Own Goal
You might get away with it if you’re just a State pollie, or a Council member, and even then only if the press doesn’t have an issue with your performance, or your party’s for that matter, but once you’re in Canberra, I’d suggest not hitting the piss too hard when you’re on a junket, and especially, I’d recommend not going to any bar called ”Scores.” I suppose it’d be a simple enough error in judgment that would let you think it’s a sports bar, but that’s the same error that sees you going into a bar advertising “dancing” because you thought it might be a disco, instead of a topless dive. And offering “I’d had a lot to drink” as an excuse probably isn’t going to help you any more than “I called my wife as soon as I got back to the hotel.” Peter Costello’s assessment that his program would have been too full to have time to go out to ogle the girlies is fatuous wowserism, but I’m not at all surprised that the NY Post reporter, Col Allen, who warmed to Rudd so well, didn’t invite Pete for a similar excursion. Petey’s a dullard.

No Guests
Security is a natural enough concern, with so many international politicians coming to town, so I guess having the police check out your balcony for assassination sight-lines makes a little sense (but very little; common sense arguments abound). Still, can they really outlaw guests? Maybe I’ve been planning a big dinner party for the September 8-9 weekend, all my friends and relatives on their way, invitations sent, RSVP’s received, wine chilling in the fridge, deposit down with the caterer. . . . You’re really going to cancel my party? Are you worried a guest might bring an RPG? Play at Lee Harvey Oswald?

Inserting APEC into my living room is pushing the friendship.

(When Al Gore was visiting the 92nd Street Y, I had a phalanx of motorcycle cops sitting under my window for about two hours, running their engines, until the fumes were more than even I could stand - and I was a smoker back then. When I went out to complain, I was subsequently prevented from re-entering my building until Al had moved on. I got a very polite apology from the Secret Service in the end. And probably a case file.)

Graduation
Christopher Hitchens is right about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but, as he also is, with tedious frequency, he’s wrong, although it’s largely a matter of his inability to simply enjoy something without reference to himself. I’ll give him make-up points, though, for not introducing any major spoilers.

The final volume was a lot of fun, although the camping did get dull. J. K. Rowling has considerable skill in weaving a compelling plot across 759 pages. I was up until 2 a.m. finishing the book, simply because, having reached a point where I felt I might put the book down, there was enough impetus to read on that I gave in at every turn.

Yes, much of the resolutions to difficult problems did end up being a little too Star Wars, Return of the Jedi for me, and I never did think much of Harry as a wizard per se, and Ron and Hermione are never much more than secondary characters at best, but none of it matters. The books did, in the end, what they always promised to do. It would have been easy enough for Rowling to have wrapped the whole thing up in one book, to move on to other literary efforts, but the conception of the 7-book series, to see HP through High School, essentially, puts a close to the adventures no other method could have achieved. Harry would not stand up in adult fiction, and we’ve seen every inch of his maturation. These may not be books I’ll ever go back to, but they’re vivid enough in detail to stick around anyway.

Records
Barry Bonds is the new king of baseball, home runs, anyway, but will his record come with an asterisk? When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record, for years all you heard was the dead ball/live ball debate. And when Roger Maris hit his 61-in-a-season, he really did end up with a footnote, because the season was longer in his day than it had been in Ruth’s day. What do we make of baseball’s pumped-up players, then? This year’s Tour de France saw drug scandals galore, toppling the leader just days before the end of the race, after all. Next year’s Beijing Olympics will surely raise the issue of China’s team-building practices again, although, admittedly, the focus there will be on what might be called “athlete farms.” The time will surely come when drug use and other, more or less risky practices come to be the norm. Already, professional-level sport performance is out of the question for the vast majority of us, so maybe it could be an equalizer. Just think of what some high-plateau training could do for your initial marathon entry, let alone a little blood-doping. Drugs and medical intervention techniques are extending our healthy lives well beyond what we might once expect, so it wouldn’t be anything really new, would it, if some 80-year-old grandpa took gold in the not-so-distant future.

More Money
Interest rates are up again, and everybody’s got something to say about it. Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, Prime Ministerial hopeful, says PM Howard’s bluster over past high interest under Labor show’s he’s out of touch, unconcerned with the reality of the effects. But the PM, recently shown poll results characterizing him as dishonest and arrogant, rejects such criticism, as he does any criticism, for that matter. (Arrogant, moi? I reject that.)

Mortgages will be well up over 8% now, and likely to rise further still, perhaps even before the next election. Keep in mind, only the PM knows when that will be, but most people are tipping November. That’s about when the rates would be likely to rise, too, just in time for Labor to take over the government. If we’re headed for an economic downturn of any duration, let alone – and God forbid – a recession, the rates will go up even more under the next government, regardless of who’s in the Lodge.

