What do a Today Tonight cameraman, a gang of grafitti artists, a bottle of vodka and fairy wings have in common? Easy - they all featured in my Saturday night.

I don't often right on this blog about the happenings in my life except in my very brief "Good & Bad" posts, however, last night was particularly memorable / strange / interesting and thought it worthy of a mention on here.

A friend of mine, Ben, threw a Halloween party last night and, yes, he is aware that Halloween is actually on Sunday the 31st but thought last night was as good a night as any to throw a party at his place in Williamstown. I have no idea why it takes me so long to get to Williamstown from my place but I did have to wait around a lot for connecting trains.

On the way, a rowdy group of people who had obviously been to the races hopped on the train. One of them was carrying a large video camera and I later found out that he's a Today Tonight cameraman and the camera he was holding is worth around $60,000. They chatted loudly with some nearby teens, pretended to auction off a boy's necklace and invited would-be thieves to steal the video camera (side note: wouldn't that make for an interesting story on channel 7's "current affairs" program if someone did steal it?). The teens later exposed themselves as grafitti artists (or "aerosol artists" as they prefer) and showed the group pictures of some of their work. Upon embarking the train at Newport, the group suggested the "aerosol artists" paint a slogan in protest to the toxic waste dump proposed for a site close to Mildura.

I bumped into a friend who was also on his way to the Halloween party and I watched him put eye-liner on using the reflection in the train's window and helped him tie his fairy wings on. He was one of a select few at the party who had bothered to go in costume. I was sans-costume myself.

I managed to drink an entire bottle of vodka at the party by mixing it with vanilla coke. Apparently vanilla flavoured vodka and regular coke tastes better than vanilla coke with plain vodka. I will have to test this theory out one day.

I met this nice lad who I thought was one of Ben's straight old school friends. Turns out he did go to school with Ben but he's definately gay. We swapped numbers.

The rest of the night gets a little blurry after this because of the effects of the vodka. I think I passed out a couple of times and spewed up in the sink. I woke up at some stage to realise they had all gone off somewhere. Apparently they went to the beach. I decided to make myself comfortable and hopped into Ben's bed until I was awoken by someone (not Ben) and told to sleep on the futon. I was joined a little while later by the fairy-wings guy and the guy he was being intimate with all night. They told me they kicked me off the futon at some stage but I don't remember. Presumably they had sex.

I woke up at 8am to a very bright Sunday morning and promptly realised it was actually 9am because of daylight savings. My head hurt, the place was feral and most people were still asleep. There were 4 fully-clothed people in Ben's bed and one on the floor. At some stage, I do remember, that my friend Andy showed up. He wasn't there in the morning.

I got up, got dressed, ate something bakery-looking really slowly and attempted to join in on the morning conversations. I then said my farewells and walked to the train station thinking that it had been an interesting night worthy of a blog entry.

1. Getting a new job... [ WED ]

2. The prospect of Bush winning the US election... [ NEXT TUE ]

3. Buying new work clothes... [ THU ]

I found this article by Burnt Karma hilarious.

I look forward to a follow-up article when the FTA kicks in, Howard sells the ABC and the Rupert owns everything.



Billy helps me out with my job searching. Gosh, he's such a trooper. If you want a copy of my resume, email me.

1. Finishing uni for the year... [ FRI ]

2. Not having enough credits to do work placement... [ WED ]

3. The weather will soon be nice(ish)... [ SAT ]

This week's lane, Beaney Lane, is up on my lanes blog.

This week's lane, Waratah Place is up in the usual spot.

I've just realised that I've forgotten to do my good/bad column for a couple of weeks. At the end of this week I might do a bumper edition. Hopefully something good happens between now and then.


After writing about this possibility on email lists and on other people's blogs, I thought I'd post something up on my own blog about it.

Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute has summed up my sentiments exactly (although more articularly) in his article in The Age.

"It is time for the progressive voices in Australian politics to unite. Australia needs more from the remaining Democrats than three years of squabbling with the Greens about who is the original environmental party."

The Democrats and the Greens have a lot more in common than they do in difference and the opportunities a dynamic, progressive and united third-force party would have on the political landscape should outweigh the immediate difficulties.

I'd like to be the first to extend the olive branch and invite both Greens and Democrats to discuss the possibility of a merger. Feel free to use my blog as a forum.



I know that I usually post something everyday but since it's the last week of uni, I really need to focus on getting my assignments in.

If you have any suggestions as to what I should write about when I start blogging again (give me a week at the most) please write something in the comments section.

And I promise to link the small photos with the large photos on the Lanes blog soon (for ACDC Lane).

In blogidarity

Aaron






After accepting channel 10's invitation to host their election coverage, Billy delivers the verdict that disappoints a nation and throws the national wing of the Labor Party into undeserved turmoil. Shame, Australia, shame.


Not convinced that Howard needs to go? This article on Crikey pretty much sums up everything you need to know before heading into that polling booth on Saturday.

