String up the lights and light up the tree
We’re going to make some revelry
Spirits are high, so I can tell
It’s Christmas time in Hell.

“When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter; I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.” (You know that the State of California has a home invasion law where it’s actually legal to shoot someone just for entering your residence—and I mean perfectly legal.  Did you know that? Well, it’s true.) “Away to the window I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.”

From out of the cold dark night he comes, dragged through the bitter abyss by a herd of cloven hoofed beasts, their jagged horns tearing through the winter winds.
An obese, hairy figure of pagan lore, clad in animal hides of the deepest crimson, cracking his whip with a perverse laugh—ho ho ho!
He comes with a list of children who know that bolted doors cannot keep him out.

It’s Christmas in Heaven
There’s great films on TV
The Sound of Music twice an hour
And Jaws I, II, and III.

Last Friday, Smalley totally dressed me down for wishing someone a Merry Christmas. I told him I thought we were supposed to say that, and he was like, “You’re supposed to say ‘Happy Holidays.’ It fosters an environment of religious inclusion.” I got a news flash for you, Smalley: It don’t make no difference if you tell them “Happy Ass Day.” They’re there to get a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree.

O Tuesday Night
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night to watch TV and play cards.
Fall on your knees
And do a jigsaw puzzle
Just stay inside tonight
It’s half past nine.

He knows when you are sleeping
He knows when you’re on the can
He’ll hunt you down and blast your ass
from here to Pakistan.

Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walking home from our house Christmas eve
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa
But as for me and grandpa we believe.

Put on your yarmulke
Here comes Hanukkah
So much fun-ukah
To celebrate Hanukkah
Hanukkah is the festival of lights
Instead of one day of presents, we have eight crazy nights.

Mr Hankey
The Christmas poo
He loves me
I love you
Therefore vicariously he loves you.

All work and no play makes Jack adult boy
All work and no play next decade old boy
All work and no play makes Jack and old boy
All work and no play and makes Jacksonville boy
All work and no play makes Jack and old boy
All work and no play makes jacket and ole boy
All work and no playmates jacket old boy
All work and no play makes Jack and ole boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

One has recently reached the dreaded blog cringe: the moment in the life of every Web journaller [sic] when either he stops posting due to ‘real life’, or realises that perhaps past posts were too unpolished (i.e. crap) to ever have been put online.

As we all know, blogs are due to die a slow and painful death. Syndication allows you to subscribe to thousands of your favourite sites and to be informed whenever they have new content, without ever going to the sites again. This is pretty nifty, but as they say “where is the love?”. I’d conjecture that in fact the love is not there.

The author of a popular RSS-less site tells me it is nice that people have to actually visit the site to see if there is anything new.

Blogs that indulge the author’s need to write about news and current events without discussing his or her personal life will be the first to go. Yes, this means that most LiveJournals are safe for the time being, as people often have a need to transfer their emo feelings to a diary and LJ is simply another medium for that. Thanks, LiveJournal (thiveJournal).

Eventually, the blog cringe will end those ones as well, as more and more people take their blogs offline to stop family members or prospective employers reading them and finding out their secret desires and crazy revenge fantasies.

Indeed I started this journal to give myself an opportunity to write, because neither my study nor my job really required any real writing to be done. That has now changed due to this being my honours year, and thus there is much thesis (and other) writing to do and not quite enough time to do it.

A few people have asked me about honours and some of the questions are answered here, so some of this may be informative so anyone looking to follow the increasingly-seldom-beaten track to an honours year in CS or IT.

So how did you get into honours anyway?

This is a good question. I’m something of a reformed slacker and getting into an honours program generally requires some kind of sustained academic performance. However, IT at UQ only requires you to have an average grade of 4.5 across the final year project (CSSE3004) plus your four most recent ‘third year’ courses. I kicked all kinds of arse in third year so that allowed me to get in. Basically, as long as you got at least 4s and 5s across those five courses, you can get in—it’s as easy as that. Nonetheless there are still very few takers.

What’s your thesis on?

Video similarity search: using video to search for video, as opposed to using text to search for video. Just as one can gauge the similarity of two text documents, by counting the common words for instance, so too can one compare two videos using some measure, from a simple concept like colour or texture to a more abstract one like places or faces. I’m aiming to build a simple video similarity search engine predominantly using techniques that already exist.

Is that a one person project?

