">My Big World Of Crap

It is often said that most people who fall victim to snakes get bitten while attempting to kill them. Here’s another case where the snake beat someone trying to hunt it.

A woman was shot dead by her husband in Queensland this week while trying to flush out a brown snake that was hiding in their garage. Leanne Sleba and her husband Geoff had spotted the two-metre Eastern brown snake earlier in the night, but failed to find it. Worried about their children’s safety because they frequented the fridge in the garage, the couple returned later with a shotgun.

After a thorough search, they couldn’t find the snake, and were about to give up, when, according to a family member:

“Leanne started to walk away and she was about three or four metres from him and Geoff heard hissing and he looked down to see the snake on his foot.

“He’s either jumped, slipped….. and his finger hit the trigger and the gun went off.

“It hit Leanne,”

She died at the scene.

Toowoomba District Police Inspector Brett Schafferius said police deemed that the firearm accidentally discharged. Scientific investigations were undertaken and a report was being prepared for the coroner.

Call me suspicious, but how often do things like this eventually turn out to be much more than initially meets the eye?

I heard Robert Mugabe on CNN tonight, going on about the British, accusing them of trying to steal his country, or in his own words:

“down with the British, down with the thieves who want to steal our country”.

My immediate reaction to this is why would anyone bother to steal Zimbabwe ….its such a total shithole of a country and would be lucky to be worth about $1 to anyone stupid enough to want to buy it.

I’m off tomorrow morning for a(n almost) 2 week trip to here:

then here:

and finally here:

Its for work, but I will get a little sightseeing in each place. I’ll be fairly scarce on my blog for the next couple of weeks, with work, sightseeing, eating and drinking.

Loved this song 21 years ago, and its got a great video, which has kindly been uploaded to Youtube. Do Re Mi were an excellent band, featuring the always delightful Deborah Conway.

Haven’t done this for a while now, in fact since I moved over from Blogger to Wordpress. Today marked the 140,000th visit to my blog since I started it 2 and a half years ago.

Now for a look at some of the searches that brought people here:

• vagina is very popular - in fact the top search term by wide margin
• Hermione Granger nude - still features highly. There is clearly much demand for her …”hermione nude”, “hermione granger nude”, “nude hermione”, “hermione granger pussy” and many mispelt variations of these
• tits are also popular- both generically and specific to nominated individuals. Some of the more popular searches were for “tits”, “bit tits”, “bare tits”, “tits out”, “big tits”, “naked tits” …. you get the idea.
• I still seem to be a magnet for the pedophiles - “pedo sex”, “10 year old sex”, “pedo”, ” 8 year old sex”, “girl masturbating during school” …. fucking sickos, for all you know I could be a policeman out to sting you.
• Ashley Dupree - the prostitute who former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer couldn’t resist
• Gemma Anscomb - party animal!
• Sydney Swans - finally something not related to sex, girls or both!
• “old sex” - to balance out the pedo stuff I guess?
• “sicko sex” - now this is a very open ended search, and rather specific to an individual … after all, just because something floats your boat doesn’t mean it does for me or anyone else
• “brother sister porn” - for the Tasmanian audience I suppose?
• now for some truly weird stuff - “buy rubber fist”, “vagina bilder”, “safari suit”, “horse got things in its vagania”, “geril’s pussy” (not sure if this is someone interested in girls or perhaps gerbils?)

All I can say is that there are a lot of people looking for some weird shit on the internet.

Charlton Heston died yesterday. I wish no disrespect to him or his family but he was an advocate for a cause I find deeply offensive. So, may the National Rifle Association die with him, and with it the indecently powerful gun lobby in America and the gun culture there.

Well maybe not quite, but how about machetes and baseball bats at Merrylands High School.

Five teenage boys, armed with baseball bats and machetes, paid a visit to the school yesterday morning during assembly, and went on a rampage that left a teacher and two students in hospital and 16 others injured plus thousands of dollars worth of damage. The intruders entered two of the school buildings, running through corridors and smashing as many windows as they could. Broken glass showered students huddled in the classrooms, leaving some with cuts and abrasions. Police arrived at the school within minutes and confronted the boys, who did not resist arrest.

Students who witnessed the invasion said:

“They said they were looking for some kid, and teachers made an announcement and rushed us into classrooms and locked us in,”

“I saw a lot of punching and kicking and bashing,”

Ambulance NSW said a total of 18 students had required treatment for “minor injuries, some lacerations, some bruising”.

One student said the gang was made up of students from neighbouring Granville Boys High School who were looking for a boy who was not at school yesterday. He did not know why they wanted the boy. Former students from the school claimed there had been tensions between the school’s Pacific Islander students and other student groups for many years. Police said the boys had come to the school seeking retribution for a perceived slight.

The gang comprised two 14-year-old boys from Carramar and Auburn, two 15-year-old boys from Merrylands and Seven Hills and a 16-year-old boy from Merrylands. Each has been charged with

• One count of destroying or damaging property worth more than $15,000.
• One count of affray.
• One count of assaulting a school staff member occasioning actual bodily harm.
• Two counts of assaulting a school staff member while attending school.
• Seven counts of assaulting school students occasioning actual bodily harm.
• Seven counts of assaulting school students while attending school.
• One count of participating in a criminal group.

One of the 15-year-olds arrested was on bail over charges relating to two armed robberies last Wednesday.

The questions I’d ask about this include:

• what sort of people go armed with baseball bats and machetes to settle a petty schoolboy grudge?
• why do people get bailed for armed robberies? I mean they are a fairly significant level of thug and public menace if they’re doing that, so why let them out on bail …. no doubt the kid has a criminal record as long as his arm
• what are they, Americans or something? I mean whats with baseball bats …. the Australian thing would be cricket bats (which I imagine would hurt more too, due to having corners unlike a baseball bat which is round).

I reckon these boys should get some serious punishment over this, like 5 years jail or more. There have been more than one of these types of incidents - including one here in Canberra this year. Harsh punishment is needed to serve as an example that settling schoolyard squabbles with extraordinary and indiscriminate violence is completely unacceptable. No doubt however, when they get to court they’ll bring up how their upbringing was tough and that their behaviour flows from that and is an inevitable consequence beyond their control … and end up getting a 6 months good behaviour bond or something like that. (These arguments about people committing crimes due to their childhood or family situation should carry no weight in court …. they are just bullshit - everyone, no matter how difficult things have been for them, has choices about being a decent citizen or not, and if they make the choice to commit crimes they deserve to suffer severe consequences - its 100% their own responsibility.)

I suppose at least we should be grateful that this is not the USA with its lax gun laws. Rather than baseball bats and machetes there’s a fair chance someone would have used a gun to settle their scores …. but obviously the weekly school shootings there are acceptable to the people - if not surely they’d bring their gun laws into step with the rest of the western world.

I was supposed to be flying to Sydney in the morning, nothing unusual, do it regularly.

Got a phone call Thursday. Change of plans. Can I change it to Thursday instead of Monday? Sure, no problems. Suits me better in fact.

So Friday morning, I go looking for the booking number so I can get onto the travel agent and change my flights. Slight problem ….I hadn’t actually booked. I’d only thought about it a couple of weeks back, and saved the trip in draft in our travel reservations tool.

I’m so glad my plans got changed. Otherwise I most likely would have shown up at Canberra airport at 7 am this morning …. without a ticket.

I am just so organised at the moment. Not to mention dumb, dumb, dumb!

Try this for the champion of low acts that I’ve heard of in recent times.

Raouf Philopos was staying overnight at Westmead Childrens’ Hospital in Sydney, having been given permission by hospital staff to sit in a chair for the night to be with his 6 year old son, who was recovering from a severe asthma attack. In the bed next to his son was a teenage girl.

