Tim Blair

Tim,

We've been conditioned that anything in Australia that is farther from the coast than say Palm Springs is from the Pacific is "the outback".

You would've enjoyed LA this weekend. There was a MOPAR car show. All kinds of immaculate Chargers, Cuda's and otehr classic 60's muscle cars.

moopor, probably a derivative of "mopor", a cantonese word describing a witch

I am not sure how much of Victoria can be classified as outback anyway. However I do know that I am well and truly in the outback right now... mind you they do have ADSL out here - go figure.

Are there 'unspecified cultural reasons' for the bone not being pointed at Mark Latham who also wants to abolish ATSIC? Ah, that's right: Mark would snatch the bone and beat the poor woman about the head with it.

Unspecified safety reasons.

What is it with American reporters and this outback obsession?

Wait -- you mean that not all of Australia is covered with sandy fields, kangaroos, and crocodiles?

Next thing you'll tell me is that y'all have paved roads and running water.

By the way, I'm in Texas, where apparently everyone is either an oilman or a cattle baron (except for the other 99% of us).

2-shay David.

Where is the anti-fur crowd ? Think of those poor little murdered possums.....

"What is it with American reporters and this outback obsession?"

they're in Manhattan, they think New Jersey is the outback

ABC 702 yesterday had a brief interview with the bloke in the Northern Territory that "pointed the bone" at the Collingwood Football Club in the late 1990s. He suggested that "pointing the bone" was exclusively a male perogative.

Apparently it did the job on the 'Pies (sorry, Tim!).

david
what's this oilman/cattle baron thing ? ask most of the clueless idiots over here in oz and they think everyone in texas rides around wearing a ten gallon hat and a pair of six-shooters picking off in'juns......

So if any "harm" comes to Howard, will charges be laid for assault, attempted murder etc?????

Or will aborignal law need to be applied ie spearing??

Colac could be accurately described as a "shithole in the southern state of victoria", but you are quite correct on the size and 'outback' nature of it.

What i want to know is where did the 500 figure come from? Did they just make it up - and if so, why 500? The difference between that and 10,000 is huge, and took a 5 second google search to verify.

The GnuHunter has more:

Geoff Clark's mates, at a Colac venue, subjected the Prime Minister to an aboriginal bone-pointing ceremony conducted by "Moorpor" a mysterious aboriginal woman dressed in possum skin (cue the mystical didgeridoo and stick music now), ooowoooh...

Well Geoff, I've got news for you. Only kadaitcha men can point the bone. The incantations are far too important to entrust to women. The effect of pointing the bone is that the "appointee" will die within a few weeks. Pointing the bone won't have anything to do with elections or the regulatory framework of a corrupt ATSIC.

Click here to read the rest.

Henceforth, I intend to cite 'unspecified Aboriginal cultural reasons' whenever I don't want to answer a question."

I've been citing "Secret Men's Business" for years since the Hindmarsh Island bullshit-fest.

Oh damn, it happened again - the paragraph beginning "Well Geoff, it happened again" should be in italics as well.
Do I have to put new "i" or "em" tags at the beggining of each paragraph, or is there any way of getting around this?

If Howard fails to die within a few weeks, will this be seen as racist disdain for traditional Aboriginal customs and beliefs, or merely a flip flop mirroring Latham's latest multicultural policy?

Or MooPoo, available at the farm gate for $2 a bag. Look for the sign half way between Colac and Birregurra.

Great for the winter vegetable garden.

so true, Banco, so true...i work in Manhattan but live 0.5km away from GWB, on Jersey side. many manhattanites think they need passport & vaccinations update, BEFORE crossing Hudson. if neighbouring state is an 'outback" for our elites, how could they ever understand middle of US, let alone remote Australia?

TimT:

Yes, start each paragraph with "". The italics stop at the end of the paragraph. If you want to stop the italics before the paragraph end, use "" Take out the dashes -- I put those in for effect.