Yes; it started with two, but the other guy seems to have cracked the shits with honours after just six weeks and didn’t return to uni after the mid-semester break. I haven’t heard from him since.

Was that a pain?

You bet. It wasn’t a show-stopping problem, but it did scale back the scope of the project to (in my opinion) little more than a glorified assignment with the time I am able to dedicate to it.

Not to give the guy a hard time, I wish him well. But if you are thinking about doing a shared project, choose somebody who you are positive is focused on honours and hasn’t got huge work burdens competing for his time. Ideally this will be somebody you knew and worked well with in previous years.

Would you recommend it?

I’ll just say “know why you are doing it”. I’m doing honours partly to set myself apart from the crowd, and partly to set right my appalling academic record from when I was fresh out of school and didn’t really want to be there. That’s probably good advice for school leavers actually—if you aren’t positive you want to go to uni or are not sure what kind of career you want, it’s better to leave it for a couple of years and go travelling or something, rather than to plunge into it anyway. It’s always important to start with the end in mind. Of course some people do honours as a gateway to a PhD or an academic career, which is not altogether bad if the university atmosphere agrees with you and you’d like to keep working there. At this point, I’d rather get pushed in front of a train.

See you in another six months.

Love,

King Smo

I’ve always been suspicious of digital rights management technology—copy protection on DVDs and CDs, for instance—as something which unnecessarily hampers progress whilst offering no economic benefit. Whenever I want to articulate this position to someone, I just point them toward a talk given by Cory Doctorow on the subject of DRM to Microsoft researchers in 2004. A highlight from the speech:

When MP3 rolled around [...] instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG.

Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. That’s because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, “Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music.” Presented with an alternative, Sony’s customers enthusiastically jumped ship.

He characterises DRM as a matter of market choice, and there’s never been a more important time for consumers to vote with their dollars. If you enjoy your multimedia tech treating you like a potential criminal, then by all means shell out for new computers with stupid garbage like the Trusted Computing Platform.

Doctorow will be speaking in Brisbane on March 31st as part of The Ideas Festival. Tix are $25.00.

If Chinese New Year is on January 29, then logically Chinese Christmas falls on January 22. So, my sincerest season’s greetings to all.

Yes, this is my half-arsed way of acknowledging that my site (or at least its predecessor insom.cx) is, or at least was at some time, banned in the People’s Republic of China, recalling the much-superior Communist Party makeover of Kewn’s World that I can’t seem to find the URL of anymore.

Well may I snicker now, but I have no desire to visit China yet. Someday I might, though, and the idea that I’ve said stuff on my humble Web abode that would get me thrown in the slammer with a guy named Wang is cause for concern. There is a site with more information on Internet filtering in China, including a lot more examples of blocked sites.

You better not breathe
You better not move
You’re better off dead
I’m telling you dude
Santa Claus is gunning you down!

In Japan they call him Annual Gift Man and he lives on the moon.

Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.

What gift do you get for the man who oversees everything?

We are on to you Santa! And we unmask you and heartily rebuke you! Get thee hence from our Christ’s birthday party!

Q: What did Santa say upon entering the house of ill repute?
A: Ho ho ho!

I have nothing substantial to add to the debate about racism or ethnic violence in Sydney. However, there seems to be a widespread belief that anti-Arab racism in Sydney is a result of September 11. Naturally, Australians feel affronted by that event, as we are also part of this kind of anglophone democratic Christendom thing which also comprises the country that was attacked. Subsequently, the Bali bombings happened—carried out by Malays, who are muslim too, and therefore leading us to hate Arabs more.

I believe this article should be compulsory reading for any journalism student before she runs her mouth and damages this country’s reputation any further.

It is a speech by a former detective of New South Wales Police, published in Quadrant last year; a refreshingly honest look at how the nation’s largest police force, castrated by unrealistic crime fighting philosophy and enslaved to gutless political correctness, has let the Lebanese gang problem get out of control, to the point where they are practically above the law, and go around assaulting white Australians for no reason.

Thankfully, I live in Brisbane, where I learned everything I know about Lebanese gangs from the television show Pizza. However, left unchecked, the problem of ethnic gangs could just as easily take root here in the Sunshine State, and I say that because political correctness is not the exclusive domain of our mexican cousins. There’s a sense that cops have to treat different races or religions gingerly, as if they didn’t know they were signing up for the rule of law when they or their parents came to this country, a land where crime is considered naughty, and assaulting the police is a rather stupid move if you want to keep your spleen.

