">My Big World Of Crap

Some interesting examples that really make me wonder about the thought processes of some people.

Example #1

The editors at Chinese magazine New Travel Weekly decided to do a nice tasteful photographic shoot, with underwear models posing among the ruins from the earthquake in Sichuan. They pose in front of and draped across fallen beams in ruined buildings, singly and together. Some appear to be wearing fake bloody bandages. Lovely! Tasteful? Respectful of the earthquake victims and survivors?

Chinese officials don’t stuff around in these cases. The magazine has been temporarily closed down and its managing editor, editor and deputy editor sacked.

The propaganda department in Chongqing, where the lifestyle magazine is based, issued a statement condemning the publication’s editors for “severely violating social morality, and causing extremely negative social effects”.

It said the magazine itself would be subject to “rectification”, although the editors in charge have gone for good. Wonder if the “rectification” involves rapid application of lead to the back of some former employees’ heads?

Example #2

An exhibition of photographic art by Bill Henson, due to open in Sydney last night, was cancelled after police visited the Paddington gallery to investigate child pornography claims. The future of the exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery, which featured images of a girl and a boy, aged 12 and 13 - some of which also appear on the gallery’s website - is now in doubt.

Henson said last night he was determined the exhibition should go ahead. One artist who attended the exhibition opening, Eugenia Raskopoulos, said the cancellation was “censorship of the worst kind”.

“I cannot believe that they have cancelled this opening which features pictures that are honest and beautiful and in no way pornographic,” she said.

Maybe, but to contemplate exhibiting such pictures publicly demonstrates a serious absence of sensibilities about what should be acceptable in terms of the sexualisation of children. Beautiful the images may be, but they are portraying children in sexual terms, and that is wrong. Repeat after me …. children are children, and they are NOT sex objects.

Example #3

This one was around a couple of weeks ago and I thought about posting something then, but was too busy. Another “what the hell” moment from the modelling/fashion industry. Russh Australia, a lifestyle and fashion magazine, hired Zippora Seven, a 16 year old model from New Zealand, to do a provocative 18-page editorial fashion spread alongside 16-year-old male model Levi Clarke. Shot in March, one of the images depicts the pair sharing a bubble bath nude with Seven topless and Clarke’s eyes closed as if he is passed out. In the foreground are four bottles of champagne.

Again, maybe the photos are pretty, but I question the judgement behind using such young models to pose in such sexually suggestive scenes. (Mind you, I’m sure that if the magazine hadn’t been able to use 16 year olds, they’d have found some child-like waifs just on 18 years old to give the shoot that jailbait look.). What is it with the fashion industry that wants to make children adults and sexually attractive? Is it overrun with pedophiles or something?

And what sort of name is Zippora Seven? Progeny of hippies? Offspring of science fiction fanatics (it sounds like the name of an android off Battlestar Galactica or something like that)?

Example #4

Tania Zaetta may or may not have screwed the Australian army detachment at Tarin Kowt in Afghanistan, but what the hell was going through some public servant’s mind when he/she decided the Minister needed to be briefed about what was rumoured to have happened? And then, what the hell was going through someone’s mind, and this someone would be someone in either the Defence Department or Minister Joel Fitzgibbon’s office, to leak this briefing note to the media?

Zaetta, who was taking part in a 17-day concert tour performing for Australian troops in the Middle East, has called the claims “ridiculous” and “vicious”.

Clearly there are people in Defence and/or the army that don’t have enough to do. Time for some deeper budget cuts it seems. Why on earth someone would feel the need to bother a minister with what is basically scurrilous gossip, god only knows? Do they do debriefings after office farewells and Christmas parties, too? And then to name names, and then leak it into the public domain … beggars belief.

Opposition defence minister Nick Minchin today issued a statement demanding Mr Fitzgibbon take immediate action.

“How did these stories reach the newspapers? Mr Fitzgibbon must immediately investigate who in the Department of Defence or his office leaked this story. And then he must explain how that person has been dealt with and what will be done to stop such slurs being leaked in the future.”

Too right! Heads should roll over this type of shit … but they won’t. This is just business as usual at Fort Fumble, ie Defence Department headquarters. Someone fucked up, now there will be an inquiry, no-one will be found to be responsible for anything, and no-one will be held accountable.

I’m off again, this time for a week to here.

Or more accurately to an office building in the same city.

Any ideas where? Think IT, think outsourcing.

To appreciate the significance of this heading, you’ll need to have seen The Chaser’s Age of Terror Variety Hour. We saw it tonight and its very funny. I hardly stopped laughing the whole way through.

Chas Licciardello’s lesson on internet dating was especially funny, with luckman22 a highlight of it. What a loser!!!

2 weddings in Sydney’s west turned nasty last night.

At one wedding in Liverpool, a guest who’d apparently gotten a bit rowdy was asked to leave and was being escorted out of the venue, pulled out a knife and slashed 3 other guests. One man, a 28-year-old, sustained a severe laceration to his stomach, while the other, 29, sustained a deep laceration to his left forearm. The woman, 27, sustained a stab wound to her stomach.