I found out the hard way myself.

Dang, it didn't come through! SHould have been the italics start/end in the quotes. Shows what I know.

what's this oilman/cattle baron thing ? ask most of the clueless idiots over here in oz and they think everyone in texas rides around wearing a ten gallon hat and a pair of six-shooters picking off in'juns......

Only on weekends, Johnny.

Back OT:

10 gallon hats and six shooters are passe', even in Texas; the current fad in the west is wearing baseball caps backwards, and picking off terrorists with a turret mounted M60 machine gun. There's also a standing reward for Micheal Moore. That's why the left is so adamant about taking our guns away.

And shootin' in'juns is not politically correct. Or safe; they tend to shoot back.

ABC 702 yesterday had a brief interview with the bloke in the Northern Territory that "pointed the bone" at the Collingwood Football Club in the late 1990s.

I recall he also said it had to be a kangaroo leg bone. What was pointed was far too small. When it comes to bones, size matters!

and picking off terrorists with a turret mounted M60 machine gun

Texans have these kind of guns?

This probably isn't PC, but I think it's humorous!

A Texan visiting the outback has been boring the local pub inhabitants rigid with his tales of how big everything is back home.

Finally Blue has had enough. He says to the Texan, "Yeah, I know. We had a Texan here once, he was a big bloke. Huge. He died. We didn't have a coffin big enough to bury him in..."

The visitor interjects "What did you do?"

"Gave him an enema and buried him in a shoebox."

To echo comments I made in a previous post: this stunt will presumably be referred to endlessly by the likes of Tim Dunlop, Margo Kingston and Mike Seccombe.

Maybe the 500 is quoted in american figures. They quote an ATSIC budget of $600 million, which is actually $1.2 billion in aussie dollars, so maybe 10,000 australian people is discounted to 500 CNN people.

I thought only aboriginal men of high degree could point the bone -

But then, being a mere white female, what do I know?

I hear Geoff Clark has been pointing his bone at a few shielas down in south western Victoria

I hear Geoff Clark has been pointing his bone at a few shielas down in south western Victoria

I just want to know if this bone-pointing scheme is common within ATSIC when the auditors are closing in, or when the ATSIC board members aren't getting their way?

Also, isn't it great the way that none of the "reporters" asked if Geoff Clark had something to do with the bone-pointing. He and his mates all just happened to be there, passing by.

JeffS: you mean like this? <i> </i>

Making those tags actually appear is a carefully guarded secret of the Protocols of the Elders of Geekdom.

Well, I'm just a junior assistant geek wannabe, aspiring someday to rise to the level of Ultimate Geek. I bow to my master of Geekness.

<i> </i>

"& l t;" less than symbol
"& g t;" greater than symbol

Take out the spaces to use them and see < and >

Thanks guys. I consider myself well and truly geekified!

I feel bad about John Howard being cursed by a traditional, possum-skin-wearing Aboriginal.

Therefore I, a traditional, rather-nice-suit-wearing Anglo-Australian, would like to counteract this curse with an ancient blessing from my people:

"Good on ya, mate."

Mr Howard can now rest easy, knowing that the cosmic balance has been restored.

Speaking of cowboy boots it says in my RM Williams catalogue that Dubya has been presented with a pair custom RM western boots made from some lizard and embroidered patterns of Australian wildflowers.

Now some people might reckon that giving boots to a Texan is pretty pointless, but they wouldn't have worn RMs

All this possum skin-wearing and bone-waving would have come in handy to defend aboriginal Australia when the Eurotrash were colonising the country. Maybe they didn't think of it.

Or maybe bone-waving was considered the nuclear option, tribes refrained from resorting to it out of fear of retaliation, and so a delecate blance of power was maintained while the aboriginals confined themselves to spearing each other with sharp bits of wood or clubbing their brains out with other bits of wood.

And this went on for the 40 thousand years they forgot to invent the wheel in. Or even the chop-stick.

