Thursday 26 October 2017

From the Sublime to ....



Shane the Concert-Goer
Shane the Concert-Goer

G'day Possums,


Mrs Wombat and I were gifted concert tickets for Richard Tognetti's Australian Chamber Orchestra performance last night.
What a cracking lot of musos.. bouncing around, working off each other with impeccable timing and making things heard many times before, alive and refreshing in a programme including....


Olli Mustonen's Nonet No2, a sonorous lyrical piece  repeatedly asking the same question till dancing to a resolution...

Beethoven's Grosse Fugue, Op.113  just, WOW! Wholly contemporary music composed in 1825 ....

Shostakovich's Prelude and Scherzo, Op.11 edgily Soviet constructivist but  emotional and full of drama...

and

P.I.Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, Op 70 happily transposing Russian folk idiom to a sunnier clime with a cracking finish.

A glorious night of superbly played music, thank you, Wombat gels!
 
Lawrence Winder: Still-Life

Well that was the sublime... now to our ridiculous ruling rabble;  that mongrel cabal that a/ : "...couldn't get a root in a brothel", and b/: "couldn't sell a meat tray in a Pub raffle" which is showing increasing signs that the "Kangaroos are loose in the top paddock".
Where to start with this hysterically funny (if it wasn't so serious for the nation) week of own goals, mis-steps and plain poor administration.

Lawrence Winder: Still-Life

In the week when the very last cars were manufactured in Australia, the Ruling Rabble who obliterated these thousands of jobs (when there is one position for every seventeen unemployed) and who might well have been advised to keep their heads down and look competent for once doing nothing, decided to announce after 5 years of allegedly being in charge that they now had what could pass for, in a darkened room, an energy policy.
Tossing aside two years work and the advice of the Chief Scientist and instead approving the month old new panel of "experts" who effectively said, Coal is OK, gas is good, Pumped Hydro (even though twenty years away) is lovely.. and re-newables ..eerrr... well I suppose we could have sixpence worth of those too, but forget a clean energy target!
Gushing with pride at their momentous achievement of a Final Solution, Environment and Energy mal-administrator, Fictions Frydenberg and Prime Miniature Truffles fanfared their brillance telling all that by 2020 we might save 50cents a day on our electricity bills now that they, in their heads had the energy market sorted.
Unfortunately it has been announced that banks are now going to pull funding from renewables as Truffles' "fix" creates market uncertainty and eventually this will mean higher not lower prices.

Defending himself against criticisms that the "...finshed earlier in 2016..." National Broadband Network he converted from fibre-optic to copper lines between two tin cans was a dud, Truffles said that in hindsight Labor had made a mistake in even thinking that Australia needed such a service when carrier pigeons were almost as efficient and The Ugly American Murdoch was happy his Foxtel cable had less competition.

The Happy-Clapper Pretend Treasurer who spouts more bullshit than the Werribee sewage farm, Scummo Morriscum agrees with the productivity commission and thinks that education and health are fragmented...and to fix them, doctors and teachers should be payed by their results. Well, well...I wonder who did that fragmentation of these public systems in the first place and will further privatising them provide a solution...?? Oh, come in spinner!!

Lawrence Winder: Still-Life

In the Vindictive Stakes (it is the racing season, after all) two candidates stand out. Michaelia The Harpy, Cash and Uncle Otto's great nephew, Eric Vichy Abetz.
Both these stables are concerned that activist filly, "Get-Up" is streets ahead of them in pace and tactics and wish to handicap this brazen filly, nobbling it's popularity with the betting public before the odds of them winning their respective saddles become any longer.
Devising a carnival of their own The Harpy (whose voice has all the mellifluousness of a thousand Sulphur Crested Cockatoos at sundown in Summer) and Vichy (who loves uniforms and thuggery) invited the Australian Federal Police to visit the Australian Workers Union offices simultaneously in both Sydney and Melbourne to peruse a form guide as to how much money the AWU bet on Get-Up and also on the opposition leader and outsider, Willie Shortstuff some 10 or 11 years ago.
Waiting to film the arrival of AFP stewards to read the form guide were the media. Now, as this carnival was supposed to be an in-house nobbling, the media being there before the wallopers sort of gave the game away, particularly as the form guide in question had already been handed to a Royal Commission years ago and its tote had added up.
So was this a replay of the AFP raid on Senator Conroy's (Labor) home for the supposed leaked track tactics material of the dud NBN back in March or was it a replay of "Ute-Gate" that got Truffles such a scratching in 2009 when his ride, Godwin Grech was found to be unsound?
Lawrence Winder: Still-Life


The track suddenly became heavy when in parliament The Harpy was asked 5 times did she or who in her stable leaked the carnival event to the media. She denied riding that day. Unfortunately one of the media blew "starters' on her by naming a senior jockey in her stable. The Harpy demurred saying she knew as much about that as she did about not putting her fourth new  million dollar +house on the parliamentary register.
The senior jockey has been banned (he was retiring any way... how convenient) but the owner so far, only mildly chagrined and the AFP Stewards: who knows what they think of being such obvious tools for such a rabble?
The Westminster Stakes will no longer be held in Australia till a new season perhaps, puts better talent and stayers on the track.
Hoo-roo Petals,
Shane.
PS: The effort to nobble Get-Up has resulted in thousands more joining its fan club and as many tens of thousands of dollars more in its kitty.

Monday 16 October 2017

The Cretinization of Oz.


Shane picking up the pieces.
Shane picking up the pieces.
G'day Possums,

as the ruling rabble shambles increases we hear that defence secrets have been hacked over a 16 month period... "Nothing to see here......(again)" prissily spouts the Whyne and Perfect Prat of a Prefect, Pyne "It's not our fault." Then beady eyed Tudge of Robo-Debt infamy explains why an international security company managing the refugee gulags on Manus and Nauru, Serco, is the ideal entity to handle phone calls from the unemployed and welfare recipients after 1200 Australian staff were made as redundant as auto manufacturing workers.

Rabid-the-Hun, frothing at the mouth with like minded troglodytes in London droolingly mis-informs us with his cherry-picked "facts" that mitigating the effects of climate change is doing more harm than (that which doesn't really  exist) climate change itself; and further asserts, falsely that a little warming hurt no-one. It's a pity that he didn't have the information that in Australia over the past ten years, deaths due to heat have increased amongst the frail by a factor of 25 or talked with a Californian or Puerto Rican.
In another brilliant Onion-moment bon-mot and displaying the full gamut of his empathy and sensitivity for the sexually abused, Rabid quipped that although he went to a Catlic school he was never targeted for abuse...possibly because he wasn't "attractive" enough.
 
Fresias
Fresias
Australian taxpayers stupidly, are footing a bill of more than $130,000 a day to renumerate the Ruling Rabble's legion of barristers as it fights to salvage seven administrively incompetent  ministers, including Deputy Prime Miniature, Barnyard Joyce.
Apparently the final cost of paying the 24 barristers over the course of the "citizenship seven" case could end up as much as $2 million for the Snouts in the Trough. Meals on wheels downgraded, medical fees up .... privatised electricity charges going through the roof,  penalty rates for hospitality workers slashed, industry superannuation funds and other penalty rates under severe attack, further talk of the privatisation of education and now we have to pay for these incompetent federal bastards legal bills?
Fresias

Economic body’s Fiscal Monitor shows Australia’s 30-year inequality growth is similar to the US, India, China and the UK.  Last month the pretend treasurer, Scummo Morrison opined but refused to release the Treasury analysis that income inequality was not getting worse in Australia, telling his only friends, the Business Council of Australia, that they had found in specific analysis of current wage fundamentals, that Australian wages were growing slowly across most industries in the economy, and most regions of the country, so the slow growth was evenly shared. No wonder he's a "Happy-Clapper," too.
Noted minister for alternative information sources,  Wiki-Ozone-Hole Hunt has decided that Private health Insurance can be 10% cheaper for young people by foregoing  Pilates, Yoga, Bowen's Method and other alternative therapies and medicines.  Based on no cost benefit analysis nor any study of how many millennials will avail themselves of this panacea to private health fund and pharmaceutical profits, or indeed of its efficacy as a remedy, this move only furthers the monopolization effect on treatment. I'm sure that hospitality workers losing their penalty rates, some up to $6,000.00 pa, will be overjoyed at a $0.70c per week reduction in their private health insurance.  And as one well publicly re-numerated mogul from a health insurance company said, "We want to get back to the situation where at least 70% of the population have private health insurance...as they did before Gough Whitlam introduced Medicare."
Isn't it interesting how under the ruling rabble you pay twice for every single service which then becomes increasingly inferior?
Hunt therefore provides further evidence not only of the paucity of Ruling Rabble commitment to public health with another "look-over-there-moment" but also his possible interest in a board seat, post politics!

Truffle's Turnbull's short-winded energy package will be released as soon as Rabid-the-Hun approves the energy committee of cabinet dog's-dinner after clearing  major troglodyte hurdles in The National Party to the policy's release.
Dumping spurned Chief Scientist Alan Finkel's proposal for a clean energy target and instead, returning to a C19th model of electricity generation Truffles is expected to announce vintage Knitting manuals for all and more matches for the coal-fired bar-b-q. In what was supposed to sound a positive note Truffles and Fictions Frydenberg announced that there would be subsidies for turning your air conditioner down or off to which one wit commented that "... would it be acceptable as they currently didn't have an air conditioner, to buy a dud second-hand one and claim the rebate for not switching it on?" Similarly, in the Wombat's Mt Gambier Stone house which rarely exceeds 26C after days of extreme heat can we claim a subsidy for building appropriately for the climate?
Fresias

The ruling rabble were policy bereft before they achieved control and since have only been the most predictable economic, environmental and social debacle possible. And who does one blame ...? Not Labor as they persistently do but The Ugly American, Murdoch, the Biggest Miner, Rinehart and their funded IPA, particularly  its chief proselytiser John, Le Jongleur, Roskam and his bevy of ABC acolytes who continue to muddy waters and misinform at every destructive Quisling step as they lead the Ruling Rabble and nation to oblivion!
The cretinization of the nation under these anti-social, free-marketeers is almost complete but when their time is done, as it nearly is and Labor returns to power attempting to reverse these mongrels last four year's negative actions, I can already hear the self righteous wailing of the Murdoch right wing press chorus telling us again the sky is falling in because equality to them is like a crucifix is to a vampire.
Was once a great country... now perilously close to imploding.
Hoo-roo Petals,
Shane 

Monday 9 October 2017

Trips lost in Translation.