A few things leap out about this one. First, it was a 54 year old man who did the stabbing ….not a drunken youth. Old enough to know better - obviously not! Second, who carries a knife to a wedding (well actually who carries one anywhere in public …”just going out for the night, better arm myself ” is not a thought process I’ve ever had). Third, this happened at 7.45 pm. Bit early to be pissed and obnoxious - either he doesn’t hold grog at all well or got a very very early start - the obnoxious part is probably a permanent state for this dickhead of a guy. Fourth, he comes from Mt Druitt … oh, wait, nothing surprising there, its bogan central.

The second wedding was in Lidcombe, where 3 men were stabbed outside a reception hall. The trio were stabbed outside a wedding function centre after a fight between three guests - aged 18, 19, and 22 - and several other men. Violence erupted a short time later between 70 and 80 people who were concerned for the welfare of the injured men, police say. Police from Flemington Local Area Command attended the scene with assistance from PolAir, Dog Squad, and the Public Order Riot Squad, with additional police from Parramatta and Holroyd local area commands. Lidcombe resident David Bragg said there were about 20 police cars and a helicopter at the scene.

Police are still looking to witnesses for more information about this one, but a 19 year old man was arrested at the scene and charged with resisting police in the execution of their duty. Guess where he was from? Mt Druitt. Wonder if his old man was the one at the Liverpool wedding?

There was also a party in Smithfield. About 50 or 60 people were fighting when police arrived about 11.45pm. Police said they used capsicum spray to subdue several crowd members after bottles were thrown at officers and a police vehicle was damaged during the incident. 5 men were arrested.

Business as usual for the police in Sydney’s west. Drunken bogans on the rampage.

It seems so soon after I did my last stats roundup. The last 10k visits have taken only 31 days.

Now lets look at what’s brought people here. No real surprises. The usual suspects, vagina (in various forms, eg hairy, bald, wet, loose, big, 8 year old, 10 year old, Japanese, etc, etc), pussy, nude Hermione Granger, nude (insert celebrity name here), pedo sex, etc … all there again. There are a few new ones though:

• Lynne Tziolas - the nude schoolteacher from Sydney
• “how to resist masturbation” ….willpower, I’d suggest, or cold showers, or maybe wear boxing gloves to bed
• Macdonalds food pictures - just remember, it always looks better in the pictures than the real thing

Thats about all actually … the usual collection of weirdos looking for whatever they get their jollies from.

Police pulled up a car near Alice Springs and found:

• one five year old boy not wearing a seatbelt
• one 30 can slab of beer, wearing a seatbelt.

The policeman who pulled the car over said the driver of the car “just looked at me blankly” when he was handed a $750 fine for driving an unregistered and uninsured vehicle, and failing to ensure a child was wearing a seatbelt.

“There were four adults in the car, two in the front seat and two in the back seats and in between those adults there was the carton of beer strapped in with the belt,” he said.

“The child was sitting in the lump in the centre, unrestrained.”

“I asked him about the fact the child was unrestrained and the beer was, and he said he didn’t know anything about it.”

I’m not sure what is more disturbing ….that morons like this drive, or that they breed?

I had visions of schoolboys saying that to Lynne Tziolas, when I read of her sacking from her job as a teacher for appearing nude in pictures in Cleo magazine. However, I guess as a Grade 1 teacher, maybe they are a bit too young for that sort of thing … had they been high school boys there is no doubt her nude pictures would have made their way all over her school (perhaps used as book coverings by some more enterprising students?).

Here’s the picture that got her the bullet from Narraweena Primary School in the northern beaches area of Sydney. (and you can’t even see her butt anyway!)

Extremely tame in my opinion. The only thing that causes me any offence is the feral tattoos ( have I mentioned before I hate tattoos … why do people choose to disfigure themselves in this way?)

The article which has caused the furore is this month’s Cleo. Titled “Buck naked couples talk about their sex lives” the article interviews ten couples about “what they get up to between the sheets”.It also includes a full-page picture of each couple, naked and holding each other.

Lynne and Antonios’s article asks them about how many times they have sex a week, their favourite body part and the most risque sexual thing they’ve done. Now, not having read the article, I’ve got no idea what they said in answer to these questions. On the assumption they didn’t confess to their sex life including things such as having a threesome with a goat on the teacher’s desk in the classroom, there’s no real harm in that. Sure, too much information, but nothing extraordinary!

But, according to the NSW Department of Education:

“Concerns have been raised by community members in relation to this article. I have concerns that this will seriously impact on your continued employment at Narraweena Public School,”

Not sure how widespread this community concern was. Lynne Tziolas says:

“The first thing I knew was on Friday morning when a parent complained, and come Friday afternoon I was told not come back to the school”

The school and department aren’t saying anything on the subject, although they did refer to complaints from several parents. On the other hand, she seems to have plenty of support from parents of the kids she teaches.