This article is something I would have beed expecting to read in The Age this morning - not because I think The Age is leftwing but because it has standards - and one of those standards is editorial consistency.

Here are a few gems from Crikey:

"Now [Howard's] just another ruthless populist exploiting the prerogatives of power whilst his government runs out of puff."

"One great Australian institution, however, that may not survive the re-election of the Howard government, is the Liberal Party itself. Sickly for many years, under Howard it has become almost comatose. Its members have deserted, dissent has died out, and its state divisions have degenerated into factional warfare over diminishing spoils. Howard himself is attempting to restructure the party as a tool of the federal secretariat, not a popular movement.

A Howard victory tomorrow would set the seal on his picture of what the Liberal Party should be: a party hostile to any genuine liberal thought, undemocratic in its principles and its processes, loyally supporting whatever policy twists the Leader (always with a capital "L" now - remind you of anything?) deems necessary to secure his re-election.

The Fraser and Howard governments both frittered away opportunities to change the nation for the better, but all the signs are that Latham would be a genuine reformer."

A change of government tomorrow will change the nation for the better.


This week I've taken photos from Duckboard Place and the newly re-named ACDC Lane. Check out my lanes of Melbourne blog.

The election is on tomorrow so don't forget to vote! Yours truly will be handing out how-to-vote cards for the Democrats and celebrating (or drowning sorrows) on Saturday night.


It's one of the safest Liberal seats in the country and in the past 50 years Kooyong has been represented by only three politicians - Menzies, Peacock and (Petro) Georgiou. In the preceding 50 years, the seat has been held by 3 members also. That's six members in 103 years. And it's the bluest of the blue.

On Monday night I attended a meet-the-candidates forum in Kew, and while we all know that Georgiou is going to get back in (and possibly be our representative in Canberra until he retires in 10-15 years), it was good to see four of the the other candidates campaigning hard to win our votes.

It is interesting to note that 3 of the 4 speakers at the forum ran last election, leaving Mary Dettman from the Democrats to fill Ari's shoes this time around. It also turned out that many of the organisers and the candidates themselves were Melbourne Uni political science graduates.

Petro spoke to us in a rather arrogant matter, praised the Howard government, and belittled the Opposition and the minor parties. However, this man could have slaughtered a bunny rabbit live on stage and still have received cheers from the audience.

I had hoped that Tom Wilson from the ALP would have spoken very profoundly about the differences between his party and the Liberals. I was a little disappointed. He got flustered way too often, said some things that made the audience laugh (including the ALP's education policy). Side note... Kooyong has the probably the biggest concentration of private schools in the whole of Australia. Overall it wasn't his best performance. His best performance may come on election night when he pleads with the ALP head-honchos to give him a better seat.

Mary Dettman was a little nervous but she spoke well and got her point across. I would have preferred her to push voting Democrat in the Senate more but overall she did well in representing my party to the blue-ribbon and rinse set. She's actually quite active in the local community and should use her profile at the next state or local election to win a seat.

The Greens candidate, Peter Campbell spoke well, didn't slag off the Democrats, directly challenged both the incumbent and his Labor counterpart and raised a lot of important points. Normally I cringe when I put the Greens second on my ballot paper but this year, in this electorate putting them second will actually be a pleasure. He also openly raised the prospect of a Greens member for Kooyong. A prospect this cynic of the Greens wouldn't be dreading.




Billy prepares himself for next Saturday night... "It's time to go..."


I clicked on one of those Google ads just now. You know the ones, they're tailored to the search criteria you've entered (or in my case, since I'm using an Opera browser, typed into the address bar). I was looking at the ABC election site.

Anyways, I clicked on this ad saying "play the 2004 oz election game" or something like that. I clicked thinking that it was probably some dodgy site that lists everything in the hope you'd visit them. But no... it's actually a game. You can even download a trial version for free.

http://www.80soft.com/pmforever/info/aus/index.htm

I'm waiting for it to download at the moment. I hope it's fun.

And it says you can play any of the four major parties. Yes four. Liberal, Labor, National or Green. Yes that's right, a Canadian computer game company thinks the Greens are a major party. They have three members of parliament! The Nationals probably couldn't be considered a major party either but they at least form part of the government and hold more than three seats (13 in the HoR to be exact).

I wonder how many other things they've got wrong. Watch this space.

--UPDATE--

Three things:

• The game lets you choose Peter Costello to be leader of the Liberal Party. If only the 'real' election gave us this choice.
• I tried playing the game as Bob Brown and realised just how little power he has in influencing the outcome of the election.
• The trial version stops 3 days before the election and you will have to pay for the full version to actually get any meaningful use out of it.

1. Urban design group meeting... [ WED ]

2. Looking for work... [ THU ]

3. Bloggers who use RSS or XML... [ FRI ]

Name: Aaron Hewett
Location: Melbourne, Australia

aaron [at] myrealbox.com

www Urban Creature

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