If it’s Labor, it will cement their reputation for economic mismanagement and we can look forward to a swift return of the Liberals, and by that time, much of the present crop will have retired or at least been relegated to the back bench. While that itself might seem a good result, keep in mind that Mr. Howard has empowered the far right wing of his party, much as Reagan did in the States, so we’d be looking at a George W-style leadership coming to power.

Labor’s best hope to manage the economy is to act in consultation with the civil service, a practice Howard decided to abandon, in favor of his own brilliance. That’s why I feel a little leery over this latest 2.0 promotional effort from Rudd: Kevin 07. It’s a little “presidential,” don’t you think?

2.0
Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a Flickr account, and Googlepages, and a blog, and a Twitter profile, and, now, a Facebook entry, but to be honest, most of this stuff is just junk, a waste of ones and zeroes. Fickr’s o.k., if you want to sign up for a “professional” account and store all your photos online, but I hit the limit and haven’t had much cause to upgrade; I get more value out of Moo calling cards, but don’t want any calendars, stickers, or prints, and have no use for U.S. postage made from my photos. Twitter was fun for all of five minutes, but frankly, I’m not that busy, or too busy to be sending up 140-character updates with any frequency. And Googlepages offers little more than the kind of static “homepage” people were playing with back in the 1980’s, although I can see some measure of utility in setting up a “portal” to my various other Web 2.0 efforts.

There was so much fuss over Facebook lately, however, that I had to have a go, and now that I have, I can see it affords a level of interactivity that other applications don’t, but it’s all self-promotion, really, like piling up “adds” on MySpace. And the applications don’t work nearly as well as would make them of any substantial utility. I thought, for example, that the Visual Bookshelf feature would allow me to catalog my books, but there’s no organizational capability, and the “recommendations” feature keeps offering me books I’ve already added. Amazon must have that technology locked up.

I’ve heard that Facebook is being used or developed towards a more professional networking site, but the limits imposed so far prevent anything substantial being done. You’ve got to be a member of a group in order to join a group, unless it’s an open group, like “Australia”. Great. That’s helping.

Still, it’s keep up or fade into the Luddite past. Maybe I ought to get an iPhone. When they reach Australia next year.

Darfur Force
I can’t believe this didn’t make the front page of any of the on-line newspapers I read, but the UN is sending 26,000 troops to Sudan, at last. Everybody else is more concerned with Murdoch’s take-over of the Wall Street Journal. Now, China’s still managed to impose some use-of-force caveats, and the troops will only move if Sudan holds up on their end, and there’s still the composition of the forces to be managed, itself, I’m sure, a logistical nightmare, all the more so because the U.S. can’t be in much of a position to help out. But good on Gordon Brown for getting this started.

So Much for Happy Hour
I suppose there will be those who cry into their beer tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll stop for a schooner on the way home tonight.

A Win
Maybe George Bush should be put in charge of soccer in the U.S. – look what he did for Iraq. Or not.

No Cats on the Bed
So what does it mean if the cats want to curl up with you? It may not be a good sign. I’d figure there’s an element of learned behavior involved, as well as the more easily concluded sensory explanation. I can also imagine that some of the nursing home residents would be a little leery of sharing their bed with this cat.

Look, Up in the Sky
It’s a bird!
It’s a plane!
It’s a frog!

Not bird, nor plane, or even frog, it’s just little old me: Underdog.

I may wait for the DVD.

Debt Relief
Although personal debt is at all-time highs in Australia, and continuing to grow, the government sees the bright side: There’s $5 in assets for every $1 in debt, according to our PM (recently reckoned a very poor Treasurer, when he held the post, by his own Treasurer, Peter Costello; now we can see why). I’m sure it’s true, but I’m also sure that those assets consist largely of the home people are living in, the car they drive, and so forth. My net worth, on paper, has always exceeded my debt. That never meant that I didn’t struggle over bills.

Embracing the New
Everybody’s doing it: setting up MySpace pages, that is, including Australian politicians. I’m intrigued that Mr. Howard doesn’t have an individual page, just Howard Government (L’etat, c’est moi?), and that his only friends are six of his fellow Liberal party members – only two of whom are on the front bench – the “How to Vote” page, and Tom, a resident of California, who, with 190,943,913 friends, may be the most popular person on the internet, or just the most amiable. Meanwhile, over at the various Labor politicians’ pages, the friends keep building, as does the overall response. Even the Greens are doing better at making friends (Bob Brown lists the Dalai Lama.

