perform. Brutus is estimated to be 5.5 meters (18′) long.
The photo has made a sensation, and NT News ran it past a number of experts who basically agree that it has not been Photoshopped.
I want to see the bigger one that took off that front leg.
Robert Pickles, who is moving back to Britain, in the Telegraph, shares an Australian spider story.
One evening last year I thought I’d play a little trick on my better half, with a plastic replica of a Huntsman spider. It was about the size of a child’s hand, complete with fangs, hair and big scary eyes. While she was watching telly, I sneaked into the bedroom, placed it on her pillow and pulled the covers over the top. I ran a bath and was happily soaking away the day’s toils when I heard a high-pitched scream. A few seconds later, the bathroom door flew open.
“Robert, you’ve got to come and see this spider.”
“Spider, what spider?”
“It’s huge, you have to come and see.”
I feigned my interest. “Yeah I’ll be out in a bit.”
“No, you have to come now. It’s on the ceiling and it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”
“On the ceiling?” I grabbed my towel.
I had seen some big ones in the past, but this was the mother of them all. It was as big as an outspread hand. I stood mesmerised, in awe of the hairy beast. It looked quite capable of inflicting a good deal of pain before deftly chewing on fingers and limbs. Sometimes I would hear them in the shed, scuttling through the steel infrastructure like mice, which was a good indication of their weight and size. Other times they would hide behind the sun visor in the car and give me an unsuspecting fright. They have been known to drop onto driver’s laps and cause fatal accidents. By the look of this one, it had eaten quite a few mice itself. Its hairy body was a similar shape, size and colour. More worrying was the fact that, a) there had never been a Huntsman in the bedroom before, b) Ali had not yet seen the plastic one on her pillow, and c) maybe the real one had.
With smaller ones, I would catch and release them by plopping a glass or bowl over the top before sliding a piece of card underneath and throwing them out into the garden. This one needed a 12-bore to kill it and a Bobcat to take it away.
Ali explained that she had been lying on the bed reading a book. Harley was dozing between her legs. She noticed him looking upward with big white nervous eyes. When she looked up, she got the fright of her life. I’m just glad she noticed it before lights out.
When I showed her the plastic version on her pillow, she hit me. I had to agree that it wasn’t one of my better pranks, but it still perplexes me that as we had never seen a Huntsman in the bedroom before; had the real Huntsman seen the plastic spider and thought that he or she was in for a bit of hanky-panky? Ali thought I was talking nonsense, but I still think it was spooky and I’m convinced something weird happened that night.
Huntsmen spiders are representatives of the family Sparassoidea which has numerous individual species. They are very fast and do bite, but (unlike certain other Australian spiders) their bites are not lethal.
Australia’s former prime minister Paul Keating, as the Sydney Morning Herald explains, does not think much of Barack Obama’s choice of Treasury Secretary.
When Barack Obama announced his champion to rescue the world from economic ruin, it was the first time most Americans had ever heard the name Tim Geithner.
The initial impression was good. The stockmarket surged and the pundits swooned. “Exactly a decade ago, he was Uncle Sam’s golden-boy emissary sent into the stormy centre of what was then the world’s worst financial crisis [the Asian crisis],” reported The New York Post.
The paper gushed: “Just 36 at the time, he’d been raised in Asia and knew the culture so intimately he scored successes and won confidences that other diplomats couldn’t match. Geithner earned widespread plaudits for pulling together quarrelling Asian finance ministers into a $US200 billion rescue of their economies.”
“A fantastic choice,” said a Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi analyst, Chris Rupkey, as the Dow rose by nearly 6 per cent. Even one of Obama’s political rivals, the hard-bitten Republican senator Richard Shelby, agreed Geithner was “up to the challenge”.
If anyone in the US media had thought to ask a former Australian prime minister for his assessment, they would have heard a different view. And they would not have been so surprised at Geithner’s performance since.
In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating gave a starkly different account of Geithner’s record in handling the Asian crisis: “Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis.”
In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.
Geithner thought Asia’s problem was the same as the ones that had shattered Latin America in the 1980s and Mexico in 1994, a classic current account crisis. In this kind of crisis, the central cause is that the government has run impossibly big debts.
The solution? The IMF, the Washington-based emergency lender of last resort, will make loans to keep the country solvent, but on condition the government hacks back its spending. The cure addresses the ailment.
But the Asian crisis was completely different. The Asian governments that went to the IMF for emergency loans – Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia – all had sound public finances.
The problem was not government debt. It was great tsunamis of hot money in the private capital markets. When the wave rushed out, it left a credit drought behind.
But Geithner, through his influence on the IMF, imposed the same cure the IMF had imposed on Latin America and Mexico. It was the wrong cure. Indeed, it only aggravated the problem.
Keating continued: “Soeharto’s government delivered 21 years of 7 per cent compound growth. It takes a gigantic fool to mess that up. But the IMF messed it up. The end result was the biggest fall in GDP in the 20th century. That dubious distinction went to Indonesia. And, of course, Soeharto lost power.”