So what did good old Raouf do? According to the evidence in court, he approached her and started massaging her shoulders and ran his hands to her lower back, waist and thighs. He then indecently assaulted and raped her. The girl was in hospital suffering depression and severe social phobia. Because of her illness she did not raise the alarm immediately, but later that day told her psychiatrist.

When interviewed by police, Philopos denied touching the girl, and said he spent the whole time looking after his sick son. But at his trial he gave different versions and accused the victim of acting in a “very seductive way towards him” (the “she begged me for it” defence). Philopos’ DNA was found on the victim’s breast and semen samples found he could not be excluded as the source of the partial DNA profile. He was charged with six counts of indecent assault and rape. He was convicted and sentenced to a maximum 12 years’ jail for the offence.

He appealed on the grounds he was suffering a psychiatric condition at the time of the attack and was not fit to stand trial. Now someone tell me, what is this psychiatric condition that tells you its ok to start fondling and then rape a young girl lying in a hospital bed, when you’re supposed to be looking out for your young, sick son?

Last week when his appeal was rejected in the Supreme Court. Oh, and his wife has filed for divorce.

12 years doesn’t seem enough for this type of scum!

Seems that Swimming Australia has told members of the Australian swimming team for the Beijing Olympics to tone down some of their Facebook pages.

Swimming Australia media director Ian Hanson confirmed the organisation had taken the step in consultation with the Beijing-bound Dolphins team management.

“It’s something we had counselled them on in the past two years to be careful of,” he said.

“Some of the photos were somewhat distasteful and we thought it was best that they took a bit more care.”

Basically it seems they want us to see the likes of Stephanie Rice like this.

and not this:

A year long study that concluded last September has reported that more than 50 per cent of patients in NSW hospitals are malnourished.

Two thirds of those patients either presented to hospital in a malnourished state or worsened while they were in hospital. Two dieticians working in the NSW health system told an inquiry into the hospital system they had no input into what foods were served to patients and no dieticians were involved at the Department Of Health, which developed hospital menus … no doubt overseen by accountants.

According to Rhonda Matthews, leader of the study:

“Malnourished patients are also more subject to infection, dehydration, diarrhoea, depression and their wounds take longer to heal.

“We’ve found that the patients who have some degree of malnutrition in our hospitals were staying in hospital twice as long as those who were not malnourished.”

Joanne Prendergast said food, linen and other non-medical services were not incorporated into the overall patient care from a medical perspective, and she recommended more flexibility for individual patients’ dietary needs. She said:

“If they’re getting the food (packaged) presented in that way and they couldn’t access it they didn’t eat it,”

“They’re starving if we don’t support their nutritional needs.”

I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone arguing that the food is shit. In my experience it certainly is - you really have to be starving to want to eat it (not to mention the weird meal times, which are undoubtedly designed around staff rosters rather than patient needs), and inevitably only about 1/3 of the food served up is even vaguely worth eating. My last hospital experience goes back 8 years, but my son was there last year and hardly touched any of his food.

Next startling revelation - airline food is shit, too!

Problogger Darren Rowse scored an article in the the Australian newspaper yesterday. Makes for interesting reading. In particular it sets out how Darren has made over $700,000 from advertising on his sites since 2003, and gives a bit of a history of his business as well as an outline of how Google Adsense and affiliate advertising work.

Some interesting points from the article I thought included:

• Each day 15,000 to 17,000 people visit Problogger.
• an advertiser will pay from $10 to $100 per thousand people. The average cost to reach 1000 people across all media in Australia is about $20.

and the tips about building traffic (presumably Darren’s):

• Traffic builds over time, which is why early blog adopters usually have more than new ones.
• Search optimisation helps build traffic, from the name of a blog to the words used in posts and tags.
• If you build a community and trust with your audience, you can make a lot of money from affiliate sales.
• There is less clutter of websites in Australia than in the US and potential to build internet properties with the .au domain.
• Give visitors the option to save posts to social bookmarking sites. They can multiply traffic.

Thanks to Meg for the tip on this article, via Aussie Bloggers.

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