Sikamikanico Blogs

My travelling companion, Stampy.  I blame The Strokes.  The NYC rockers famously broke through with their 2001 debut album Is This It and were hailed as the saviours of rock. (Although they weren’t even nominated for Best New Act at the Grammys, rather proving Homer Simpson’s views on the matter ). At the time I didn't want to know. There was tonnes of great rock out of Australia in those days, I was wary of fads, and most of all a bit of trauma in my personal life months before had left me uninterested in new music. When YOLO came out in 2006, I loved the song but didn't know it was by The Strokes for ages and when I eventually found out, I still didn’t seek out any of their music (too busy lying facedown on the floor listening to Triptych by the Tea Party). It wasn't until I heard their new cut Why Are Sundays So Depressing on the radio in 2020 and realised yes, this is exactly the song I need right now, and I went on an obsessive deep dive of everything the band had eve

Drug Free Australia sound like a stand up bunch of people on the face of it. Keeping kids from trying drugs is a noble aim, I think we could all agree, even if in one's most exhausted, stressed out moments of parenthood the desire to sedate your kids has briefly flashed across your mind.  But for the peak body Drug Free Australia, that may be the only noble thing about them. Problematic doesn't even begin to describe this lot. They peddle pseudo scientific nonsense about the dangers of drugs, partner with organisations that have been labelled  brutal, unscientific and based on human exploitation  and have stated that gay people should be laughed at and ridiculed *. Most disturbing of all however is that DFA heavily leans into the Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that George Soros covertly runs the world . Yikes, who are these people? You don't have to go far beyond the face of it to see that these people aren't on the level. The front page of the DFA website claims the Uv

Not content with taking away women's rights to decide what happens to their own bodies, the GOP are determined to strip the rights of children and young people as well. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district court Trump appointee in the Northern District of Texas, has upheld a lawsuit brought by local Republican official Alexander Deanda challenging Title X , which provides contraceptive access for low income people, including those under 18, on the grounds it "violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children". Deanda believes it is his right to prevent his children from accessing contraception, as he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” Deanda, whose lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, helped write the Texas law that allows anyone to sue a person who aids or abets an abortio

You can't go a day on the internet without seeing someone invoke Karma. Someone will post on a neighbourhood Facebook group that their bicycle was stolen from their front yard, and the police don't seem all that bothered about tracking down the perpetrators. And there it will be in the replies: "Don't worry. Karma will get them eventually".   They're not referring to the complex concepts of Karma in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosphy. The watered down, White version of karma casually invoked on the internet whenever someone has a grumble is taken to simply mean: if you do something bad, something bad will happen to you. Placing it, I guess, on the lower end of the scale of cultural appropriation of spiritual practices , the whitewashed, for-profit magic bowls and yoga and saging that function, in the words of the late Elizabeth Wurtzel, as "a brain-dead insult to the very Native American [or Asian] culture it is supposed to revere".  I can see why t

 Ah, Ann Coulter, what can I say? ("Preferably nothing", you reply, "she's a washed up has been who used her shit takes to ascend to the top of shit mountain during the Clinton impeachment, and, unable to compete with the new breed of Republican hate mongers, has been slowly sliding down shit mountain ever since".) None of that is incorrect, unlike anything Ms Coulter writes. But she at least used to be kinda  interesting to read, inasmuch as I'd check her books out of the library if I was running low on something to read, and sort of enjoy the argumentative thrust even if the wounds failed to land.  Then Barak Obama won the Presidency in 2008, and she lost all relevance and her freaking mind. For the duration of the Obama presidency, in her dwindling schedule of TV appearances, she referred to him as B. Hussein Obama. For 8 years. Why? "Because it's funny.". I don't think it was ever funny, but for the people on her side, maybe it was funn

I'll keep this concise (there's a first time for everything). It looks like the demise of Twitter is imminent, as Twitter employees across the world are reporting being locked out of, or even in, their own offices; and Elon Musk is shitposting, which I suppose is helping him pass the time given that he has been locked out himself.  So, I might as well return to microblogging here, just like I did when I started blogging in 2004 and there was no social media to share my various witty remarks. It's like going back in time! Luckily 2004 is past the point of time travel where I'd need to warn people about 9/11; if they didn't listen to the CIA, they're not going to listen to me. But I've a few things I need to warn the people of the past about: Donald Trump has already been President and is gearing up to try again, people are blowing up forests to indicate the sex of their unborn children, and you remember Robert Kardashian, the lawyer on the OJ case who passed

 I've just gotten over a bout of Covid. After two years of being careful, and being triple vaccinated, here we are. And whilst the world is suffering a dire dearth of hot takes from special snowflakes on their views of the epidemiological management, sociopolitical implications, and personal experiences of the pandemic, Covid isn't the story I'm telling today. Instead I want to talk about what came next. On account of being in mandatory isolation after testing positive for Covid, and also being quite sick, I didn't drive my car for ten days, and when I did take it out again, rather than wisely taking the opportunity to refresh the battery with a nice long drive, I was still a bit ill and only went to the local shops. All of which brings us to yesterday. I get in my car, put the key in the ignition and click-click-click-click-ptooey . The car won't start.  Luckily I already have reason to suspect the battery, because otherwise I would have no idea what is going on. A

If you'd asked me when I was aged 20 about plans for my life, I was a little hazy (I didn't work out what I wanted to do when I grew up until I was 33). But I would have had a visceral, furious reaction at any notion that I should stay at home taking care of the kids and the housework while my husband worked. At that time, my feminism was a lot more strident than it is now. I believed women who stayed at home, taking their husbands' names and care of home and family, were letting all women down. They should be out building careers, tearing down the barricades, glass ceiling and patriarchy, as I planned to do just as soon as I figured out how.  You have to remember this was over two decades ago, and my exposure to feminist theory largely came from what books I could obtain from the local library, and they mostly written by the second wave feminists of the 1970s: Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer. Going back further in time, I'd grown up being told there were

 When you have a chronic illness - especially an illness like Chronic Fatigue Sydnrome that can't be diagnosed through testing (though we're constantly hearing doctors are on the verge of a breakthroug h), or treated - lay people are continually coming up with alternative remedies. Try rubbing lavender oil on your pulse points. My neighbour had this, and they started going for a walk each day at sunrise, and they felt much better. Bury the third finger of the left hand of an Amazon delivery driver under a full moon, and it will re-align your chakras for long term relief.  I'm a member of fairly active CFS/ME online groups (well, it gives us a chance to be active). Between several thousand members, I've seen every natural remedy and cure suggested, and for pretty much every one, it's worked for some people and not for others. Yet people are often desperate to try anything, especially because the symptoms of CFS/ME are so awful - and especially for an illness so misu

DHX Media The genre-shifting children's show In The Night Garden...  which originally aired on the BBC between 2007 and 2009, was a hit with toddlers and parents alike. But behind the colourful dreamworld and its cast of trippy yet delightful characters lay a much darker reality; a tale of clashing egos, forbidden attractions, heavy work schedules and even heavier partying, and a creator with an artistic vision many believed was impossible to film. We find a show threatening to fall apart behind the scenes even as, on camera, they drew together to create paradigm-shifting art that laid the groundwork for such future television as Twin Peaks: The Return and Squid Game . In this exclusive extract from the upcoming book Go By Ninky Nonk: the Uncensored Oral History of In The Night Garden ... the cast and crew reflect on returning from hiatus to shoot the Second Season Premiere, "Slow Down Everybody!"  ANDREW DAVENPORT (SERIES CREATOR): By that point in my career, my commitm