“Festivus for the rest of us”!
(Olden days kiddies riding bikes without helmets. Such behaviour is now BANNED!)
It’s a real struggle keeping pace with the most defining salient issues of our time.
And it’s easy to loose your metaphorical eye from the proverbial ball.
Olden days kiddies playing with sparklers. BANNED now for THEIR OWN GOOD!
What news item is more pressing? Is it the fact that if you’ve got shitloads of money and you want to launder it a Crown? Peter Dutton will throw out the red carpet. No questions asked!! Or is it Angus Taylor? Angus understands that ‘Mateship’ is way more important than the environment. By removing red tape and killing off ecosystems, business can FLOURISH!
Or just the fact that as you read this your mind impulses are being monitored by a Chinese submarine somewhere deep off the Pacific trench and already your vitals are slated to be harvested in an Uighur organ donor factory! (the one that Cotton On uses for its labour force). And all awhile you know that th U.S, last bastion of self interest and free enterprise is going down the toilet. The UK is going down the toilet, and you can hear a flushing sound and know that we’re on an identical trajectory. And it’ll be all over just as soon as the kleptocracy finishing dividing the spoils.
Olden days kiddie mucking round with a .22 rifle. A Kiddie would GO TO JAIL if they did that now.
In the end it all comes down to EDUCASHUN!!
WE are indebted to Ira for this snippet.
Good people all,
At the risk of laying myself open to the accusation that I am nothing less than a tedious pedant, I would like to make the following observation;
The Bendigo Writers’ Festival has adopted the above ‘quotation’ as its banner to attract the crème of the crop to its Word-er-ama. (9-11 August 2019)
As we all know, Portia is available as a missus to the person who chooses the correct container. The Prince of Morocco reasons that Portia is so trif that that the pure gold container must be the right choice. He is wrong. Instead and inside there’s a written piece that more or less tells him not to judge a book by its cover. It tells him, not that ‘…all that glitters is not gold…’ but ‘…all that glisters is not gold…’ and that death awaits…
Am I missing something? Is there an in-joke here, beyond the comprehension of people like me? Or is the ignorance of the promoters such that they have no idea how badly they’ve fucked up, or don’t care? And what about the writers? Dear God the writers… Have they mounted a campaign to boycott this literary disaster? Jesus wept…
Ira
Portia goes for the box. Not Pandora’s though.
I think it sad… or am I missing the point?k
What is the point?
What does it point to?
Were does it lead?
John Marsden reckons that parents are neurotic. Took him years to work that one out. Could’ve told him that modern parent neurosis began on the day they killed off Guy Fawkes and replaced it with Halloween. More Hollow than hallowed, and you can’t wean yourself off the commercial opportunities. 
The author writes about parents ‘loving their children to death’. How right he is. We reckon they’re born dead. Work, eat, (a small aperture exists for breeding) and Death. Marsden hasn’t gone far enough. Hard to put a more precise date on it, but perhaps when the Shanghai was no longer an indispensable part of school equipage, and the strap gave way to serious counselling and behavioural limitation strategies.
Nicola Heath reckons Johnny has got it wrong.We beg to differ.
Olden days kids enjoying a smoke. BANNED!
Either way we’re rooted, need working with children checks if you want to take the kiddies to the park, and if you hang around you’ll be arrested as a pervert. Spose that’s what got Marsden into teaching. As a riposte to all that control. Parents now want to micro manage everything. It’s an insecurity index. A critic countered and said Marsden was over-reacting. Since when did kiddies have I-phones etc in the past so that they are monitored every nano-second of their life? And the pressure to conformity? With the added bonus of consumerism to hollow them out just that little bit more. Food for consultant psychiatrists, psychologists, paediatricians and allied health and mental health workers. Value added by the certainty is there aint someting wrong with em, there WILL be something wrong with them. Indigenous kids as young as ten killing themselves. They’ve seen the future and jumped the queue. And yet this knob tells us nothing’s changed.
Anything than to question the reason why.
Cracker night anyone?