Therefore, whilst I don’t particularly identify with the drunken yobbos of Sydney who are allegedly sticking up for my race, and descending to violence against cops and ambos is wrong and hypocritical, the idea that this racism just plopped fully formed out of a vacuum is a dangerous one.

Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU) will not be passed in time to be implemented in 2006. The legislation in its current form would not only make student union membership voluntary, but also prevent universities from imposing any kind of fee to support campus activities and services. The government would not compensate universities for this.

To this new development I must say, thank the good lord. As recent president of a student society, and current treasurer of one of the sporting clubs, the loss of funds would have been a huge pain in my backside.

Universities are more than qualification factories, they have a cultural character which costs real money to maintain, and an environment which nurtures critical and independent thinking. Opinions on VSU are not simply decided by people’s usual attitudes toward socialism vs. pay-for-it-yourself, but also other factors such as whether the current student union president’s political views accord with their own, or whether they happen to be on the executive of an organisation that gets some of the money.

Therefore, from my obviously biased position, I say to the government, throw all of VSU in the garbage bin, and stop filling people’s heads with misleading garbage about what student unions and sporting clubs do with the money.

There is a metric butt-ton of ‘alternative’ wikis, but occasionally one manages to gather a critical mass of interesting, amusing, or bizarre content, and hence to transcend simply being a refuge for those spurned by Wikipedia editors with the temerity to claim that the term ‘boring gay midget’ is unencyclopaedic.

As we all know, a wiki is a site which allows anyone to add articles, and also to edit articles, even those written by other people. This kind of power gives people a warm fuzzy community feel and can make a site very popular in no time at all.

Alas, popularity can be a curse, namely that of what I would call wiki entropy—a piece of writing edited by dozens is gonna lose pretty much all of the coherence of the original. In other words it turns to complete shit. See creationism, a prime example of why it is often better to link to a particular revision of a wiki article, so you know it won’t change.

It is pretty obvious which side of the creationism debate the author is on, but the subtlety, avoiding bitterness and abuse, makes for a far more acerbic and witty piece. Since it’s a wiki, people see an opportunity to contribute their own funnies, but the result only ends up introducing disorder, much like the retelling of a joke.

A lot of the time the enhancements are tasteless humour; sex, bodily functions, and all that. Being shocking is a lot more difficult when it’s written. Your audience probably isn’t going to read your poofter joke in the same hilarious cadence as you imagined it, and you’ll just end up looking like a homophobe.

Most times though, people simply mistake subtle humour for sarcasm. This is an easy mistake to make, but they simply aren’t the same thing.

Another article on Tom Cruise demonstrates how a deliciously absurd, thinly-veiled ridicule of Scientology turns into a confusing rant where you almost need a magnifying glass to find the laughs.

I’m positive that wikis (or some similar technology) are the future of collaborative Web-based e-parody. But subtlety, people, that is the key.

Simone and Shane Warne are to split, after a 25-year-old woman went to the press with allegations that he begged her for sex, and she begrudgingly complied. It’s all over the news.

A question for the ladies out there—what is it about a tubby, balding Australian cricketer ten years your senior dropping his pants in front of you that gets you percolating in the nether regions?

Is it the fame thing that does it for you? Perhaps the possibility of selling the story to an inquisitive English paper? The overall studliness of Aussie men?

Send me a text message with your thoughts. No, I’m not going to tell you my number.

There’s an article in the Sunday Mail, ‘Students quit over anti-US slurs’, that I found really annoying. And that was just from reading the headline.

American students have told The Sunday Mail the verbal attacks are unbearable and threatening to escalate into physical violence.

Griffith University student Ian Wanner, 19, from Oregon, said abusive Australian students had repeatedly called him a “sepo” — short for septic tank. “It is so disrespectful. It’s not exactly the most welcoming atmosphere here,” he said.

Are you shitting me? If every American student left the country for being called a seppo, the population of Brisbane would be about half of what it is. The fact is that when you are given an irreverent nickname it is often a sign that you’ve been accepted, and I don’t think this kind of humour is peculiar to Australia.

It’s also true that if you are a humourless douchebag and take offence at being called a name, then no matter whether you are in Brisbane, or Portland, people will keep doing it. Don’t you dare come over here and expect my country to tiptoe around your fragile ego.

Unless things have really changed since I was at University—which is still ongoing, but I’m referring more to my 2½ years at a residential college—people are not generally openly hostile toward Americans.