G'day Possums,
the last fortnight has, it seems, been a little marine. 
First, a return to Point Cook and playing "Biggles" in a Tiger Moth and then later the next week Mrs Wombat and I wandered down to Geelong Art Gallery to have a look at their wonderful Fred Williams in the You-Yangs, exhibition.

The last time we saw a collection his work was five years ago and where I blogged it as http://shanewombat.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/searching-for-fred.html


Geelong

This show coincided with the Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards too, where much to my surprise and pleasure (for it's always joyful to see people maintaining their art practice) I came across the work of an acquaintance from college days, Ben Fennessy. His woodblock print "Tower Hill Inside 1 and 2"  was a powerful statement not only of an ancient land but also of its intense environment.
 
Ben Fennessygeelong acquisitive print awards,
TowerHill Inside 1 and 2
Interesting, too was Rew Hanks extraordinarly fine linocut, "The Battle of the Wills" which presented like a Victorian newspaper illustration the clash of cultures still apparent with indigenous people playing "the white-man's-games" as sadly evidenced by Adam Goodes' response to his calling out overt racism.
 
Rew Hanks, geelong acquisitive print awards
The Battle of Wills

Ben Rak's  screenprint, "No Way (safety at sea: Manus Island) points to the current bi-partisan federal hypocrisy of lauding "Aussie values" and the reality of our ongoing cruelty to asylum seekers.

Ben Rak, geelong acquisitive print awards
 "No Way (safety at sea: Manus Island)

Good works in this prize show but I must admit I found the winner of the printmaking residency a bit, too, too "Breaking Bad," conceptually and banally trite in thought.
 
Fred williams in the you-yangs, geelong acquisitive print awards
You Yangs111, 1963
The Williams show which had many print works and watercolours and gouaches as well as oil and tempera was inspiring. We returned three times, each time finding things anew and stimulating with the juxtaposition between etchings, drawings and the final result illuminating as to his process.

Fred williams in the you-yangs, geelong acquisitive print awards
You-Yangs (second series)

Illuminating too, but in a completely cynical way was Senator "Look-at-Moi, Look-at-Moi ", The Show-pony Xenephon's bailing out of the federal sphere prior to his anticipated removal by the high court.
Wishing to save the world from Adelaide by taking over state politics, this most loquacious and apparently dictatorial, proto ruling rabble apparatchik had the misfortune of having one of his selected candidates severely embarrass himself and blot his copy book by shooting really asinine selfies exposing his lack of political credibility in a wax works by molesting the dummies!
Trotted out from The Show pony's stable the twerp in question will probably have no difficulty joining a real ruling rabble after getting a suitable reference from "Slit-her-Throat" Ciobo.
Geelong Art Gallery, Fred williams in the you-yangs, geelong acquisitive print awards
Geelong Art Gallery

Asbestos Jules our peripatetic foreign minister has again been revealed looking like she's fiddling the public purse by attending the AFL grand final instead claiming that "...this internationally renowned sporting code invited me to attend to have a chat.."
Less certain of appropriate government business was her quadruple attendances at her sisters birthdays!
Express 1842

And then Craig Laundy the new owner of an $8,000,000.00 apartment is resisting having flammable cladding removed from buildings echoing his master Truffles opinion that banning the importation of these dangerous materials is scaring people.
I'm sure he meant it was scaring the developers who donate so munificently to the ruling rabble in NSW.
Truffles is allegedly "keenly aware" also of the pain and disappointment people are feeling at his "less-than-Kenya-quality" cock-up of an NBN... although I suspect that the chill breeze of incrementally losing office is really what he is experiencing ....which is not really empathy is it?

And let's finish with the hapless Kelly, Shaduppa-Yo-Face O'Dwyer's mangled attempt on 7.30 to explain why forcing industry superannuation funds to be less productive and as inefficient as private and banking ones for their members is a good thing. The Gel in question gets quite excited when union bashing... almost as much, although thankfully, not as Cockatoo strident as her colleague the Harpy Cash.

Hoo-roo Petals,
Shane

PS  A person some think of as a troll on FB sent me this after he said I should publish something he wrote.. well here ya go... Brian Sanaghan Yeh...You do that...make sure it's about me...  You know one thing I've learnt in politics pilgrim. .Get the narcissists to write shit about me...then let your readers decide to vote for me because they hate you so much...Now..Go ahead...make my day...lol


Tiger Moth
....playing Biggles.