"...you're a parliamentarian, in Australia, who believes that the world you live in is less than 10,000 years old...?"

An absolute pleasure, last night, while flicking through the small selection of terrestrial channels we have to choose from here in Australia, past the uninspiring Oscars coverage and dull US drama imports, to stumble across Richard Dawkins on Q and A, the ABC's local version of Question Time.

If you watch this clip from the start of the show, you may be struck as I was by the gulf between Dawkins and the rest of the guests--juxtaposed with someone who can speak so articulately, the politicians on the panel seem spectacularly incapable of stringing a coherent argument together to explain their daft beliefs.

Steve Fielding, sitting to Dawkins' left, came across particularly poorly by contrast, I thought.

People voted for this man?

Now I know that voting is compulsory here in Australia so it's not like anyone went the extra mile out of their way to elect him, but do you really mean to tell me that there were choices and people chose him over the other candidates? Who was he up against?

[I see from his website that he's also a Climate Change Denier, which is nice--I still don't quite get how anyone in Australia can deny climate change. It's a little bit like the turkeys voting for Christmas, because if there's anywhere that's going to bear the brunt of the increasingly extreme wacky weather we have to look forward to as a result of screwing up the planet, it's surely Australia...]

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Insulted by Spam

So I just received the following message from teh interwebs:

------------------------------------------------
From: Jennifer Holmstrum
To: Matt
Subject: I am worried about you Matt

Hi Matt,

Please listen to me on this.

You can either continue on the path that you
are on right now?

Or you can make a positive change that will
reward you for years to come.

Matt, I am talking about your career.

Go here right now and see how easy
it is to become a professional.

[SPAM LINK]

Jennifer,

PS This might not be the first time you have
thought of doing this, but it could be the first
time that it was actually possible. ;-)
------------------------------------------------

Sheesh. "See how easy it is to become a professional?" Thanks, The Internet. What are you trying to say? Is it because I is always twittering during work hours?

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The Day We Bought The Bank A House

There's a well thumbed copy of a book called Everything You Need To Know (But Forget To Ask) When Buying Or Selling Property sitting on the table beside my bed. According to the book it is not uncommon to wake up the day after you buy a house thinking "oh god, what have we done?"

Buyer's Remorse, they call it.

Maybe this will set in later, but on Sunday morning--the day after we bought the bank a house--the first thought to enter my head was not one of remorse but amazement. "I can't believe I bought a house at auction yesterday!" I thought to myself when I woke up, with a grin.

It's certainly an odd way to buy a house. Although Australia-wide there are plenty of houses bought and sold by private sale, in Melbourne (and inner Melbourne at that) the vast majority of property changes hands through public auctions right there in the street outside the house, just like on Neighbours that time when they sold Mrs Mangel's or Number 30 or whichever one it was.

Saturday was a big day for us--with the place we were interested in going under the hammer at 1pm, we got some practice in by attending three other auctions beforehand that morning. None of these were houses we wanted to buy, but I had previously been inside all of them and thought it would be a good idea to get in the right mindset for the job ahead, and pick up a couple of tactics from some of the other bidders (although as we were advised by Sal's sister earlier in the week the only tactic that really works every time is "have more money than everyone else"--I'm not sure that's necessarily something you can pick up in a morning).

We weren't the only people who had turned up just to watch, though. At our second auction of the day, in Yarra Street in Abbotsford, The Age had sent a photographer and Channel Nine had sent a reporter and cameraman to interview one of the agents and film people shouting out numbers in the street. Clearly a slow news day in Melbourne.

As I Twittered at the time, I had to resist the strongest of urges to run past the interview being filmed beforehand shouting "Eddie McGuire's a Prick!" Somehow I managed to keep this childish thought to just myself and anyone who might be following my twitter stream or facebook status...

By the time our one came round, any confidence I might have had earlier in the week had well and truly gone, as we'd seen all three properties sell for well over their advertised price and well over our budget. Still, we headed over to the house and took up a position over the road in amongst a crowd of about 50 or so people spread along the street, and waited for what seemed like an age as the minutes counted down to 1pm.

In the end it proved to be remarkably easy to spend more money than I have ever spent on a single thing in my entire life (most of which I don't even have). There was a point just before I entered the bidding when I was suddenly struck by the fear that I wouldn't be able to say the words (what if I opened my mouth and nothing came out? what if I let someone else buy it for less money than we were prepared to pay just because I didn't get in a bid in time?) but luckily I hadn't lost the power of speech and I managed to yell out (possibly a little too loudly--I think a lady to my left gasped when I shouted the amount) a number a couple of thousand dollars above the current bid. And once I was in there was nothing to it--by that point there was only one other bidder left and we were only going up in $1,000 increments, at some way under what we were prepared to pay for the place, so it was quite easy to just keep nodding my head and putting it back onto the other bidders. We were competing against an older couple who we later found out were buying for their daughter. Every time the bid went back to them the wife would shake her head as if that was it for them, but then after a pause the husband would bid again. But then they reached their limit and stopped, and after the longest pause of the day so far, ("are we all done? is there anyone else? any more bids...?") a small piece of Collingwood (a much underrated but very central suburb bordered by cool Smith Street and close to Brunswick Street) was ours. *

Still can't believe it, though.



* By which I mean we bought 10% of it. It might be ours in 2035, if we're lucky...

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We hope we have not affected any essential plans you have made.

So I thought I'd give supermarket home delivery a go for the first time here in Oz. Generally a seamless experience, and pretty similar to the service back in the UK, but with the additional step that they send you an email when they pack the order to tell you if everything was available:

From: Coles Customer Care
To: Matt
Subject: Out of Stock Email

Dear Matthew Armstrong,

We're emailing to apologise that some of the items you ordered are temporarily unavailable. They are indicated on the following checklist:

Order Item
Carmans Muesli Bars Apr/Almond

We hope we have not affected any essential plans you have made.

[snip]

Well, Coles Online. Yes I did have some "essential plans" for my museli bars. I was planning a long evening in with just me and my museli, but now that's just not going to happen, is it?

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Gems From Today's The Age

Clearly The Age have given up on proof reading altogether...

"Gangland daughter Katie Peirce found dead":

Mr Ser, an outreach worker with the Father Bob Maguire Foundation, told The Age in the statement that rumours of the overdose "are yet to be made official".

He said the family were dismayed at the rumours "as it is totally out of character for her to have died from an alleged overdose".

Er. Yeah. I'm pretty sure she's never died from an overdose before...

"Flying off the handle: a day with the Dalai Lama, a night with Jetstar":

"I'd just spent three days with the Dalai Lama and just looked at him really dismissively and said 'f--- off' and we kept going," she said.

That's not a very nice way to treat the Dalai Lama, now, is it?

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