Since then, the war in Iraq has happened, and it was supported by our government just as much as theirs. So I’m going to assume the people abusing American students know why that’s stupid, and move on.

Queensland Anti-Discrimination deputy commissioner Neroli Holmes said the alleged labelling of students as “sepos” could be classed as racial vilification under anti-discrimination laws.

No, dickhead seppo would be vilification. Seppo is just cockney rhyming slang meaning an American person. As with most other ethnic soubriquets it really depends upon the intent of the speaker. I just hope this journalism student hasn’t done any real damage to our city’s reputation, because I happen to feel that American students are treated pretty well here.

Been having fun with this new Google Maps thing. It’s a service where you can look at satellite pictures of the entire world, and pan, zoom in, and zoom out. Some areas have higher quality pictures than others. Check out these classics:

Uluru — low res but still cool (now hi-res!)
Cameron Corner — state borders of South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland meet
Cape Byron — easternmost point on Australian continent
St Lucia — suburb of Kings
Area 51 — nothing to see here
Abu Dhabi — big empty suburbs on the outskirts of the city just waiting for people to build
Chernobyl — deceptively lifelike
Adelaide — the most planned city in the Southern Hemisphere
Canberra — a close second
Superfluous traffic device — in Los Angeles
Almost-as-crazy traffic thing — in Bratislava, Slovakia
Pyramids and suburbia — Cairo, Egypt
Lake Baikal — a lake “bigger than Belgium and almost as dull” (© P.J. O’Rourke)
Lo-res Reykjavik — Iceland, with vast, nondescript plains to the north of the nation’s capital conveniently provided in high quality
Rock-like structure — Gibraltar

Although I’m not sure what the site itself has to offer, the very idea of Free Katie is enough to make me inclined to assist the cause in any way I can.

At first I thought Katie Holmes was just a bit naïve, and we all cringe whenever an old man takes a young, fertile woman out of the market, but that’s the dating game for you. So, I was happy enough for Tom Cruise and the 26-year-old star of such masterpieces as The Gift and Disturbing Behavior to be going out.

Cruise has been telling everyone who will listen what a wonderful woman Holmes is, as she has made it clear that they will not have sex. This is, again, sort of how relationships work.

Now, it is reported that Cruise has converted Holmes to his religion, Scientology. This filled me with a pure, wholesome rage—not the kind that makes you smash your mouse against the desk, or break light poles with your fists, a rage without any physical manifestations.

You miserable bastard. Putting that shit into her head.

So, Free Katie, and send a message to weirdos everywhere to stop propagating their weird brainwash cults.

Having upgraded WordPress, I thought I got rid of Bugs. This post is really just to test a theory that I have—that applying the patch I just downloaded, then posting an article, will fix the RSS problem. Currently, RSS is returning a blank document, which is not good.

So… what’s in the news today?

• Kylie’s cancerous can
• Schapelle Corby and the suspiciously benevolent random Gold Coast businessman
• I have a new iBook
• My favourite (probably) tooth got broken in half by an errant squash racquet. Goggles you would think of as typical squash safety wear, but dude, get a mouthguard if you play this game.
• I think there’s some sort of a row in the gov’t about how a woman was detained for awhile because she wouldn’t give her real name and no one knew who she was

Okay, that’s enough random shit. Hope this works.

Edit: success!

insom.com is back. Please insert liquor.

WordPress 1.5.1 fixes the problems I was having with permalinks—such as the link above this article that says “insom.com — Large and in charge”—as well as the monthly links. They all now work as they should. The other stuff was working anyways and is as such unaffected.

So if your site was shafted by WP 1.5.0, upgrade post haste, and feel the love. Also, enjoy the default Kubrick theme, as I accidentally deleted Old Red in the upgrade.

Now, an introduction to the things that are occupying my time currently, when I’m not posting here:

• COMP3401: Compilers and Interpreters.
• CSSE4004: Distributed Computing.
• INFS3101: Ontology and the Semantic Web. Did you know that a brute fact counts as an institutional fact in a context?
• CSSE3004: Introduction to not committing to a software project that hasn’t been fully planned, scoped, and costed, and the resulting documents signed by all parties, lest the whole thing become a big money hole. I swear that’s its title.
• Incidentally, working on a software project part time. Behold, as this unplanned, ever-expanding money hole sucks time and money like some kind of productivity Hoover.

