The Blog From Hell

All the blame for this post should be given to @jacobril on twitter.

In a far distant corner of the unfashionable South-Western spiral arm of the Indian Monsoon lies an unregarded yellow-red lump of rock. The ape-like inhabitants of this rock have a problem – in that most of the time nobody else in the world really acknowledges their existence, that their contribution to world culture consists of a guy who catches crocodiles for a living and a wannabe of the same guy who got stabbed in the heart by a fish and that their importance to world politics is almost as big as that of a solar eclipse that is only visible from Jupiters's moon Io. And then suddenly it all changed and the country that most people would be hard pressed to remember  on a typical day came to be the star of every front page in the world…

Not since the place was first founded by criminals were so many people being bailed out. As they rush to save their loved ones you can, in your minds eye, hear their desperate baahs for help superimposed upon the thwack-uh-thwack-ah-thwack-oof-thwack-oooh-thwach-ugh which is a woman's tennis match while Australia manages to dominate both main stream and sports news channels for the first time in it's existence.

And in the far-off distance the outback lies in perpetual baking heat, a kangaroo drinks from the dust-swirled remains of a billabong, a boomerang slices through the air and a snake curls itself around a branch seeking some shelter from the parching sun. On a hilltop a bush ranger sits, the corks around his hat hanging still in the windless air and wonders if somehow they can get a little of that water sent here.

As he stairs up at the cloudless sky, a small pocket radio brings news of the rising waters and he tries to remember what rain even looks like. He turns away from the scene and seeks shelter in the lee of an overhanging rock, retunes the radio to a sports channel and opens his breaches while trying to imagine that what he is hearing is something far more exciting than two steroid pumped power-women hitting a ball back and forth with oversized fly-swatters.

On a nearby island a small marsupial, famed for it's ferocious temper rushes through the underbrush in search of grub and other delicacies utterly unaware that when the rest of the world hears it's name the image that springs to their mind is of a horn-eared, bow-legged creature that spins like a compressed tornado and annoys Bugs Bunny.

In the far off Sidney a politician announces a new law that blatantly discriminates against aborigines and refugees and amidst the chaos of wild cheering ads a few more websites to the blacklist for the giant government censorship program, ensuring that young Australians will never have to suffer the potentially damaging effects of political commentary or women with breasts less than B-cup in size.

As the sun sets over the giant kleenex box honored by the name of opera house and the minds eye pulls back you see ones more the tragedy of human suffering in the floods, the stupidity of purposeless human endeavour on the tennis court and stark contrasts between them. The fortunes paid to the women with skirts shorter than the thickness of their thigh-muscles to be hidden in Swiss Bank Accounts and guarded over by tax attorneys with the social grace of a rabid junkyard rotweiler while other people struggle to protect what little they posses from the fury of nature hoping against hope that political rhetoric would through some previously unobserved magic translate into real aid this time.

And unobserved a man sitting on the far side of the ocean notices all this, contemplates it and writes a horribly tasteless blog like this one about it all as Australia adds yet another minor footnote to the history of the world. One part of him smiling at his puns and clever wordplay and intelligent social commentary, another aghast at the subject of his own humor – and no part strong enough to censor either.