I must admit to having mixed feelings about this story. On the one hand, the photo published is completely harmless and inoffensive, and whatever they said about their sex life (presumably) is nothing outrageous. On the other, she showed poor judgement in doing what she did …. there are things we don’t need kids or parents to know about their teachers, and she should have known that something like this was bound to cause someone somewhere some offence. So, bad decision on her part. Does it warrant a sacking? I’d have thought it could have been handled with a good stern talking to by school management indicating their disapproval of her actions, and a warning not to do it again. I’d put her “crime” in the area of a mistake due to bad judgement …. its not like criminality, dishonesty or incompetence are issues in this case (although in my experience, there’s usually more than the particular precipitating incident involved when someone gets sacked suddenly - ie I’d suspect the principal/department had some other issues with her and the Cleo stuff is just the excuse, or final straw).

The other thing I have mixed thoughts about is that she’s a temporary employee, and has been put on 4 weeks suspension on full pay (why do people always get suspended on full pay?… when I had to suspend people from their jobs when I was a public servant I always made it without pay - its not a freaking holiday for them, its telling them they’re in deep shit and we plan to sack them asap), which is somewhat short of sacked. Also as a temp, she would know her employment is somewhat subject to the school’s continued need for her services, so pissing them off was not a good employment choice. As a temp, sudden changes in your employment should be something you expect fairly regularly, and should be no big deal. Tough, but them’s the breaks in temporary work.

I also don’t think some of the comments by Mrs Tziolas and her husband are particularly helpful to her case to be reinstated. Saying she would gladly strip and pose again is sort of just flaunting it, rubbing the department’s nose in it. Guaranteed way to get on their shit list!

Mrs Tziolas said she was stunned by the response of her school to the article, and said it may end her career in public schools. Yep, especially if you go on about it in the media.

Mr Tziolas - also a teacher - is concerned the furore may have also affected his chances at getting a job with the NSW public system. He said he had applied for work at Narraweena, a primary school, as well, but doubted he would now get a position. “I’d imagine that my name is one that won’t be called, even though I’m on the list,” Mr Tziolas, 45, said. Yep, start looking for another job I’d advise … the only list you’re on at the department is their “never to be hired” one, aka shit list.

My advice if they want to be teachers is: lay low for a while, show some remorse for your errors in judgement (even if you don’t agree you made them), promise not to do it again.

Two parents who had split up about a year ago, recently went to the Family Court to ask for a ruling on where their 7 year old daughter’s birthday party should be held and who should be invited. Her dad wanted to celebrate at McDonald’s with gifts, balloons, his relatives, his new partner - and their seven-month-old baby girl. Her mum wanted it to be on familiar ground at her daughter’s usual play centre, with no relatives.

It took a judge, three barristers, three solicitors and a day in court at an estimated $30,000 to work out where the girl should celebrate her seventh birthday.

The parents have been before the court “a number of times” since they split up early last year. Last appearance, in December, the judge ordered they both undergo “therapeutic counselling”. They ignored this, didn’t do the counselling and so ended up back in court over the birthday party.

Personally I’d say put the little girl into care, and tell mum and dad to grow up, and then we’ll think about custody arrangements, and when we’ve shown we’re all grown up and mature, you can have her back.

Family law experts yesterday slammed parents who tie up valuable court time with “trivial” matters. Michael Taussig QC said if somebody came to him asking to run a case in court about a birthday, he would tell them to see a psychiatrist. (Unfortunately, I’m sure most lawyers would happily take the money and run the case.)

“Unfortunately the Family Court has to deal with dysfunctional people constantly and this is just one example,” he said.

My son talked me into going to see “Iron Man” tonight. I’d seen the ads for it when I was in Taiwan and Hong Kong a week and a bit ago and thought it looked interesting (of course, I didn’t understand the ads in Chinese). So “cheapskate Tuesday” at the local cinema was enough to convince me it would be worth spending $9.50 on.

And it was well worthwhile, much better than I’d expected. I haven’t really been much of a fan of comic book adaptation movies (like Spiderman, Batman, the Hulk) but this one was pretty good ….I’d never heard of the Iron Man comics before, so it was all new to me.

Sure it was far fetched, but it did have an interesting premise, and the story was well told. Robert Downey Jr was excellent as the main character, Tony Stark, and Jeff Bridges made a good bad guy (I didn’t even realise it was him until the credits at the end). Gwyneth Paltrow did a decent job also.

Next thing we’re going to is in a couple of weeks …. The Chaser’s live show. Kids talked me into that as well. That should be good … Cellobella saw it last month in Perth and enjoyed it.

Regular readers will know there’s an intense fascination among searchers who come to this blog for nude pictures of Hermione Granger, the young witch in the Harry Potter books, or more especially, movies. Well, these are not actually nudes, but getting there.

This link is not safe for work. It is presented as a service to those readers of my blog who wish to see Emma Watson’s rude bits. Emma, who turned 18 only last month, plays Hermione in all the Harry Potter movies.

OK, hope this satisfies the needs of those readers for their Hermione fetish.