Stay tuned for partial excitement!!!

I feel compelled to journal a computer problem I had recently, and what I had to go through to fix it, so that it might be Googled and other people might be saved the days of frustration and loss of productivity that I went through whilst trying to figure it all out.

Warning, this is technical and will be exceedingly boring to you unless you are having the same problem.

How I buggered the BIOS up in the first place
My computer has an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. Recently I noticed that a newer BIOS (version 1013) had been out for a few months, so I downloaded and installed it. Yeah yeah, don’t update your BIOS unless it is absolutely necessary, etc. Caution is for chumps.

I did some other things and then rebooted. Windows would not load, however, getting to a point in the loading process (MUP.SYS) at which point the computer would suddenly restart. I thought, “what have I installed recently that might affect Windows?” The only other thing I had done was to re-install Adaptec ASPI driver, as I’d accidentally inserted a copy-controlled audio CD which had quietly removed my computer’s ability to rip CDs.

Pretty cute, EMI, but I’m still going to rip your CDs, so cop it sweet.

I went with the BIOS theory, and long story short, I put the old BIOS file onto a diskette and rebooted. On post, you can press ALT-F2 and it will allow you to flash the BIOS from a file on A: drive. I’d suspected that my A: drive was unreliable, but I figured, if the file doesn’t read properly, the checksum won’t match and the flash program won’t let me proceed, at which point I can just try again until it does read properly.

The problem is, of course, that the flash program reads the file twice—once to check it, and if the check passes, it goes ahead and flashes your BIOS straight from disk. You guessed it, my floppy disk drive choked on the second one.

Back to Bootblock
Upon reboot, I was stuck with the Bootblock, the small bit at the very beginning of the BIOS that doesn’t generally get overwritten, that gives you one more chance: put in a floppy disk containing the flash program (AWDFLASH.EXE) and the BIOS file (something like C18E1013.BIN) and it will restore your BIOS back to its pristine condition.

So, after I installed a brand new floppy disk drive ($20.00), I used someone else’s computer to download the necessary files and put them onto disk. Sure enough, it went ahead and loaded the flash program, which led me to the next problem.

“Source File Not Found”
No matter what I called the BIOS file, awdflash kept saying “Source File Not Found”, and freezing up. I even tried something in the manual about calling it A7N8X-E.ROM, but no luck there.

But the error message is misleading. After much Googling, I discovered that it doesn’t matter what you call the BIOS file. The AWDFLASH.EXE on the diskette has to have come from the CD that came with the motherboard; versions available for download from the ASUS site are probably different and will not work. They were indeed different files, and using the correct one made the spurious error message go away, which led me to the next problem.

BIOS-Lock String…?
After analysing the BIOS file, the flash program declared that “The program file’s BIOS-Lock String does not match with your system!” I had no idea what on Earth that meant, so I repeated the process with several different older versions of the BIOS file only to get the exact same error message each time, then I gave up and set up my Linux router as a desktop machine so I could get things done.

The thing that saved me here was a technique I found on a bulletin board discussion, to make a DOS boot disk and add a fake Awdflash to it in order to “trick” the Bootblock loader into giving you a DOS command prompt for whatever you may need it for, such as running your own choice of flash utility. Uniflash seemed to be highly recommended, so I put that on the diskette, but it was useless to me as it reported my BIOS as being write protected, and at any rate is not recommended for nForce2 chipsets.

Anyway, the thing that finally got the BIOS back in tip top shape was to put the real AWDFLASH.EXE (the one from the mobo CD) onto the diskette under a different name, as that name is already taken by the fake program, and to run it with the /nbl option:

flash.exe /nbl C18E1013.BIN

This worked and the flash proceeded without a hitch, and now I am back to the problem of Windows not loading. But I am working on it, and I don’t have to send hardware and dollars to ASUS.

I am guessing that the /nbl option ensures the flash program doesn’t attempt to flash the Boot Block, or something like that. So is the BIOS-Lock String a mechanism that stops you from overwriting the Boot Block? I have nfi, but where was all this security when I nearly fried my PC in the first place?

Neil Young once said “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Today, Mark Latham has decided to burn out, taking the unprecedented step of resigning not only from the Labor Party leadership, and not only as a frontbencher, but as a bencher of any kind.

The powerbrokers are no doubt relieved to put away the dagger without having to plunge it into the man’s back, perhaps uncertain of being able to aim it away from the pancreas.

