February 22, 2022

Worrying times! (22/02/2022)

It's difficult to think about crazy people when we are looking at a possible start to World War III. I did, however, like the suggestion that if the Russians want to take back parts of the world that used to be part of Russia they could start with Alaska. Of course, the last time Russia invaded a neighbouring country it ended badly for them, but Kipling could have told them about Afghanistan.

Look at that date!! (22/02/2022)

Numerologists, conspiracists and coincidentallists have been slavering at the thought of today's date. Just look at what it looks like on a calculator.

Then turn your calculator upside down, and what do you see?

Coincidence? Hardly.

At this point I must apologise to residents of the USA who think the date is 02222022. I know the calculator business above might be confusing but everything from now on should make sense to you.

News media leapt on the story that a baby had been born just after 10pm on the day. At 22 minutes past ten. At 22:22. This must have been an amazing coincidence because only about 270 babies are born somewhere in the world during every minute of every day, but I'm a paid up member of the journalists' union so I know to never let the statistics interfere with a good story.

The best thing about this is that it has been noted that palindromic dates only occur at most once in a person's lifetime, which is why none of us here have lived through any of:

12022021
11022011
02022020
01022010
10022001

Actually, that's only the second best part. The really best part is it all happened on a Tuesday. TWOSDAY!!!!

Some amusement in these troubled times (22/02/2022)

All over the net, so my conscience is not disturbed by stealing it.

I have no idea who I stole this one from either.

And speaking of batshit crazy … (22/02/2022)

Our old friend and master of hyperbole, Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination-[mendacity] Network, decided to compare the reaction of the Canadian government to morons blockading the border with the US with terrorist organisation ISIS murdering people. As she has refused to apologise for equating vaccination to rape I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at her latest dive into the cesspit, but I guess I just don't have the imagination to dream up such appalling similes

The protests in Australia generated more bullshit than the effluent sluices on a live cattle export ship, with nonsense increasing on a daily basis. The capital city Canberra has a population of about 400,000 but crowds of protestors were supposedly a million strong. Except that the next day there were two million people in the park. (And yes, Ms Dorey was there with the Vaxxed plague bus. Never miss an opportunity to spread the lies.) Complaints were made that the police closed the toilets and this was the cause of diarrhea and conjunctivitis, not being crowded into a park with a lot of people who deny the existence of germs. There was an outbreak of coughing, sneezing and sore throats probably caused by chemtrails and nothing to do with a horde of unmasked and unwashed people gathering in the middle of a COVID epidemic (mandated mask wearing and vaccinations were the things being protested against). People reported red and sore skin and feelings of being burnt, obviously caused by authorities aiming EMF and sound waves at the crowd and nothing to do with standing in the sun all day without using sunblock (which causes cancer, you know) in a town 567 metres above sea level.

Do you think I'm joking about sunblock causing cancer? I have been informed that as Australia has both the highest usage of sunblock and the highest rate of skin cancers in the world the connection is obvious. To sane people it's the risk of cancer that has us all doing the slip, slop, slap when we go outside but to quackonauts it's the other way around, with Big Pharma getting us to cover ourselves with stuff that makes them rich from chemotherapy drugs. Or something.

One nice thing did come out of the three-times-Woodstock sized protest. Each year there is a motoring festival held in Canberra called Summernats. The protest was almost immediately dubbed "Dumbernats".

Quintessence Nook (22/02/2022)

Almost exactly twenty years ago, Quintessence of the Loon carried the following obituary;

Goodbye Chuck and Spike The last week of February 2002 saw the deaths of two people who brought enormous pleasure to many people for a long time. They are relevant here because Spike Milligan raised loonity to an art form without ever losing the ability to make us laugh with him, and Chuck Jones gave us Wile E. Coyote, who symbolises the obsessive futility that fuels so many of the sites here. It may be a cliché, but it is true to say that we are richer for having known them.

But the news wasn't all bad. There was fun to be had, so let's look back at some of it from January and February of 2002.

Something new that's actually something old

I've written a lot of short articles and news items here over the last two decades. Each week a couple of these pieces will be randomly selected and displayed at the bottom of the week's update. They might not always still be relevant, but that's the way history works.

Looking back. Looking forward. (29/1/2022)

The month of January is named for the Roman god Janus, who had two faces to look both forwards and backwards. It is a month when we look back on the year that has gone and forward to what the next year might bring

Looking back over 2021 all I can see is a continual and continuous load of fear and nonsense about the COVID19 pandemic. The disease has produced a coalescence of anti-vaccination liars, sovereign citizens and other believers in pseudolaw, right wing nutcases (there have been people attending anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests in Australia waving Trump flags and wearing MAGA hats - in Australia!), grifters lying to make money, snake oil salesmen with magic miracle cures and almost any other form of vermin you can imagine climbing onto the bandwagon.

A bandwagon! (Photo by Bob Cline. Maybe.)

For this reason I have decided to not have any Millenium Awards for 2021. It was either give an omnibus award to all the lunatics and liars or try to separate the worst from the rest. As I am neither omniscient not possessed of unlimited time I decided that giving nobody any awards was the fairest thing to do.

Looking forward, I can't see much changing over the next few months. Governing myself accordingly, as hate mail writers like to advise, I'll probably only be updating this site about once a month unless something special happens. If you want to be advised of updates, I suggest you register this site with Visualping. I use the site (to remind me when I do something?) and it doesn't tell me if you register so your privacy is protected. If you register a site there, chose the "Visual" changes option which lets you map out an area on the site's page that will trigger a notification email for changes. If you don't include areas that aren't significant (like the column at the left of the front page here) you will only get told when something important changes, My map for here only covers the top right hand part of the screen, so I get notifications like this.

As I've said before I'm going to be as busy as a one-armed banjo player this year anyway with my other hobby and with Wooworld apparently stuck in a vortex i don't want to be continually (and continuously?) repeating myself.

See more from XKCD here

Wise words from a wise man. (29/1/2022)

One thing I've sorely missed over the last two years because of COVID-related restrictions on travel and gatherings has been my annual trip to address the young people at the Young Scientist Awards, organised by the Science Teachers' Association of NSW. It's sort of the highlight of my year, even though I only get three minutes to speak to the audience. Hopefully we can get back to some sort of normality in 2022 and we can all meet again. Obviously, the science teachers who encourage their students to enter the competition are the sort of teachers we need, and I'm reminded of this comment from a very smart science teacher indeed.

Richard Feynman had another thing to say about knowing things and learning things.

See more from Brian Kent here

Happy New Year (15/1/2022)

Welcome to a brand new year. We can only hope that this year is better than the last two and that one day we can stop wearing masks everywhere, stop needing COVID testing because we have been exposed to plague carriers (I've been tested about a dozen times, all thankfully negative) and maybe even stop listening to batshit crazy people offering "cures" (in 2020 it was bleach, in 2021 it was horse dewormer paste, in 2022 the old "drink your urine" thing is already back). I'm optimistic but I've been doing this for too long to hope that sanity finally wins over idiocy in the near future.

See more from Sketchplanations here

Things will be a little random around here this year. 2021 was a bit of a disaster for my other hobby, media coverage of car rallies, because almost everything was cancelled because of floods, other weather conditions (I got snowed on in November! In Australia!) and of course COVID restrictions about travel and about people getting together. 2022 looks to be a lot busier and you can see my planned activity here. Also, I've resurrected my motorsport competitor credentials so I might be inside some of the competing cars instead of standing out in the dust, rain and wind taking photos. There are those old sayings about being as busy as a one-armed paper hanger or a one-legged arse kicker. That's me for the next twelve months.

Speaking of kooks … (15/1/2022)

Stolen Borrowed from somewhere. I'll acknowledge the creator* if some one tells me who it is.
(* Not that Creator. I haven't gone mad.)

And speaking of predicting the future … (15/1/2022)

This isn't the Ziggy who played guitar, it's the one by Tom Wilson.

Fun with old friends #1 (15/1/2022)

Marcus Blackmore, main owner of Australia's biggest purveyor of snake oil had a couple of parties over the Christmas period. Mr Blackmore denies being anti-vaccine (of course) but hasn't found the time in between counting his millions to get to a doctor and actually have the shots. As it could be expected that his social circle would include people of similar quackery sentiments (plus the usual brain-dead hangers on social butterflies who worship the rich list) the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was sort of predictable - "Party pooper COVID ruins rich-lister fun". You can click on the image to read the complete article.