Oh well, at least they're not blowing themselves up.

Howards curse is nothing compared with what I have got hanging over my head.
I gave a talk at a mosque in sandringham last week
and offended the locals.
Now the mullah of the mosque declared a fatwa
on me and Im freaking out.

Tim and others: you may want to sit down for this. The fact is, most American reporters are ignorant and provincial, often knowing less about other cultures than the average teenage stamp-collector.

Hey, hey! Don't make me turn the hose on!

Film Ideas:

MOOPOR IN LA
Paul Hogan directs a film in which the possum-clad aborigine travels to the City of Angels to curse President Bush on behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world. In the first scene, she points a bone at the president and is shot dead by the Secret Service. Fin.

DUBYA DOWN UNDER
In the tradition of Roger & Me, a scathing indictment of the Bush regime, filmed during a presidential visit to Australia. In the first scene, Gareth Smith attempts to place the so-called "president" under citizen's arrest for war crimes, and is shot dead by the Secret Service. Fin.

Outback? Outback? Restaurant chain isn't it?

'Colac could be accurately described as a "shithole in the southern state of victoria"'

See, we think "outback" means "shithole".

"Boney PM"? I thought Boney was an Australian detective.:-)
At least that's what I understood from books I read many years ago. And all the murders took place in the 'outback'.

Barry, 'Boney(P)M': famous for the Oz-relevant tracks 'Ra, Ra Roo-shootin' and ATSIC-fave 'By the Rivers of Babble-on.'

Solemn Native ceremonies are always joke material. It's kept alive by multiculturalist sensitivity, doubling the size of the target.

Wear possum skins and solemnly point a bone, and you're toast in the modern media.

I deplore it myself. Don't mess around with bone pointing.

Someone in Canada please wear some clubbed seal skins and point a whale bone at Quebec?

Please...

new jersey's far worse than the outback: recall that even crocodile dundee stayed safely cloistered in manhattan rather than venture through the holland tunnel

Oh well, at least they're not blowing themselves up.

I caught an article on the 7:30 report tonight about an aboriginal community which had just been taken back over by the SA government after a decade in self-managed hell. A quote from a despairing elder caught my ear about petrol and marijuana not going together well, so maybe they're only a toke & sniff away from blowing themselves up.

According to ancient customs, the only effective way to counter a ritual boning is to perform the traditional cutting-off-the-welfare-check ceremony?

Here in the US, we call it "the sticks". Look, these reporters are the "flight to the city" types who hate their home towns. If it's any consolation, they're generally people who can't be loved and are unlikely to reproduce....

What are you guys talking about?

I conjecture, that we've already put a curse on this beatch, here's how:

Little does this witch-woman know that leftists have put a western curse on her people: it's called "Government Solution". And not only have they succeeded with this curse, but they've made the people under its spell oblivious to how to rid themselves of it.

Hey at least they didn't use the phrase "down under."

Moopor refused to speak with reporters, citing unspecified Aboriginal cultural reasons.

I love that phrase, if she refused to speake how could she cite cultural reasons? She show them a card?

Mmmm...possum.

Cripes. Next thing you know, Tim'll tell us Yanks that Outback Steakhouse *ain't* Australian and that you blokes don't eat Bloomin' Onions with every meal.

"This 'ere's the wattle, the symbol of our land:
You can stick it in a bottle, you can hold it in your hand..."
-- Monty Python

"Australia, it's a bonza place
It's full of bonza blokes
Beer and shielas and no one's queer
Except in Pommie jokes"

-monthy python

If the woman was named mopar than we would really have to watch it. She may put a hex on your blower;)

Tounge Boy, I really hope they don't. Otherwise 'aussie cuisine' translates to 'burnt steak', and the last time I had a bloomin onion, I was in the bathroom for a hour afterwards.

Of course, the european alternative seems to be boiling the taste out of the meat.