The question in everyone’s mind is, who on Earth is everyone in the ALP going to agree upon for a replacement leader? With Kim Beazley immediately putting his hand up, and Kevin Rudd sure to challenge even if just to provide a choice, it’s shaping up to be an interesting race.

Beazley

Garrett

Gillard

Kim Beazley (Member for Brand)
Bee’s Knees is basing his candidacy on experience and stability. He has 24 years of parliamentary experience—five years as Defence Minister, one as Deputy Prime Minister, and five as Opposition Leader—and he has quite stably presided over two election defeats. However, with Labor’s system of factions, Kim appears to be the only candidate with blend of charisma and political acumen that a statistically significant amount of the caucus can agree upon.

Kevin Rudd (Member for Griffith)
Despite receiving encouragement from some, Kevin decided to stay out of the last leadership ballot and vote for Kim instead, regretting only that he only had one vote to give for his erstwhile leader. It would now seem that he has another vote to give, and whilst Kevin is in Indonesia on tsunami business, he cannot be drawn on any leadership aspirations he may have. However, it has become apparent that, as shadow minister for foreign affairs, he is a hearty, well-tempered young diplomat, and it would be fantastic to see a Nambour boy in the Lodge.

Prime Ministers by State of origin

NSW

Barton, Page, Chifley, Holt, McMahon, Keating, Howard

Vic

Deakin, Bruce, Scullin, Menzies, Curtin, McEwen, Gorton, Whitlam, Fraser

Tas

Lyons

Q’ld

Fadden, Forde

SA

Hawke

Overseas

Watson, Reid, Fisher, Cook, Hughes

Two Queenslanders, and not even any good ones. Time for another!

Penny Wong (Senator for South Australia)
Hailed as one of the up-and-coming young women of Australian politics. She might look like a diminutive Chinese woman but she speaks with a strong, authoritative—and yes, Australian accented—voice. I could see her appealing to a broad range of voters, not just women and ethnics, but folks who would normally vote Liberal as well. What a pity she’s a senator.

Peter Garrett (Member for Kingsford Smith)
Sure, he may look like an eccentric bald weirdo, but he also has the distinction of having fronted Midnight Oil, and there is no doubt Australians love their Oils. Garrett is well-known for the conservationist message in his music, and as leader of a party determined to win government eventually, he would be in a prime position to do so, pun intended. He’s only been an MP for a month, but how much training do you need to be Opposition Leader anyway? The man has a huge team around him to guide everything he does and every decision he makes. Any smo could do it.

Julia Gillard (Member for Lalor)
There has been a lot of hype surrounding Gillard lately, and it is said that her supporters are having a sticky-beak around, seeing if she would have the numbers for a viable challenge. While it would be nice to have a (attractive) woman as the leader of a major political party and alternative prime minister, I tend to think that she is not quite politically mature enough yet. Her spinster status may also be an obstacle to her becoming leader, and for the time being at least, a closed-minded Australian electorate will probably feel the same way.

In sum, although it looks like a walkover for Beazley next Friday, there’s a veritable salad bar of talent and, knowing the Labor Party, there’ll be plenty of second helpings in the near future.

The big man goes for a medical check-up with a few buds

In the aftermath of the recent Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, with the death toll in the six figures and millions left homeless, not once did I think, “Gee, I wish Mark Latham would chime in with yet another pointless, vacuous, and redundant statement from a public figure.” So his absence, although certainly surprising, has been somewhat refreshing.

It did occur to me briefly that in a situation like this, the leader of the opposition would usually express his party’s condolences and magnanimously agree with everything the government is doing, but it seemed like shadow cabinet was already handling that quite well.

The reason why Latham has not made any comment, it has since been revealed, is that he is suffering from acute pancreatitis, and is on strict doctor’s orders to take a rest. Now, bored right-wing troublemakers at The Australian say that he has blown it, and have invented a story that he is under immense pressure to resign.

Firstly, the title of the article, Latham should ‘do right thing and go’, places words in quotation marks that are not part of a quotation, thereby falsely representing an editorial opinion as something someone said.

[...] Many hope the increasingly isolated Labor leader will “do the right thing for the party and his family”.

Is that right? In that case, I’m sure the authors will provide us with some examples of who the “many” are, and attribute the quotation to someone. Oh wait.

Big fella, til you get back to health, you can rest as long as you want, and wherever you want. Shame on you journalism students for kicking the man while he’s down.