Can we fix it? It seems we have no choice, quite frankly

My life appears to have settled into a steady pattern of awesome weekends interspersed between truly freakin’ awful weeks. And oh my goodness was today a fine example of that YES IT WAS.

I plan to focus on the weekends, since the bits in between are way too ugly to record, and I would much rather write about the good stuff. So, in the near (or at least foreseeable) future there will be posts about a truly awesome Saturday culminating in dinner with Giggles & Actonb, a very entertaining weekend where I went to a 40th birthday party and a 4th birthday party and I can’t decide which was better (but only one resulted in a deeply humorous text message), and of course a grand final day spent taking excited children for a ride on Puffing Billy rather than watching the first three quarters of a rather depressing football game. This was, of course, followed by a few commiseratory texts to dear friends who had had a very unpleasant afternoon.
However since all of that will take a while to write, this post will be devoted to asking what the freaking hell is up with parents who take their children to Bunnings?

I have been spending rather a lot of time at Australia’s most frighteningly large hardware store lately, as apparently anyone who lacks for projects around the house need only leave a four year old child unsupervised for a minute or two. This would explain a recent trip to buy a door latch because to open our front door one must turn the handle clockwise whilst simultaneously turning the deadlock counterclockwise and a certain smartypants has figured that out. As we do not have a front fence, the idea of our children getting out the front door unaccompanied is remarkably unacceptable.

That little project was easy enough. More complicated was dealing with the after effects of said four year old running full tilt into a sliding door and breaking several of the bits that make it slide. And back to Bunnings we went.

A very nice man pointed me towards the items I needed, explained how to fit them to the rest of the door, and politely pretended not to notice my increasingly blank expression. He concluded by explaining that all I would have to do after installing the runners would be to electrify the door so that children would learn not to run into it, and smiled politely when I asked in which aisle I would find the necessary kit.

So, after a quick dash to the bathroom (which we will skip over, pausing only to note that I am starting to dread the phrase "Hey daddy, I’ve got a great idea") it was off to the playground and the inevitable fun that follows.

So, I must ask, what sort of insane parent says to a four year old "Hey, why don’t you stay and play here by yourself, I’ll be back in a while"? My first act on arriving at the playground was to persuade young Alex (for that, I later learned, was his name) that, even though it was possible for him to walk out through the childproof gate when I openned ito let my kids in, and he had, he probably should actually come back into the playground area rather than running around a big hardware store entirely unsupervised.

I’m glad he agreed, since if he hadn’t, I’m not sure what I could have done to stop him. I do know there are very few stores with more sharp things per square metre, not to mention easy access to a busy carpark and even busier major road out the front.

Also, I’m not one for stranger danger style hysteria, but, quite frankly, any parent who sees me hanging around a children’s playground should perhaps at least check that at least one of the children there knows me before leaving their children alone in my company.

Bundle and Cherub look absolutely nothing like me and were some distance away and inside a tunnel, so why any parent would take one look at me and think "Hey, I think my kids should hang around with that guy" is beyond me. I know I'm not a complete psycho, but they don't.

I am not actually going to grab someone else’s child and do a runner, but it is appalling to consider just how easy it would be. It takes Bunnings staff 10 minutes to turn up when all you want is someone to cut a piece of shadecloth to length. Would you bet your child’s safety on their response time being any better in the case of an abduction attempt?

In the case of young Alex, the scariness only increases when you consider that within two minutes of my arrival at the playground he was chatting happily to me and calling me ‘daddy’. If I ever find one of his parents, I may have a few suggestions to make about some fundamentals of responsible parenting.

Still, in the end all was well. Bundle breathlessly informed me that he had made a new friend named Alex (but not the same one I mentioned earlier), I eventually tracked down someone who agreed to sell me some shadecloth, the lawns got mowed, and we can open and close the door to the study once more.

Now, if I can just get through this week without going utterly mental, I will be able to post about everything else that has been going on, and soon.

Al'Thor

Does anyone else miss those posts full of random and often stupid dot points? I KNOW I DO.

Lets get on with that important work.

