Liam Getreu

I’ve read his book, The Audacity of Hope, and tracked his progress in the primaries for the last few weeks. I figured it was time to put my money where my mouth is: so I bought an Obama hoodie. Cool, eh?

Ain’t it pretty?

I’m so excited! I don’t know how I could possibly wait the two-to-three weeks for it to ship, and then the week for it to arrive in Australia…

Nice to see that just a day after Barack Obama won the Democratic South Carolina primary, Senate stalwart Teddy Kennedy has given his all-important endorsement to Obama. The Times reports a story about Obama:

It was on a November day in 2005, near the end of Mr. Obama’s first year in the Senate, when he was asked to deliver a keynote address at a ceremony commemorating the 80th birthday of Robert F. Kennedy. The invitation was extended by Ethel Kennedy, who at the time referred to Mr. Obama as “our next president.”

“I think he feels it. He feels it just like Bobby did,” Mrs. Kennedy told me that day, comparing her late husband’s quest for social justice to Mr. Obama’s. “He has the passion in his heart. He’s not selling you. It’s just him.”

The winds of change, they are a comin’.

As it does sometimes, The Age has decided to run two articles, with two contrasting points of view on the one subject. It often chooses the Israel-Palestinian conflict because it evokes so much emotion in so many people. This time, it has an article in the Palestinian corner by Australians for Palestine’s Michael Shaik (I’ll get to him in a minute) and the other in the Israeli corner by Monash University professor Dr Fania Oz-Salzberger.

The ‘Kotel’ (Western Wall) from my 2005 trip to Israel

Oz-Salzberger’s article is fairly liberal: in it she (rightly) concedes that “Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 left its million denizens poor, radical, violently divided from within and economically dependent on Israeli power and goods.” But somehow, she ponders, it only increased the rockets being launched over the border into Sderot and nearby Kibbutzim. Interesting. She also suggests the Arab League become involved as a mediator to work towards a peace:

Luckily, sinister equilibriums can change. Egypt cannot have Gazans wandering around the Sinai peninsula, nor can President Hosni Mubarak wait for Hamas to team up with his own Muslim Brotherhood opposition.

The Arab League must step in, and creative thinking is requisite: a massive Arab investment in Gazan infrastructure can help. A territorial swap between Israel, Egypt and Gaza is ripe for open discussion.

Dr Oz-Salzberger’s article is quite good, with her views not all that dissimilar to my own. She comes up with a new idea to get over the now failed Road Map, and (until proven otherwise) doomed Annapolis Conference outcomes.

Shaik, on the other hand, seems only to blast Israel for “Zionist colonisation” and subjecting “80% of Gaza’s population … [to] a state of extreme poverty” as if it’s no fault at all of the terrorist group that’s in control.

(Incidentally, the reason I don’t like Mr Shaik is because the one time I met him, at a debate at uni with Danny Lamm, president of the State Zionist Council, he was rude, abrupt and wouldn’t give me the time of day. I had wanted more information than that given in his speech and was interested in speaking with him further about his views, but he refused and left me feeling hard done by.)

He doesn’t seem to ever concede any ground, or give up at all. He just keeps hammering away, twisting great Zionists’ words against them. It is so unfortunate the articles like this and authors like Mr Shaik that show some Palestinian commentators to be unnecessarily extreme. Why do they insist — on occasions — on not only defending, but supporting extreme, terrorist groups like Hamas?

If it weren’t for idiots running the Fatah party, there would have been a peaceful negotiation between Israel, the Palestinians and the Quartet long ago. But when a terrorist junta launches a coup, like Hamas did in Gaza, it will never end well.

And sadly, the Palestinians — even though they’re way better at it than the Israelis — are terrible at PR

Now I’m not the greatest Triple J fan. I didn’t particularly care when Myf Warhurst defected to the un-holy, capitalistic and consumerist Triple M. I very rarely listen on my radio, only occasionally online, and absolute despise JTV and the idiots that occupy its slots.

But I do find its annual Australia Day Hottest 100 countdown interesting. (And the archives of countdowns of years gone by fascinating, even.) Particularly when, eighteen months after it was first released, Muse’s Knights of Cydonia was named as the number one song, eclipsing (by only thirteen votes, mind you) Silverchair’s ARIA-winning and most-played song on radio of 2007 Straight Lines.

