There’s a new gallery in Salamanca called Spacebar opening today. I’ve got a little bit of space on the wall to stick up some of that old-school ink-on-crushed-trees type artwork. First cab off the rank is the Bovine Terrorists haiku. If you’re down that way, take a look at the gallery. Lots of nice stuff.
Have a very wowser Christmas
The Hobart Mercury, 11 December 2010
One of the great institutions of Hobart used to be the annual drinks outside Knopwoods on the Friday before Christmas Eve. Naturally, all attempts have been made to ruin this by forcing a large fence to be erected around the area and now the council has decided that it would be far more convenient to have it a week early, which is no doubt totally correct, but does somewhat spoil the vibe.
There’s no doubt a balance exists between having a good time and a complete bloody shambles, and as I have two children and thus no idea what goes on outside the house after sunset any more perhaps heavy-handed bureaucracy is the way things get done these days, but it is sad to see a uniquely Hobart event get strangled in red tape like this.
Behind The Lines
If politics is rock and roll for ugly people, political cartooning is standup comedy for ugly socially inept rampant egomaniac psychopaths… no, hang on, that’s Question Time.
Okay, it’s Twitter for people who can draw. A bit. With added deadlines.
The Behind The Lines exhibition is on again at the Museum of Australian Democracy (which has a most appropriate acronym if you leave out the “of”) at Old Parliament House. It has been put together by Guy Hansen and Laura Breen who also had the excellent taste to give me the Least Crap Cartoonist For 2010 Award, which is high praise from people who have just waded through a room full of our lunatic scribblings to create a remarkably coherent and entertaining narrative on the political shenanigans of 2010.
They’ve also stuck up the prizewinning cartoons from the school cartooning competition so we know who to squash before they can nick our jobs. There are a few crackers in that bunch as well.
If you’re in town, take a look. Or buy the book. Or both. Details here and a bit of telly about it here.
ArbibiLeaks
The Australian, December 10 2010
On behalf of the United States, the Australian government is getting tough on the guy who leaked the stuff about Arbib leaking stuff to the United States because leaking stuff from the United States about leaking stuff to the United States is bad, whereas just leaking stuff to the United States is okay because that happens all the time. No wonder this stuff is usually kept secret.
The devil’s in the detailed programmatic specificity
The Australian 6 December 2010
The title of this blog post isn’t really relevant, but I was dying to work it into a caption when Kevin was running the joint.
Kev’s back in the news with the startling disclosure that the USA is a bit worried about China taking over the place and the less surprising revelation that Kevin had the whole thing sorted until Julia brutally stabbed him in the back, condemning the planet to Chinese totalitarian rule shortly before we all die of climate change, which Kevin also would have fixed but for That Meddling Woman.
Anyway, to the apocalypse at hand: wikileaks, huh? What’s going on there? The bottom line is that politics is based on the assumption that a majority of people are dangerous lunatics who can’t be trusted with anything sharp and the rest are complete idiots who can’t be trusted with anything sharp, hence the quite accurate principle that what people don’t know probably won’t hurt them and definitely won’t hurt us.
This is why governments are extremely keen that the dangerous lunatics/idiots outside the tent are kept in the dark about what the slightly better informed dangerous lunatics/idiots inside are up to (which mainly involves drinking cocktails and trying to look like you know what’s going on).
Unfortunately, the dangerous lunatics/idiots at wikileaks have failed to realise how the game is played in polite company (as is the wont of uninformed dangerous lunatics/idiots from outside the tent) and are revealing to the entire campsite that nobody really has a clue (except Kevin of course) possibly causing worldwide panic, even though we all knew that already.