A Quiz For the Aus Folk

Who were the first explorers to cross the Blue Mountains?

Name the first and second Prime Ministers of Australia.

What is Australia’s national flower?

Name the GREATEST cricketer of all time.

What is the year of Federation?

What year did the Melbourne Cup start?

These are all questions on the new Australian Citizenship test. Aspiring citizens must get at least 12 out of 20 answers correct. Yes I do know the first Prime Minister of Australia (Sir Edmund Barton) but this is a factlet I looked up because Australians are famous for having no idea what the answer to this question is. If you went out in the street and began quizzing folk it could take you hours to find anyone who knew this.

I will hazard a guess that the national flower is the wattle. If it isn’t the wattle I want to know why!

The sports questions are completely embarrassing to me. Yes I should accept that for many Australians sport is art, religion, tribe and joy but I would like Australia to accept that for many of us it is none of these things. A bunch of blokes running around after balls like dogs.. perhaps now that sport is included in the citizenship test this is a treasonous sentiment.

I will be very interested to read the whole test when it is released. Will there be questions about famous Australian artists? Pioneers in the medical field? I certainly hope so if sports events are going to be memorized by migrants as part of an Australian catechism.

~

 

Painting is “Copper Delight”

by Cairns artist Ingrid Douglas

filthy politics

This week Australia was rocked by the news that Kevin Rudd, aspiring CEO of our Great Land, spent an evening in a bar in New York pissed as a fart and ogling the breasts of paid female employees. Oh how can we ever trust this man again? Betrayer! Pervert! Anti-feminist exploiter of half your electorate! Will the Labor party survive this blow? We, the nation, shall surely maintain our disgust.

But wait.. let’s not get carried away here. We should not forget who the real evil doer is, the man so overlooked by wowsers but with so much to answer for. Bob Brown fills us in:

Greens leader Bob Brown said the issue should be kept in perspective. “Four years ago Kevin Rudd got drunk and took himself into a strip club,” Senator Brown said. “Four years ago John Howard, sober, took Australia into the Iraq war. I think the electorate can judge which one did the more harm.”

Yes Bob, thank you for that. Now, to the strip clubs!

~

 

Painting by Charles Thompson

Nice Guys are Jerks

There are guys out there in the dating/singles scene who are Jerks: total arseholes who are abusive and treat women badly. They don’t understand women and don’t particularly like them, either.

Then there are the Nice Guys: these types are all about empathising with women, sympathising with women and enjoying their company.

Nice Guys can’t stand Jerks. Whenever a Nice Guy turns around, there’s another smart, funny, attractive woman going out with a Jerk, yet she looked past the Nice Guy who was right under her nose! Women say to Nice Guys, “All the nice guys are taken!” and the Nice Guys think to themselves, What about me? Am I invisible?

But here’s the ironic twist: Nice Guys, deep down, really aren’t that nice. Inside, Nice Guys are Jerks, and if you scratch the bland, passive surface of a Nice Guy, you’ll find a reserve of seething anger, resentment and bitterness bubbling away underneath.

There’s a subtle kind of arrogance to the Nice Guy’s character. He’s so convinced that if a woman would just give him a chance, she’d see that he is really the perfect man for her. He’ll worship her — treat her like the Goddess she is — and, well, attraction on her end will naturally follow.

But damnit, these women can’t see how good the Nice Guy is! The Nice Guy believes that women just don’t know what’s good for them. (You’ll often hear Nice Guys say things that spell these sentiments out explicitly. And yes, they self-identify as “nice guys”, too.) Nice Guys are narcissists.

And so the Nice Guys blame the women for not wanting to be with them, and the resentment grows. Not surprisingly, this rather toxic attitude that they carry around with them is a bit of a turnoff, so the rejections continue.

Meanwhile, as much as Nice Guys think they’re relating to women, they’re really doing anything but. No woman is a Goddess — she’s a human being, and most women are smart enough to realise that the only thing such guys are in love with is an idealised image of their own creation.

So I’ll say it again: Nice Guys are Jerks. They don’t understand women and don’t particularly like them, either.

Don’t be a Nice Guy.

Eddie Murphy from Da Ghetto

So most people would have heard by now that Eddie Murphy has a bastard child to Scary Spice… and of course he hasn’t acknowledged the fact that “Iris Murphy Brown” now three months old is his daughter as proven by a DNA test.

I can hear you saying “Why are you talking about this?”

I am talking about this to say one simple point; unfortunately in most cases you can take the Homie out of the Ghetto, however you can never take the Ghetto out of the Homie.