This weekend, I plan to make an effort to avoid watching the world's most idiotic TV show, Eurovision. The craziest thing of all is that my native land, Australia, is pursuing its aims to become a permanent member of this organization. Clearly, Australia is stupid. Here's their candidate, named Dami Im, as True Blue as they come...
Readers will be happy to know that Johnny Depp's Yorkshire terriers Pistol and Boo have indeed succeeded in escaping safely from Australia in their master's jet plane, after being faced with a mortal countdown announced by the Aussie politician Barnaby Joyce. Here's an extract of John Oliver's TV presentation of the drama:
Click the YouTube icon to enlarge the show
Lianne Kent with Pistol (left) and Elly Kent with Boo.
The journalist Stan Grant is a descendant of the Wiradjuri tribe.
I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges… It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, diseases ravaged us on those plains. My people die young in this country. We die 10 years younger than the average Australian, and we are far from free. We are fewer than 3 per cent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 per cent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons. And if you're a juvenile it is worse, it is 50 per cent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school. My grandfather on my mother's side, who married a white woman, who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy, and ran over the graves of the three children he buried there. That's the Australian dream. And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person. The Australian dream. We are better than this.
As Australia Day draws near, and the summer sun parches local brains, my fellow countrymen in the advertising domain are becoming dimmer and duller. In this idiotic video (with a meaningless title), we see Australian defence forces (transported by a single media helicopter) kidnapping Aussies stranded in foreign lands, so that they can be brought back home Down Under for a good Australia Day meal of barbecued lamb chops.
Critics point out that the video contains no images whatsoever of real live lambs grazing on grass in Australian sheep properties.
Ah yes, if only a few genuine baby jumbucks had been thrown into the casting, it's quite possible that this video would have become a cultural and artistic masterpiece. But then again, maybe not...
NOTE: For my final year at high school in Grafton, my grandparents (who were determined that I become a fine student) invited me to reside in their quiet and comfortable house in Robinson Avenue, where I had a tiny study room. Seeing that I was fond of lamb chops, Ma would often ask me to pick up meat from her local butchery. She always insisted that I ask for a packet of "lean, loin, lamb chops". This expression amused me because of the string of L-words. In fact, I never really understood the meaning of the first two unusual adjectives: "lean" and "loin". But I soon realized that the butcher's lamb chops, supposedly "lean" and "loin", were very tasty when Ma cooked them. I would imagine that my grandmother had picked up this expression as a girl in the bush, when she was living on her family's sheep property at Breeza.
