Well, after spending a week in remotest country Victoria, I think I have figured out why country people are so ticked off with the modern world.

Mobile phones don't work properly. Internet access is intermittent (if you're wondering why I haven't commented on anything, that's why.) Everything at the supermarket costs more - including the things that are from the country in the first place. And you would not believe how poor the public transport infrastructure is - I haven't seen a single tram line the whole time I've been down here. Read more »

There will be those who, on seeing the ugly face of aspirational selfishness as personified by the Sciberras family in The Age this morning, will seek to mock them for their apparent narrow-mindedness. Read more »

Note to Fairfax: I bought The Australian over The Age today. I seriously did. I looked at the uninspiring front page of my traditional paper, remembered how little of worth had been in it on Monday, and actually bought the News Ltd alternative.

I paid money to Murdoch's company.

That's not a good sign, guys.

So, all the holier-than-thou "family values" stuff was a front. I knew it had to be. Steven Fielding reveals all in an email sent around this afternoon to supporters (and sneaky lefties who'd forgotten they were on his mailing list):

After listening to a pensioner named 'Shirley' from Glenroy on the radio, I thought it would be a good idea to support her call for a 'fair go for pensioners'. Read more »

I wrote a post earlier this afternoon with a bit of detail regarding the Liberal infighting over Ted Baillieu and his staff who hate him. Read more »

Dear undemocratic Democrat "Superdelegates",

You have to see it's over. Tell Hillary she's out. Don't let her take you all with her.

Cheers,

Irrelevant Australian Person.

Dear Hillary. Read more »

My anonymous UK friend who's entitled to have seen the following writes:Dear Dr Who writers,Say for the sake of argument I could suspend disbelief long enough to accept that 400 million cars could somehow spew out a sufficient volume of a toxic Sontaran gas such that within a day or so it could replace just less than 80% of the atmosphere. (If I can just repeat that for a second - eighty percent of the entire Earth's atmosphere.) Read more »

You're a leading teacher - ie, one of the poor mugginses on which the schools rely to run their extra-curricular programmes - and you've done poorly out of the new pay deal. So poorly, in fact, that your wage will effectively decrease as it's been locked in below inflation, just to punish you for taking on extra work to give kids a comprehensive education. Read more »

First a brutal military dictatorship that shoots monks, and now a devastating cyclone that kills an unfathomable number of people. The poor, long-suffering people of Burma. At least TEN THOUSAND dead. No-one knows how many injured and still dying. Read more »

Does anyone seriously believe this rubbish?

HOUSES are expected to become thousands of dollars cheaper for first-time buyers in Victoria under a cut to stamp duty in today's state budget. Read more »

You know, Morris, one day you're going to run out of public services to sell. You realise there are other options, right?I ask because the logic you and your ministers were running over the weekend appears to have been -

1. We need money to fund public services for the elderly and disabled.
2. Selling the state's electricity supply is the only way of getting that money. Read more »

FFS, Kevin. You give with one hand and take away with the other:

The ACT government has been forced to abandon plans to legally recognise same-sex civil union ceremonies after the Rudd government refused to support the move. Read more »

...One!

Isn't it awesome how quickly you can build spectacular things with a bit of brutal fascism?* Read more »

Good news for those who oppose the state telling people what they should and shouldn't do in the bedroom:

GAY couples in Australia are on the verge of winning equality in tax, health, superannuation, aged care and other areas as the Federal Government moves to rush through laws to overturn same-sex discrimination. Read more »

You know those days when nothing you say comes out right, when you can't finish a sentence properly, when you even find yourself making dad jokes?There's one thing worse: when other people don't notice any difference.

Those who say discrimination against gay people has already ended and what are the poofs complaining about now honestly they can't just want equality because don't they have equality already I'm sure they do in every important way except perhaps the word marriage, might want to consider this point made by Justice Kirby yesterday: Read more »

Actually, I'll leave you with a photo of Polly and an associate, immediately prior to some feline crankiness:You can guess what happened next.

