"Probably what it shows more than anything is how incredibly boring prison is."

"You've got to do something that fills in the day."

Equal justice under the law — a proclamation in pictures.

Issued in 1816 in Van Diemen's Land, which is to say, Tasmania, in Australia, today's "History of" country.

"DM, thank you for providing the map of Canberra. Were it not for that..."

"... I would have had trouble reconciling the city's layout with a man impaled on a bedpost."

A comment at The Daily Mail has the distinction of being the first thing that made me laugh out loud in 2013. (Please forgive me!)

"The dingo really did take the baby."

The 32-year-old case.

Camel massacre.

For the earth.

ADDED: If you're going to kill all those camels for the environment, why not do the fully conservationist thing and eat them? Anthony Bourdain shows how it's done in Saudi Arabia:

Harry Connick Jr. is "pleased with the way [he] handled the situation."

Australia is a little different from America. There was Connick, guest judging on "Hey Hey It's Saturday"....

Four men in blackface and with Afro wigs sang and danced behind a Michael Jackson impersonator wearing white makeup. Connick gave the performance a zero score....

Some Australians said they were embarrassed such a racist sketch had been broadcast, while others said detractors were too politically correct and that the skit was funny.

Connick said he canceled an autograph session and interviews in Sydney after the show to let the controversy die down.

ADDED: Here's the video of the performance and Connick's handling of the situation. (Via MadisonMan, in the comments.)

"Hooroo, where's the poo?"

My favorite headline today.

ALAN Cooper specialises in ancient DNA. When he came to Australia in 2005 to be director of the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, he was keen to find and analyse the droppings of the country's megafauna, creatures such as giant marsupial diprotodon and the giant short-faced kangaroo, which became extinct more than 45,000 years ago.

"Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria in the last 24 hours."

At least 49 dead in Australian wildfires.

You voted. I saw 2 movies: "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Australia."

You could have sent me to "Rachel Getting Married," "Milk," "Synecdoche, New York," or "Let the Right One In," but you chose "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Australia." I'll say a few things comparing the 2 movies, and I'll keep this spoiler free.

1. