“Brezhnev begins his official speech opening the 1980 Olympics: ‘O! O! O!’ His aide interrupts him with a whisper: ‘The speech starts below, Leonid Ilich. That is the Olympic symbol.’”
Outwitting bureaucracy:
Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in [...]

With all the biblical mudwrestling at the moment about religion in Ozblogistan, I have been proudly but civilly atheistic.
Behold, one of the few things that could conceivably bring me to prayer: the Age has reported that Keith Richards has been flown to hospital in New Zealand with head injuries after falling out of a [...]

Update – Sunday brunch, cooked amid the dishes of last night’s roast. Autumn brings out the traditionalist in me.
I have lived in this country for 44 years, in two long bursts. But I can never ever stop myself from thinking: Geez, fock, this is terrific.
Hog-bloody-heaven.

I really like the internet thing of connecting to someone whose life is pretty completely different from mine.
Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants has described a certain reactionary pundit in the US as surprisingly cute. I appreciate this is a drek image, but the face is not to my taste, though I am male [...]

I think it is fair to spread this around, since I am just sharing the message. The ITMA numberplate stands for “Impeach The Motherfucker Already”, from a campaign here.
Dan Savage, who runs the campaign, is a sexual Agony Aunt, who I found via a nifty interview with Matt Groening on A.V. Onion, an internet mag [...]

This is a self portrait by Max Beckmann, some time in 1915. He was in the German army, serving in Prussia and Flanders in the medical corps. As he painted this, he was on the way to going insane. Discharged, he slowly recovered.
For me, Anzac Day brings out a deep, sickening rage.
Farm boys and [...]

I don’t know the story of this, since it is shorn of all originating information, and lives now as one of a parade of vaguely daft and sometimes poignant photos on Dave’s Daily.
Myself, I suspect an eruption of art.

an instrument for electrical excitation
Bloody buggery Big Brother is back! As we have for the past five winter ratings periods, we wait to see just how pitiful it will get in its shabby, childlike search for depravity, like watching a rabbit fuck a decaying moccasin.
Last year someone waved a flaccid willy, with all the aplomb [...]

This might be the world’s most dreary microsite, found at Coudal’s Museum of Online Museums.
The gallery of East German paper bags.
It is worth roaming around the 404s on the general site, which kind of sort of adds up to a portrait of Ostie educational and cultural magnificence. There are some highly symbolic fragments like [...]

In one working lifetime:
1970 -
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
2006 -
I’m [...]