• For years, I worried that I was not musically educated enough because I had no idea who Louis Burdett was. It took me until this week to discover that he is just some Sydney musician who knows Tim Freedman and who is, apparently, less than thrilled that a song written about him last decade is still way more famous than he is.
• Now that I think about it, it's possible that none of Tim Freedman's friends were entirely thrilled about that song.
• If you were taking your very young children to the zoo for the first time, and you started chatting to the guy you parked next to because he also had young kids, would you, in the short time it took you to get from the carpark to the main gate, tell him all about the fight you just had with your husband because his parents insisted that he go off to find firewood with them even though you had been planning this zoo trip for ages and had put it off several times so he wouldn't miss it and now he wasn't there anyway?
• If you did do that, would you be a little bit pissed if you ever found out that I put that story on the internet?
• The zip on my suit pants got so comprehensively stuck this morning that it took two hours to sort it out. I guess it's good that, after 35 years on this planet, in which time I thought I had experienced pretty much every available emotion, it was good to feel something entirely unique. It would have been better of that feeling was not best described as "Trapped in my own pants"
• Louis Burdett could probably swap a few stories with Marty Jones from California. For those who don't immediately recognise the name, Marty Jones was in every band that Adam Duritz played in before Counting Crows. It can't have escaped Marty's notice that his buddy Adam wrote a song about a couple of unsuccessful musicians dreaming about being famous, the result of which is that now one of them is, but it's not the one the song was named after.
• It's good to see that I'm not the only one who realised that the fastest way to irritate Malcolm Turnbull would be to say the word 'republic' on his first day as leader.
• Games invented by my children in recent weeks include "Pillow on You" and "That's not a beach, that's my head". A full list, possibly with explanations, will be posted on WDTAOK when I remember to do it.can be found on WDTAOK RIGHT NOW
• I'm not sure which is worse for my musical credibility - not knowing much about the Whitlams or knowing way too much about Counting Crows. It doesn't matter because, judging by the react I got from a couple of fellow bloggers when I revealed this snippet in an email chat last week, I will lose any last shread of credibility I may have once had when I reveal that I once played in a band that did a heck of a good cover of "Paradise City"

And that's it for now. At some stage, there will be a more coherent post about the most interesting weekend I just had, and, in particular, about a very fun evening with the two incomparably awesome young ladies better known to the internet as Actonb and Gigglewick.

And, really, props to them just for showing up after the Paradise City revelation.

A very happy rest of the week to you all.

The gold of the early sourdough's dreams

And we're back, just in time for the Republican National Convention. For an event that I was planning to ignore entirely, this has turned out to be an absolute barn-burner. Anyone who thinks Christian fundamentalists have no sense of humour will surely have to reconsider now that it's been revealed that John McCain's selection of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate was not, as wildly suspected, a stroke of genius from a bold, independent politician with a gambler's instincts and the nerve of a barbary pirate, but a last minute compromise forced on an unpopular candidate who can't even get his own party behind him a few weeks out from an election. And yes, it was America's ever admirable Christian Right leading the charge of the Palinistas.



Let's look at how its working out for them, so far.



Things started well. How could America not fall in love with the obscurity to riches story of Sarah Palin, the former high school basketball star who was once voted "Ms Congeniality" in the Ms Alaska competition, and who has now gone from Mayor of Wasilla to nominee for VP in a remarkably small number of years. And if that wasn't enough to love, she is married to Todd, an an oil worker, commercial fisherman and champion snowmobile racer, known to Alaskans as, quite seriously, The First Dude.



I haven't researched whether he had this nickname before his wife became the Governor but a blogger can dream.



Maybe's it's the last minute appointment and the lack of time for the usual, rather thorough, background checks, but there have been a couple of rough patches since.



Let's start with her belief that teaching abstinence prevents teen pregnancies. Let us avoid all cheap shots concerning the pregnancy of Governor Palin's 17 year old daughter, as common sense alone tells us that anyone who thinks that teaching abstinence will work wonderfully well is a little bit nuts.



Now, I'm not suggesting that it is impossible to make it through one's teenage years without ever having sex. For some of us, it was depressingly easy to achieve this. What I am suggesting is that, in a two horse race between a not quite 100% effective contraceptive device and the self control of a bunch of ecstacy popping teenagers huddling together for warmth in the middle of a cold Wasilla winter, I know where my money would be safest.



And the revelations have kept on coming since.



It turns out that Governor Palin couldn't quite make it through her first speech after becoming the presumptive nominee without telling lies about a bridge that no-one has ever heard of and which was never actually built.



Next, whilst I still refuse to make jokes about the teenage pregnancy thing, there is little that more clearly illustrates the McCain campaign's lack of background checking and general ignorance of all things internet-related than the MySpace antics of Governor Palin's future son in law.



If I quote The Age precisely, young Levi Johnson 'describes himself as a as a "f***in redneck" who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes'.



He helpfully adds "I don't want kids".



And he's still not done.


"I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some s- - - and just f - - -in' chillin' I guess," he wrote before his MySpace page was removed. "Ya f - - - with me I'll kick [your] ass."



How can this young man expect to support a wife and child when he can't even afford a fully functional keyboard?



My absolute favourite part of this story is the quote from his mother, also in The Age:



The boy's mother, Sherry Johnston, told Associated Press there had been no pressure put on her son to marry Miss Palin



Really? No pressure?





And still the fun kept coming on Monday, with reports that Governor Palin is a former member of the Alaska Independence Party.