Don't worry! Of course I'm not going to leave you for the long weekend with a post about boring old Andrew Landeryou! You deserve better than that.I'll leave you with a post about insurance instead.A friend of mine, having her car written off recently due to some idiot ploughing into the back of her at 70kph whilst she was stationary in heavy traffic (yes, ouch), went to make a claim via her RACV comprehensive insurance. And discovered: Read more »

Well, there you are. The torch went through Canberra and there was nothing but cheering and support for the Olympics, the regime in China, and the combination thereof.Look at the photographs on www.gov.cn.Not an unhappy person amongst them.

"Dummies"? That's a bit harsh, surely? Politically naive, perhaps. Easily-led, probably. Fun for News Ltd to patronise, apparently.But surely they're not dummies.

You can only applaud the state recognising a clear need and providing more ambulances:

The Victorian Government has announced a $185 million overhaul of the state's ambulance services, including two new helicopters, under a merger of rural and metropolitan organisations.Under the four-year plan, to be funded in the coming state budget, 260 extra paramedics will be employed across the state. Read more »

This is a horrendous crime:

A man was punched unconscious and had his head jumped on several times during a vicious assault in the front yard of his home in Melbourne's north at the weekend. Read more »

This isn't a post, it's a link, but if you're interested in American politics and you haven't been reading Fred Clark, you're missing out. Here's his piece, today, on the charge of "elitism" being directed at Barack Obama for daring to point out the ways in which certain people are deliberately hoodwinking the poor. Better than any other commentary I've read on the subject, anyway. Read more »

Envelope made of and filled with paper, received from Telstra today: Read more »

The initial report of the 2020 summit is OUT!And the ideas have been extraordinary!Look at some of the solutions proposed:

• Do good things;
• Try to make people happier;
• Have a good economy rather than one that's shit;
• Avoid doing bad things;
• Try to be a clever country, rather than a stupid one;
• Make sure everyone has health, preferably good; Read more »

In exciting authoritarian police state news, new ludicrously over-the-top anti-graffiti laws came into effect in Victoria yesterday.

Police Minister Bob Cameron said graffiti vandals charged under the tough new laws could be imprisoned for up to two years and face a fine of more than $26,000. Read more »

The puppehs born three weeks ago have grown a little, and opened their eyes:Permission to awww, granted.

Say you wanted to do some high-level physics experiments that were likely to reveal all sorts of exciting things about the nature of the Universe, and the way to do that was to build a large hadron collider.And say there was a minor chance you could obliterate the entire planet. Read more »

Ah, excellent.

THOUSANDS of Chinese Australians are being asked to converge on Canberra next week to rally and defend the Olympic torch against pro-Tibet protesters.The mass campaign is being organised by Chinese student and community leaders in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, while the Chinese embassy in Canberra is also said to be actively supporting a peaceful show of strength. Read more »

I was too busy today to write a blog post, sorry. (My name is Jeremy and it's 28 hours since I last blogged.) And it's too late to write a proper one now.But before I go to sleep, I'd like you to watch these two exciting and uplifting videos about recent achievements in robotics.Creepy faces: Read more »

Lovely to see young Chinese people out on the weekend protesting against their government's international policy. Of course, they were Australian Chinese people, protesting in Australia against the Australian government's policy on China, not Chinese people in China protesting against the Chinese government's policy on anything whatsoever. Don't be silly! Read more »

Don't you hate it when you're in a hurry and all of a sudden the inanimate objects with which you have to interact before you can get out the door pick THAT moment to become unwieldy and difficult to manage? Damn those things whose inconvenient movement is entirely my own fault. WILL YOU STOP ROLLING ALL OVER THE BATHROOM. Read more »

Obviously it's easy to have a certain schadenfreude regarding Tabcorp and Tattersalls, squealing like stuck pigs at losing their lucrative (lucrative) duopoly over the state's poker machines. I find I can bear the suffering of their shareholders - people who took direct financial advantage in the exploitation of addicts - as the share price plummets with equanimity. Read more »

