Sikamikanico Blogs

We're approximately at the half-way point between Rudd taking over the Labor leadership last December, and a likely November election, and it seems like a good time to take stock of how things are going. On the face of it, pretty darn well. Even after Costello's "big spending...on everyone we in the Coalition like" budget last week, Labor has "surged ahead" (I love the language of the pundits) in the polls, leading the Coalition 18 points on a two-party preferred basis. Things seem pretty rosy for Rudd and Labor right now, as even Howard admits (though he could just be trying to claim the valuable "underdog status", so beloved of Australian pollies in the lead up to an election). Having been burned so badly by the 2004 Federal election, I can't help but remember that the poll results were looking good for Labor back then too, but as this graph (scroll down) shows, Labor's poll performance now is far ahead of where it was three years ago.

I've recently been enjoying the book Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit: The Encyclopedia Of Modern Life . It's an amusing look at all that is wrong in the world today, from cafes that charge an extra $5 for a slice of tomato with your cooked breakfast, to grown-ups who read childrens' books with "adult" covers,in order to escape public scorn. It's a familliar theme though. There's just so much that is whinge-worthy in modern society, and my goodness, do people enjoy whingeing. Just read through the weekend supplements in any major newspaper, and witness the orgy of complaining-about-the-small-stuff being engaged in by columnists. Too worn out by the woes of modern life to read? Not to worry, you can receive your gripes in television form, thanks to the Grumpy Old Women and Men series. And I must admit, I like all this enough to engage in it endlessly myself, as any read through this blog's archives will show you; posting diatribes about manners, mu

Sitting on my desk at work is a desk calendar with an "inspirational" quote for each day. They're not funny quotes; it's a company-supplied calendar and it's boring, to match the job. Today's quote however gave me pause for thought, though probably not in the way the manufacturers intended: "The day you take complete responsibility for yourself, the day you stop making any excuses, that's the day you start to the top." - O.J. Simpson O.J. Simpson on the topic of taking responsibility. I can't help but wonder if it's the work of some menial underling at the calendar company, resentful at being given the task of hunting down 365 meaningful quotations, who slipped it in as a joke and wondered if anyone would notice. Or maybe the whole thing's for real. Are there any other absurd-but-true quotations floating around out there?