A carefully prepared scripted blood pledge

The Australian 13 October 2011

In what was apparently the death of democracy, the carbon tax has been extensively negotiated, voted on and passed in the House of Representatives.

Fortunately, Tony has pledged (in blood) to restore democracy by unvoting the carbon tax at some point, though whether he will be able to do this democratically due to democracy’s untimely demise is a bit vague, perhaps the blood will be used in some sort of demonic (or possibly divine, I’m not a reincarnation scientist) ritual to bring it back to life. I’m personally not all that keen on a zombie democracy shambling around the place eating people’s brains, though that would explain a lot.

Luckily, Tony probably won’t be needing to use his own blood to make his pledge as there will of course be regular rains of it under the carbon tax, though it should be noted that it is quite hard to get much fine print in when you’re writing with blood as it does tend to clog the nib (I’m told).

A Tale Of Two Hospitals

I was making a mostly futile effort to organise my files and came across this cartoon I did for Oslo Davis’ excellent Drawn From Life magazine from the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

The brief was to do something about your own life, which is marvellously self-indulgent but quite hard to do when you’re tuned into being nasty to politicians day in and day out. Anyway, I agonised over it til just after the deadline and ended up knocking out A Tale Of Two Hospitals about a rather fraught period in my life neatly summed up by a fortune cookie.

Bear with it, I attempted to cram a lot into a fairly small space and it has a non-family-newspaper-friendly word in it, but it’s got a happy ending (click on it for a bigger version).