Your mate extends the international socialist hand of friendship to multi-coloured comrades escaping the rain
As your mate says, don’t feed wild birds.
Most inspiring comment: “Never in the field of human endeavour has so much been misguided by such sumptuous evocations of impossibly marxy laddies – it really is that good.” Thank you!
Most blush inducing comment: “I cast my eye around the mymatejoechip empire, and it occurs to me that I may, just may, be very slightly in love with him. it. you. choose a pronoun, I’m not picky.”
Ahem…
Like all Australians, your mate aspires to come second if not third in everything in life, and therefore he won’t give quite the attention to this post, in case it causes it to come first. Close enough was good enough for the early settlers, and who am I to argue with people whose arms were ten times the size of my thighs?
Your mate has been very busy in charitable activities, as pictured above, feeding the starving masses, and was repaid by being pooped on, and expected no more. On the bird front, we have had another owl visitor, a southern boobook, easily identified by its call, but no picture as it was only barely glimpsed at 5am the other day. In another charitable activity, he was forced to watch Carnage and has vowed to seek revenge on Jody Foster’s character, or at least Jody Foster, who was as annoying as someone who narrates their blog in the third person.
Over at “You are what you eat“, things have been quiet. I had a draft blog about taste testing bullets in preparation, but as we all know there was another massacre, and your mate left it at a few lines which no one will read. I am a very imperfect person living in an imperfect country. We have many failings, and this is what causes me not to just make smart arse comments about other countries, whether they be Syria or New Zeelund*. However, you know how people laugh at North Korea and the devotion to whichever Great Leader is in power at any given time? You know how we cannot understand how people can be like that? For the very very little that my opinion is worth, that’s the reaction I have to the American gun fetish that simply accepts that every now and then a couple of dozen people are massacred, on top of the daily slaughter. (Feel free to point out the failings of Austria, I will no doubt agree with your analysis.)
The revolution has not yet come to completion, due to the failure of my comrade Edgar Edgarberger to buy the lottery tickets that will ultimately fund the uprising. I have given some tips on books to read to pass the time until the socialist utopia is established (I understand from reading other posts that “Obama-care” has rendered the US a communist state, so that is a positive move). I have no editing power over at that site, and neglected to include Adam Roberts in my list of contemporary writers who keep referencing revolutionary themes. “Yellow Blue Tibia” is a demented novel in a post Chernobyl setting which somehow posits a connection between Soviet science fiction and an alien invasion which both has and has not occurred. “New Model Army” has private armies being established through social media, composed almost of weekend soldiers who regularly defeat the standing armies of nation states and then melt back to their homes and day jobs. The recent “By Light Alone” has a world where hunger has been removed by genetically engineering the body so that we photosynthesise through our hair. Yes, you guessed it, it made everything worse, and the masses are on the rise, at least if its a sunny day. (Please comment on the site and ask Edgar where the hell he is. I am not clever enough to know whether it is ironic that he is unable to blog because of work commitments.)
Your mate is nothing if not a bad artist. At Poetry and Paranoia, he has blogged “Loving the Alien” in memory of Ray Bradbury; commented on “Jehovah’s Witnesses” (and I must insert an errata here – I thought I had to apologise to the JWs for accusations of laziness because they don’t bother me anymore, as I discovered a Watch Tower on my desk – I later found that someone else thought it would be amusing to deliver it for them, so I withdraw my apologies they are lazy, and Jehovah will not be happy with them (nor with me, no doubt)); posted the lyrics of the soon to be number one hit, “Albino Girl“; and drew tears with “The Polygamist’s Lament“, noting that three is the loneliest number, its one too many to rhumba.
And if you missed my post below, and are interested in noir, crime, thrillers, that sort of thing, you may be interested in purchasing “SAD JINGO” by fellow blogger Ron Dionne, one of our fellow bloggers, because it is good and it is cheap.
Thank you for any attention you paid to my rant. As a reward, here is a picture of a grey butcherbird. It is a caroling bird, and I am awoken by its beautiful song most mornings. It gets its name from its predatory behaviour and its habit of storing the carcasses of small birds in the forks of branches, either for later consumption or as some sort of hobby. It would not deign to eat from my hand, but they will zoom through the air and pluck from gravity’s grasp any bread or meat tidbits I throw them. Nice.
Grey Butcher Bird
I’ll start with the bread …
* I liked the Kiwi commentator who announced that the Australian Olympic team had changed its colours to green and silver (previously green and gold). And Australians who have been annoyed by the Commo Bank ads during the Games broadcasts will like the internet comment “so the ‘T’ was right after all!” – I’d attribute if I knew where it came from, but I love it!
I AM YOUR MATE JOE CHIP 