One can't live on politics alone...

...fashion counts too:

Source: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

Stupid rich people - Gerry Harvey

Personally, I reckon the whole GST on internet purchases thing was the invention of Solomon Lew.  I'f I'm right, Gerry Harvey is even more stupid than it seems:

 

Idiot! and as for the company who's providing him with brand positioning advice ..............

Yet another Townsville Blog

Following The Magpie's move to the blogosphere, Townsville now has another new blog on the scene.

Photoblogging $30 million at work in Townsville is an intermittent blog of pics taken of our dinosaur racing racing track built at taxpayers expense in Ried 'Park' on the other side of the Creek.

Posts will be completely adhoc and dependant on my going down Boundary St. and thinking to take a pic when I do.

Please feel free to submit your own pics - just email them to  islander505@gmail.com

Of Malls and Convention Centres

I finally had a wander down the 'finished' section of the Townsville Mall (or Flinders Street as it will soon be instantly recognised as around the globe).

Seeing no one is game to publicly bucket Council's latest little adventure in urban design (remember Flinders St East), let me be the first:

• It's gonna be a bloody wet place to go shopping in the wet season
• It's gonna be a bloody hot place to eat your lunch when it's not raining

On the plus side, some of Townsville's ugliest buildings are now fully exposed for the world's architecture tourists (and American boat people) to truly 'enjoy'.

More to the point, it seems that Council and the developer class about town have worked out that the renovation ain't going to work, ain't gonna make the Mall one bit more competitive as a shopping destination and ain't gonna be the $57 million incentive to potential investors in Lancini's Flinders Plaza development that it was designed to provide.

The building 'campaign' for Townsville's much mooted Convention Centre to be located within the CBD (read Lancini's Flinders Plaza ghetto)  is a great study in how these guys play the game (with the help of The Bulletin of course):

• You simply start by someone with profile raising the suggestion - as CBD Taskforce chairman Craig Stack no doubt did in a call to Tony Raggatt who pushes the idea into play.  The same day the Bully's anonymous Editor does a support piece in his editorial - not too strident, gently, gently, place it second.
• The next day you run a page-3 story (complete with front page header) in which, according to Raggatt, "the idea has been supported by Townsville Mayor Les Tyrell and CBD Taskforce chairman Craig Stack" (the previous day he had reported Stack and Tyrell as saying that the idea should be considered). 
• While we're about it, let's introduce Lancini into play - carefully though, you wouldn't like to look too eager at the prospect of a $140 million key-stone tenant to kick your stalled development along.
• And let's add a bit a bit of weight to the proposition by quoting an economist - and none other than local developer Carey Ramm
• And for good measure, why not give Raggatt a 'Business Desk' opinion piece on the same day when he can invoke the ghosts of his father to argue that Lancini should have the subsidy Convention Centre.

In one sense, of course, they are all right - the only thing that will make the Mall work is more people!  However, no one is going to open a shop in the Mall on the promise of maybe lots of people attending a 2 or 3- day conference once a month for maybe nine months of the year.

And of course adding a few carparks (even at the expense of the hundreds that come to the precinct every day by bus - how dumb is that) is not going to make the CBD any more attractive or convenient or, therefore, competitive against Stocklands, The Willows etc

I'm afraid that population density in the CBD (both residential and office) is the only thing that will save The Mall and Council had their chance when they considered a proposal for the development of an Arts Centre (that could have also accommodated conventions) and office/residential complex on what is currently the carpark between Council and the Law Courts.  Instead, they chose to use the available funds to build the tack-on to the Civic Theatre which (coincidentally, of course) gave Les and the big boys a perfectly oriented balcony from which they can gaze down on Pitt Straight during the annual Ried "Park" dinosaur race.  Perhaps Raggatt should chase down that story.

A convention centre to save Flinders Street is a dumb idea - just like putting a road down the middle will prove to be.  But now that they've started the play, I'm afraid that we're all gonna have to watch it unfold over the quite holiday period when no-one is paying any attention to politics. After all, it might just lead to an extra $140 million subsidy support to the failed Flinders Plaza ghetto -on top of what is fairly obviously the failed $57 million subsidy Mall 'upgrade'.

Oh, did I remember to mention that Lancini is a gold advertiser with the Bully and probably the occasional supplier of free drinks to Tony Raggatt?

Kids doing dumb things

This reminded me of a couple of stories from when I was a youth worker many years ago in the then outer southern suburbs of Adelaide.

The first was when a group of local kids got stoned one night and decided to break into the local supermarket to score some free fags.  They successfully got in through the roof but gave themselves away when, stoned and giggling as they fell over each other in the dark, they turned the lights on.  The supermarket was on a rise, in the middle of a car park and right on the main street into town and just up from the cop shop!!

The second was a car-full who went to the drive-in one night (remember them?) after dropping some Mandrax (remember them).  They of course all proceeded to fall asleep, including the driver who pushed the car out of gear setting in rolling down into the car in front!  They were all still asleep with in the coppers arrived!

Friday funny

Have a great weekend

Would you donate $5 to help build a statue of Julian Assange on Magnetic Island?

It had to happen - following the Magnetic Times article and our post in response, there is now the facebook poll!:

Would you donate $5 to help build a statue of Julian Assange on Magnetic Island?

John Howard's re-re-re-launch of Lazarus Rising , and THAT Mango

Unfortunately, I couldn't find online the pic that accompanying The Bully's regurgitation of the Book Company's PR Release. It took me a long while to realist that it's not a potato he's menacing, but rather a Mango....

an  Anti Skinny Shoe-Hurler Operational Logistics Enabling   

Military Attack Neutralising Gooks Ordinance

Today's big news - a big iTunes PR campaign

So the Beatles back catalouge is to be released in iTunes?

But do you really need it?

And if you really, really need to buy - would you do so from iTunes??

$35.99 from iTunes or $28.99 from JB Hi-Fi online (and it's an actual CD with liner notes and pictures and stuff

Hat tip: Groupthink

The invisible man-of-steel

I just love the reports that man-of-steel John Howard (never to be confused with the pig-of-steel - a true Oz icon) gets mentioned just three times in Bush's 500-page attempt at writing his own history.

PS: It would almost be worth going to the Townsville re-re-re-launch of the old fella's soon to be remaindered book just to count how many mentions he makes of his old friend George - I guarantee it's a lot, lot more than three!
Via Your Democracy

Climate change denialists are all stoners

I noted in The Tally Room's sumnmary of the US mid-term election outcomes, that the Calforniam results incuded defeat of Proposition 19, which would have legalised marijuana (56% opposed), and Proposition 23, which would have suspended climate change legislation (58% voting No).

Could this mean that,in California, most stoners are also climate change denialists???

Horse wins the Melbourne Cup

First posted in An Onymous Lefty in 2005 and again today

In exciting news today, a horse won the Melbourne Cup horse race. This horse travelled around the track at Flemington slightly faster than the other horses.

Around the nation, some people won money because they bet on the winning horse. Other people lost money, because they bet on a horse that didn't win.

Sports reporters broke out the special occasion hyperbole, reminding their viewers and listeners that if one of the horses happened to win, it would be the most tremendously exciting and fantastic thing that had ever happened in their lives, and that they would be telling future generations about the glorious win of a specific horse in the 2005 version of an annual race, for all eternity. Because it would be that astonishing.
"Dad, dad," children of the future would say, "what happened in the 2005 Melbourne Cup horse race?"

And fathers would reply, "Children, children, don't you remember what happened? I tell you this exciting story every night!"
And the children would cry, "We know dad, but please tell it again because we love it so."
And fathers would tell the story. It was 3pm on 1st November 2005, and there were about twenty horses lined up at the start of a racetrack in Flemington, Melbourne. They ran around the track. One horse won by taking less time to do this than the other horses. One horse came second, one came third and so on. And there was much rejoicing/weeping, depending on which horse the various people had backed. And this went on for a few days until everyone remembered that for the rest of the year they don't give a shit about horse racing.
It was truly extraordinary.

And this amazing story gets replayed every year!!
 

How are your figs hangin' sinner?

It's true! Look it up...

Of yesterday's men and selling books

From Alan Moir:

There is no such thing as a Vegan

Via Gizmodo

Friday funny

An attack add of the likes we ain't seen in Australia - yet!


via Truthdig

For no reason

From xkcd.com via politicalowl

Stop Press: The Borg cracks a funny

From a Departmental briefing summary of the morning’s Parliamentary Sitting, Thursday, 16 September 2010:

"Deputy Leader of the Opposition Lawrence Springborg to the Deputy Premier and Minister for Health: referring to a briefing note lost which was asking the Minister to approve a new departmental matrix so the Minister would stop losing briefing notes and correspondence, can he explain how he lost the very briefing note that would stop him losing his briefing notes."

Source: You know who you are!

Note:  From Wikipedia:

"... attempts to resist the Borg ... also demonstrated that it is possible to survive assimilation, and that drones can escape the collective and become individuals, or exist collectively without forced assimilation of others. They are notable for being a main antagonist race ..."

The End - We have a Government!

nuff said...

Leunig at his best

Election 2010 in three easy graphics

Cross-posted in full from Paul Coglan at The Punch 'cause it's so good:

Eat your heart out, Antony Green. These infographic presentations explain the results of the 2010 election. Let’s start with the ratio of eggs to faces.

Next is a Venn diagram roughly illustrating the voting blocs in the new House of Representatives

The final graphic shows how the campaign has highlighted the disparity between seats held and power wielded.