Sometimes someone is so comprehensively defeated that they start to believe the lies that defeated them. Such a man is Greg Barns, whose involvement in the 1999 republic referendum as political campaign director of the Australian Republican Movement was not entirely a success, but who appears now to have come to believe the powerful lie of his opponents that what he and others had then proposed was, in fact, a "politicians' republic". Read more »

Wow. Even despite his refusal to make a stand on China's abysmal human rights record, Kevin Rudd's still in trouble with them:

KEVIN Rudd has become entangled in the international row over China and human rights abuses, with Beijing lodging a formal complaint to Australia about the Prime Minister's comments on Tibet before his arrival in China today. Read more »

Score! We've eked the incest story out for another day!Please, please, please someone - find another twist. We don't ever want to let this one go.

Kevin's keeping his options open:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have said they will not go to the opening ceremony [of the Olympic Games] unless China meets conditions that include beginning negotiations with Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.Mr Rudd said yesterday he had told the Chinese that he was not in a position to confirm whether he would go. "It would depend entirely on time constraints," he said. Read more »

No, we didn't. BoltWatch will remain, right where it is, a historical monument to three years of resigned and reluctant Boltwatching.But it will remain there only as a mummified corpse, with posts (and, eventually, comments) frozen in time. Nothing further will be added to it. Its task is done, and it retires with a sense of relief.Because it has been replaced. Replaced by its zippier, more exciting, better-designed, thoroughly improved offspring - Read more »

What a bloody gimme for the Government. I know it's been effectively ridiculed elsewhere already, but Brendan Nelson's decision this week to jump in on the side of rapacious banks, pretty much no matter what they do, has to be about the stupidest political decision an Opposition Leader has ever made in the history of parliamentary democracy. Read more »

Grieving father of two teenage girls killed in in Mildura in 2006, Terry Hirst, on Monday's sentencing of Thomas Towle, the driver who killed them and four others:

"[If prior convictions had been admitted to the jury] it would have been a different outcome for us." Read more »

I am sick of all the snarky disingenuousness of this site. The unrelenting sarcasm. The constantly saying things I obviously don't mean, in an ironic tone. As if that's an excuse. Read more »

(This could be the last time either of them is ever mentioned here.)

BoltWatch is in the process of being prepared for a relaunch. The new version will be collaborative (given my recent "dear God do I have to read the rantings of that idiot? No? Someone else is prepared to? Thank the Lord" approach to the site), will feature a better visual design (read: "an actual visual design"), and generally make the site's first iteration look embarrassingly amateurish (read: not change the way the site is viewed in the slightest). Read more »

I drove past this sign the other day: Read more »

You know what's really unfair? The way the western media refuses to credulously accept whatever we tell them. We keep them away from anyone who'd dare express an opposing view. We show them edited footage from events and explain to them that the bits we cut out were irrelevant. And yet they still don't just take our word for it! Read more »

You know how certain people from a certain political side which shall remain nameless are responding to Saturday's "Earth Hour" switch-off campaign by childishly vowing to do the opposite? Read more »

It's good to see a transport minister who's prepared to make the tough calls:

Ms Kosky also pleaded for drivers to be more careful when approaching any of the state's level crossings, which have the nation's worst fatality record. Read more »

There's an impression out there that this blog never focuses on the good news. On the ways the world is getting better. Read more »

An achievement over at BoltWatch:

In my opinion, one of your best posts on this blog... Read more »

Visited the family yesterday for Easter, which was nice. We had a delicious lunch, a light-hearted and thoroughly enjoyable argument about what an angry man I seem to be on the blog, and admired the very pregnant dog of theirs. I mused tentatively that it was sad I didn't have room for one of the puppies, only to have a brilliant solution suggested. Why don't I get rid of Polly? Read more »