Combating Terrorism One Case at a Time
Dr. Mohammed Haneef leaves England for a job in Queensland. He hands his pre-paid mobile phone SIM card to a relative; why not? It won’t work in Australia and still has a couple of pounds sterling on it. The card turns up in the car used in one of the failed attacks. England asks that Australian Federal Police investigate. Haneef heads to the airport the next day, with a one-way ticket to India, where his family is, including his wife and brand-new baby. He’s arrested. He’s held for days while the police continue investigations. He’s charged and granted bail, his passport confiscated and a requirement that he check in with the authorities every couple of days. But instead of going to the home the police tore to shreds during their search, his visa is revoked and he’s off to Villawood detention centre. Or he could stay in jail, if he’d rather. Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, says Haneef “failed the character test”, and I guess there’s an argument to be made that his “reckless” support of a terrorist organisation (here, take my SIM card; I can’t use it), does show him to be undesirable, but how is justice seen to be done here? He hasn’t been tried, let alone convicted, and that’s a fairly long bow to draw in court, although a jury trial seems a fairly foregone conclusion in the current climate. Isn’t this just a way of subverting the legal system? And yet, PM-in-waiting, Kevin Rudd, will keep the current anti-terrorism laws that allow all this. If Haneef is convicted, that’s one thing, but he deserves his time in court, just like anyone else.

Update, 27 July: It's unclear whether Dr. Haneef will still be deported, now that the Department of Public Prosecutions has dropped the case against him, but I'd say it's likely. It's also not clear from the initial report whether the case was dropped because the AFP made it too difficult to achieve a conviction or because there just wasn't enough behind the charges in the first place.

Chinese Food
The summary justice meted out to China’s former food-and-drug agency director doesn’t inspire me with confidence (besides my categorical rejection of the death penalty), and if I were an Olympic athlete, I’d be bringing a sandwich to the games next summer.

Serenity Now
Stuck for something interesting to rent, I picked up the entire series of Firefly, Joss Wheadon’s post-Buffy endeavour. Just sixteen episodes, but I can see why it didn’t go any further, or any further than the movie (which I’ll have to rent again, I suppose, as it’s supposed to be the culmination of the series). First, cowboys in space just means lots of shooting and cheesy accents, regardless of Gene Roddenberry’s characterisation of Star Trek as “Wagon Train in space,” so making the joke explicit doesn’t mean you’re making the next Star Trek. The idea of drifters working the edges of a galactic empire borrows from Star Wars, but maybe not the best bits, which were in the conflicts between the two groups or their representatives. More importantly, however, is that the characters never do much to drive the series as anything other than a collection of episodes, so the producers learned nothing from Buffy’s success. In that series, everybody grows, so even if each episode can largely stand alone, there’s usually a threaded storyline throughout, driving to the end of the season, where what’s been learned can be applied. Not so, in Firefly. Finally, and most importantly of all, is the clear impression left that while the producers may have had a goal for these characters, particularly the doctor’s mysteriously brain-damaged sister, they took fourteen of the episodes to even start hinting. It’s just not going to hold anyone’s interest, especially not in the era of the multiple-plot series. Remember Hill Street Blues, ER, etc.? More characters, maybe, but pretty much everyone gets something to do, often affording parallels and linkages, but forcing audience attention. Missed that, too. Oh, well, I suppose it would be wrong to write off Wheadon at this point (he’s busy with the Astonishing X-Men at the moment, as well as a Buffy comic), but I’ll be more cautious in the future.

Climate Change
Winter’s setting in, and I appear to be adjusting to life in the antipodes: I’m cold. Funny, but with overnight temperatures in around the 40’s, I ought to be quite comfortable. At least, that’s the way I remember life back home. Of course, I’ve always had heat wherever I’ve lived, even if in some places it was kept quite low, to save on cost. So waking up, it’s tough getting out of bed lately, to face the chill in the bathroom before the shower adds some steam. And there’s the other sign of my acculturation: I’m whinging about the cold.

Independence Day Visitors
The Kitty Hawk’s in town, and Sydney will see a fair few American sailors around town, particularly down in the Rocks, around Circular Quay, and, of course, up to Kings Cross. I’m grateful to be out in the Inner West now, as I’m sure Oxford Street’s vicinity will also see an increase in activity, which is pretty much never a good thing, but I won’t be surprised if a few tars show up at the Hampshire Hotel anyway. Meanwhile, it’s also a good time not to live in Woolloomooloo, as the NSW Police use their newly enhanced powers to lock the suburb down. Hooray for freedom. (Just wait until APEC, in September.)

Doctors?
What kind of doctors set off car bombs?

Weasel
I didn’t expect Bush to pardon Libby; I figured Bush to be too chicken to try it on. And, whaddya know? He found a different expedient: commuting the prison term. Libby’s still a convicted felon and owes a quarter million in fines, but he walks, and Bush gets his cake and eats it, too.

There’s no way Bush thought this up on his own. This is a Rovian move if ever there was one. But, look, in all the years as governor of Texas, with all the death-row appeals that came across his desk, how many commuted sentences did Bush make? How many even just commuted to life without parole? Yeah, Libby didn’t kill anyone, but he committed a serious crime, arguably more serious in his case, as a lawyer, than perjury might otherwise be considered. The sentence was just, and Bush’s weaselling him out of serving time subverts justice.