Pre-Christmas Vinyl Chuck-Out

I've just finished sorting my collection of old vinyl recordings into two classes - those I definitely want to keep, and those I can live without.

If there are any Melbourne readers out there who might be interested in acquiring some old 70s and 80s pop, one hit wonders and other stuff I've come to regard as so much musical dross, just drop me a line (gummo dot trotsky at gmail full-stop com).

Oops!

Posting's been a little light on around here recently, hasn't it? That's because - partly thanks to some misguided encouragement in the comments on this post - I got sucked into mucking around with computer graphics big time. If you haven't checked them out already, you can see the results here, here, and here.

There's a fourth episode of The Indefatigable Wingnut in production - the first three frames of the comic have passed the Zeppo Bakunin chuckle test with flying colours but, nonetheless, I find myself in a bit of an embarassing bind.

All the action takes place in a so far nameless city - which might not be such a big problem. But not having a name for the arch villain of the piece is starting to bug me. Here's what he looks like:



Any suggestions?

Ten, Sorry, Nine Things I Just Can't Be Buggered Posting About Right Now

1. Anything that Mirko "no punishment is enough for the violence perpetrated to the laws of logic by civil libertarians and lawyer groups who campaigned for [David Hicks] release" Bagaric gets published in the fish-wrappers. In matters of moral philosophy, this bloke isn't even a dilettante's bootstrap.


2. The sad fact that all the major dailies in Australia now fall into two categories - the sewer press and the "perched precariously on the edge of the kerb sliding towards the gutter" press. Stuff it.


3. The crap state of free-to-air television these days.


4. Anything published by that Peter Saunders bloke who works for the CIS.


5. Anything written by Keith Windschuttle. Like his latest article in Quadrant, where once again, he gets stuck into the shortcomings of academic historians. It reminds me of Orwell's remarks, in The Road to Wigan Pier on the "mistaken Communist tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on..."
   
   I suppose it's possible that PP McGuiness' editorship of Quadrant is really the last step of "the Left's long march through the institutions" and that PeePee and Keith are part of some secret cabal using Quadrant as a vehicle to recruit "useful idiots". If that's their cunning little plan, I'd have to say they've well and truly screwed the pooch, run through the entire Karma Sutra with the family cat and it's time for the budgie and the kid's hamster to get nervous.


6. Anything else that gets published in Quadrant.


7. Anything Julie Bishop has to say on the subject of teachers.


8. Anything Kevin Donnelly has to say on the subject of education.
   
   When it comes to the "Education Wars" I'm going over the hill and I won't be back until I've caught up on Ivan Illich and that Summerhill bloke.


9. Bloody conservative bloggers and columnists. Zeppo Bakunin keeps telling me off for wasting my time with them - he reckons it's a complete waste of brainpower. When we have these discussions, I usually stump him by asking who, on the conservative side of commentary, he'd consider worthy of my attention.
   
   But he's right, damn it. John Ray (JR at a Western Heart) is so hard up for ideas these days that he's moved on from habitual self-plagiarism to plagiarising the words of other conservatives and using their ideas as a soapbox from which he can proclaim his own superior understanding of the Left. And the one or two conservative bloggers I have kept a casual eye on over the past year are on track to the same kind of self-caricature.

How long I'll feel this way tomorrow is anyone's guess. You could always run a sweepstakes on it, if you're so inclined.

Alternatively, someone might like to sponsor me to refrain from writing about these things at a dollar a day, with proceeds going to my favourite charity Medicins Sans Frontiers.

As an alternative to that, I'm prepared to consider the odd blogging challenge, assuming that we can come to some suitable financial arrangement that involves some, or all, of the readies going to the aforesaid organisation*. Now that's blogwhoring.

By the way, commenting is another matter entirely. Just thought it a good idea to make that quite clear.

* MSF's cut of any commission fee will be a minimum of $AUD 50. My cut will be a minimum of $AUD 0 and a maximum of $AUD 100 (in the unlikely event that the fee gets up around four figures - $100 being 10% of $1,000). I still have a few details to nut out. So hold your horses for a couple of days (that goes for the sponsored non-bloggingthing too).