From the Sublime to ....

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!

 

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.

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!!

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?

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.