See more Loose Parts from Dave Blazek here

Fun with old friends #2 (15/1/2022)

It would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with this site to hear that Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination-[more dead children] Network has been found to be being less than truthful. You could even say she was lying, although there is some doubt about this because there is a school of thought that says that to be a liar you have to know that what you are saying is not true. My opinion is that she not only knows that what she says is not true but she is what philosopher Gary Hardcastle called a "bullshitter" in that she doesn't care if it is true or not.

Her latest was to claim that 20% of children between 5 and 11 in one state have contemplated suicide, caused by the unnecessary disruption to family life caused by the COVID scare. She of course denies the severity (and even existence) of the disease and is totally opposed to any campaign of vaccination to defeat it.

Someone bothered to check the facts of her claim and to nobody's surprise it was found that she was citing the wrong statistics from the wrong age group. Unfortunately I can't provide a link to the article telling this story or even quote it because of this warning:

All information, text and images included on the AAP Websites is for personal use only and may not be re-written, copied, re-sold or re-distributed, framed, linked, shared onto social media or otherwise used whether for compensation of any kind or not, unless you have the prior written permission of AAP.

One could wonder why they bother writing something if they don't want anyone to read it or talk about it, but I will respect their request for invisibility and totally avoid telling you where you can go to read it.

See more from the apparently now defunct Chain Saw Suit here.

My letterbox gets polluted (15/1/2022)

I went away for a few days over the New Year weekend and when I got home I found a turd in my letterbox. Not an actual turd, but a couple of pieces of paper doing a reasonably good impression. They came from an outfit called Reignite Democracy Australia warning about the dangers of vaccinating children. This outfit is virulently anti-vaccine and no lie is too untrue for them to use in their deranged campaign to oppose vaccinations. (The RDA web site has been closed by the hosting organisation.)

The owner of RDA is a woman named Monica Smit and she has been imprisoned for organising anti-vaccine and COVID denial demonstrations in Melbourne. Nothing coming from her or RDA can be believed. There was news over the weekend of someone who tried to burn himself to death to avoid vaccination. This was the second such attempt over just a few days and Smit had declared the first one to be a martyr acting heroically for the anti-vaccine cause and encouraged others to follow. One did.

Click on the picture to see what turned up, but wear a raincoat and put plastic sheeting down to avoid damage to your clothes and carpet from the vomiting. The good news is that both my town's Mayor and the local police are concerned about this sort of thing being circulated in the town, although I'm not sure what, if anything, they can do to stop it.

Click to see the filth.

Fun with old friends #3 (15/1/2022)

With the arrival of yet another COVID strain and an outbreak of infection and hospitalisations following the ill-advised relaxing of contact and mask rules just before Christmas (when people could be expected to travel and gather in groups) new restrictions have been announced by my state government. Prominent among these new restrictions are bans on groups gathering for singing and dancing. We are all being encouraged to buy and use Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) kits. Unfortunately, RATs are almost impossible to find and the laboratories doing the more usual PCR tests have been overwhelmed. I had to have a test because the contact tracing system put me in a place where there had been a positive COVID carrier - no RAT was available and it took almost a week to get the (negative) results of a PCR test (never more than 24 hours on previous occasions), during which time I had to isolate at home.

So, ICU beds full of unvaccinated people leaving no room for people who didn't get sick by choice, no quick home tests available (or at gouge prices if any can be found), fun, games and live entertainment closed down, huge delays in getting tested (the queue for drive-through testing near my place was blocking traffic two streets away) and more delays in getting the test results out, but the big news story of the week has been a tennis player who came to Australia to compete in the Australian Open but refused to comply with the rules regarding disclosure of vaccination status.

While all this was happening, our local "church" devoted to the worship of money, Hillsong, held youth camps. At these, everyone was given two RAT kits (I'm supposed to get ten free ones because I'm a pensioner with diabetes but there are none available) and it probably won't surprise you to hear that there was much singing and dancing happening.

So, a pretend church can defy all the rules that dictate the behaviour of the rest of us, rules intended to control an epidemic and protect the health of everyone else. You might wonder how this travesty was able to go unnoticed until after it was over. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the Prime Minister is a great supporter of Hillsong and has waved at the crowd from their stage, and the Minister responsible for managing the tennis player situation and keeping it on the font pages of the newspapers is a regular Hillsong attendee.

And have Hillsong been fined or suffered any other penalty for blatantly defying the rules being applied to the rest of us? Don't ask silly questions, just reread the last sentence in the previous paragraph.

You can click here to see everything that has appeared on the front page over the last 23 years.