This may not actually be true. From Wikipedia:



Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the presumptive 2008 Republican Party nominee for Vice President of the United States, attended the state party's 2000 convention while she was still mayor of Wasilla. Lynnette Clark, the party's current chairwoman, also said that Palin attended the party's 1994 convention, a year after party patriarch Joe Vogler died, but the John McCain campaign denies this. Clark and other members also claimed Palin was actually a member of the party in the mid-1990s, but Alaska Division of Elections records show Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982. Palin recorded a message welcoming party members to its 2008 convention as Governor of Alaska.On September 2, 2008, the political website Talking Points Memo reported that Palin's husband, Todd, was a registered party member from 1995 through 2002.





Wikipedia also tells us that party founder Joe Vogler once announced "I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions." I'm not sure this sentiment is going to help Governor Palin attract votes in the other 49 states.





It's impossible to learn that there is an Alaska Independence Party and not immediately want to find out more, so here's a few more fun facts from their official website.



Pretty much the first thing you will read there is that:



We are not affiliated with any political party with a similiar sounding name in other parts of the United States.



Yes, they really did say that.



The FAQ page is also quite the page turner. For example:



Q: Would I lose my U.S. citizenship?


A: Depending on the form of independence, several forms of citizenship would be possible, including the retention of U.S. citizenship or dual citizenship. However, considering the moral, educational, and economic decay of the U.S., Alaskans' who hold themselves to a higher standard might very well decide to at least maintain an arm's length distance from a country in decline.



Again, I'm not sure that one is going to play so well anywhere except Alaska. And since there are 111,526 registered Republicans and 66,218 registered Democrats in Alaska, I'm not sure that it quite counts as a battleground state. Just for the record, there are 13,542 registered members in the Alaska Independence Party, making it the state's third largest.



Still, it's nice to know that these people maintain some contact with reality. Question 2 on the FAQ page relevantly asks:



Q: Aren't most Alaskan Independence Party members a bunch of radicals and Kooks?


A: The party has its share of individualists, in the grand Alaskan tradition. No longer a fringe party, the A.I.P. is a viable third party with a serious mission and qualified candidates for elected offices.



I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the party may have slightly more than its share of individualists, particularly since a number of members answer the question of what to do after seceding from the USA with a very simple solution.



Join Canada.



There is enough gold to last a lifetime on that website, but let's leave it there for now, except to note that Alaska has an Anthem. And yes, it will be found at the end of this post.

Really, it's not that bad a choice. There is something wonderfully encouraging, and utterly startling, about the Republicans choosing a woman with five children as their proposed VP instead of telling her to stay home and look after the kids. And the New York Times are complete punks for questioning whether it's responsible for a mother with a very young child to run for high political office. The First Dude will be home with the kids, which makes this no different to a man with a young child running for VP while his wife stays home, except that the New York Times appear to be too stupid to see that.

Certainly, we won't be using the choice of Governor Palin as a reason for questioning John McCain's judgment. No, we will question his judgment because he wanted to choose Senator Joseph Lieberman.

It's not exactly surprising that this was not popular with the Republican Party, given that Joe Lieberman has run for VP once before.

In 2000.

With Al Gore.

Had the Republican Primaries gone slightly differently that year, he would have been running against a Republican ticket headed by, yes, John McCain.

Senator Lieberman also contested the Democratic Primaries as recently as 2004, although it is possible that few people noticed, as he came pretty close to last, well behind John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards and Cyril the pet pick who got entered by his stoned owner for a $10 bet.

None of this, however, is the real reason why Senator Lieberman should be kept as far from the Oval Office as possible. No, it's something he said during his (very) brief appearance in the 2004 Primaries. After gathering about 2% of the vote in New Hampshire, he announced that he was very optimistic about winning the nomination.

Why?

Because his campaign had "Joementum"

I swear I am simply not creative enough to make that up. He really, really said it.

Words fail me but not, saints be praised, half as much as they fail Senator Lieberman.

And so, as we sit back and wait to see what the Republicans do next, we present the musical stylings of Marie Drake and Elinor Dusenbury, writers of the finest anthem in all of Alaska:

Eight stars of gold on a field of blue

Alaska's flag. May it mean to you

The blue of the sea, the evening sky,

The mountain lakes, and the flow'rs nearby;

The gold of the early sourdough's dreams,

The precious gold of the hills and streams;

The brilliant stars in the northern sky,

The "Bear" the "Dipper" - and, shining high,

The great North Star with its steady light,

Over land and sea a beacon bright.

Alaska's flag - to Alaskans dear,The simple flag of a last frontier.



A Native lad chose the Dipper's stars

For Alaska's flag that there be no bars

Among our culture. Let it be known

Through years the Native's past has grown

To share life's treasures, hand in hand,

To keep Alaska our Great-Land;

We love the northern midnight sky,

The mountains, lakes and streams nearby.

The great North Star with its steady light

Will guide all cultures, clear and bright,

With nature's flag to Alaskans dear,

The simple flag of the last frontier.