Like I said: how it happened not only eighteen months after Muse’s album Black Holes and Revelations was released, but also when both Starlight and Supermassive Black Hole are both far better songs continues to bemuse me.

I guess that’s why I’m not such a Triple J fan. Oh well.

Apparently British PM Gordon Brown wants England to have a national motto but, according to the New York Times, it was met with distaste. Apparently, The Times “cynically” ran a competition to find the best motto from the plebs:

The readers’ suggestions included “Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco” (Asbo stands for “anti-social behavior order,” a law-enforcement tool, while Tesco is a ubiquitous supermarket chain); “Once Mighty Empire, Slightly Used”; “At Least We’re Not French”; and “We Apologize for the Inconvenience.” The winner, favored by 20.9 percent of the readers, was “No Motto Please, We’re British.”

Remind me again why the Queen is still on the back of our coins?

Michael Clarke, the newly crowned “all-rounder” (seriously, what a joke!), has given Australia an incredible victory in the cricket this evening, and I just wanted to celebrate with a blog post.

So, Go Aussie Go!

As happens every year around this time, Macrumors begins churning up what they hope (and think) Uncle Steve will reveal to the fanboy masses at January’s Macworld conference in San Francisco.

As always, it’s not a precise science, nor it is ever really genuine, but one thing’s for sure: it is lots of fun to hope and pray that Steve Jobs will deliver us a new cool, pretty toy worth buying. Will it be a 3G iPhone to be released in Asia (that means Australia!)? Or perhaps a new MacBook Pro (which would anger me, because I bought mine only a few months ago)? Or maybe something completely new that’s been thrown around before (like the ‘MacTouch’ — “neither a MacBook nor a MacBook Pro. Totally new product”)?

One thing’s for sure — come the end of the 16th of January Melbourne time, I’ll be readying the Amex for a new purchase.

With the wonderful features of Google Reader, I’ve been reading more widely online nowadays. My subscriptions range from geeky Apple news (like Mac Rumors and TUAW) to geeky Web 2.0 news (like Techcrunch) and then the more ‘normal’ St Kilda RSS feed. Last week, though, I did add the newly Forbes.com-ised Fake Steve to both my ‘humour’ and ‘apple’ tags.

This post, comparing a photo of Steve Jobs and Tricky Dicky Nixon caught my eye this morning. For comedic value, Fake Steve is just great. You wonder how true some of the captions are, too.

Even though radio’s greatest ever show, Get This on the Triple M Network, has been cancelled and off the air since the 23rd of November, I’ve only just got around to podcasting the final episode. It’s full of Talkback Mountain montages, special guests, Tony, Ed and Richard Marsland’s usual shenanigans, and even producer Nikki Hamilton’s live birth! Of course, as always, there’s not a song to be heard: just the way Tony likes it, and Triple M doesn’t.

Check it out in the iTunes podcast gallery if you want to have a good laugh. It’s really quite fantastic.

Having moved house on Friday (well, not me, per se; my current unhealthiness meant that others did most of the shlepping for me, which isn’t the worst way to do it, mind you), yesterday I went shopping for new furniture. And let me tell you — IKEA is probably the greatest place on Earth if you want that kind of thing.

Three floors, one underlying principle: if you can screw an Allen Key into it, and it sounds Swedish, it’ll be somewhere at IKEA, Victoria Gardens. And the best bit is, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg (barring any mishaps during assembly).

Gallant, by IKEA

I ended up going for something called the Gallant (I know, it doesn’t sound very Swedish, does it?); it’s pretty much a DIY desk. You choose how big you want the desk to be, any add-ons, the type of legs you want and then you pick it all up to take home and assemble. That is, of course, unless you end up buying two desks, a bedside table, a couple of chairs, another desk from the clearance box and some other accessories which pretty much gives you Buckley’s chance of fitting it into your car and putting it together yourself.

If that’s the case, you tell IKEA to deliver it the next day and ring some handyman and get them to put it together for you! And even then, it work out cheaper than buying pre-assembled easy-to-pick-up furniture from another store. Ain’t instant gratification grand?

Having realised that I just spent an hour blogging about furniture, I think it’s time to end this little IKEA fan article right here. Seriously though, IKEA rocks.