Hooray! It's the end of the week! I hope you get to spend your weekend like I will mine: wearing trousers as a t-shirt and running through the streets yelling at children.

And now: this.



News

Does Australia have a Government yet? No, but ooooh we're getting close. And weirdly, it's starting to look (at least in betting terms) as if it might be Labor that does it. Wilkie's agreement yesterday to back Labor, which while by all metrics a political inevitability - the man did run for the Greens a couple of elections back - still looked a little touch and go there for a few hours. But what's really set things off was Wilkie's concurrent announcement that the reason he turned to Labor was because Abbott offered him $1 billion to fix up Hobart Hospital. Generous, sure, but also really, really stupidly over the top. I mean, Wilkie wants to blackmail the Government, not bankrupt it. Coming on the back of the somewhere between $7 and $11 billion hole in the Coalition's budgetary forecasts, and suddenly the party doesn't seem quite so, shall we say, fiscally responsible. I think the word the Liberals have been using is "competent". The three remaining independents will announce their positions over the coming days. Rumour has it that Oakeshott will side with Labor (he may well have been playing up those nasty phonecalls to furnish his eventual decision to reject the Coalition) and Windsor and Katter will go to the Coalition, along with Tony "I'm and Independent Too!" Crook, giving both parties exactly 75 votes. Jesus. Further propping up the rumour mill is the suggestion that a pissed off Liberal MP might volunteer to be Speaker, thus depriving the Coalition of another crucial vote and potentially giving Gillard the Prime Minister-ship. Where he thinks his political career might go from there is anyone's guess, but one thing's for sure: he'll be as welcome in the Liberal Party as herpes at a regular party.

Katter-watch: Katter has demands too! These include the devaluation of the Aussie dollar, removal of the tax on biofuels, a jacking up of Australia's already brutal quarantine laws to attack food imports, the breaking up of Coles and Woolworths and mandatory salsa lessons for everybody under the age of 20. I may have made that last one up.

Whale "euthanased". By being "blown up". That one probably didn't need any inverted commas. Apparently detonation is the humane option. I think from here on in my support for euthanasia is going to be conditional on this being the way you get to go out.

Fred Nile implicated in Parliamentary porn scandal: I'm sure this one will probably evaporate, but I do so like to see the righteous cock-knob struggle. With that said, the audit did discover 200 000 visits emerging from his office over the course of six months, so the protests that his staffers were simply performing "research" seem a little wacky. Unless by "research" he means "furiously masturbating". He's claiming hackers and I don't blame him: at over 1 000 visits per day, or over 1 visit a minute for the whole six months, this suggests an appetite for "research" that would be considered pathological and/or hilarious.

Israel and Palestine hold private meetings: Meanwhile Hamas pledges to keep blowing people up. Bah, who needs happiness and security! In related news, I saw Four Lions last night. It's really very good. And Hamas are still assholes.

Miscellaneous: China's ten day traffic jam is back, those Chilean miners are still trapped and Pakistan is still a disaster of unfathomable proportions.

Features

This New Yorker profile remains the best and most balanced piece I've ever read about the Israel-Palestine situation. Highly recommended.

Cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson writing about Google i.e. technology he wishes he could have imagined

Oddities/Curiosities

Wife of trapped Chilean miner runs into mistress of trapped Chilean miner outside mine. Hilarity ensues.

Remember that Indonesian kid that smoked 40 cigarettes a day, causing the world major panic/lulz? He quit the ciggies! There's hope for the rest of us yet!

Video

If you haven't seen the Arcade Fire's new "video clip", you really, really should.

 Otherwise, if you're feeling a little underdone on the fine points of Australia's post-WWII political history, this should straighten you out. In Pokemon form.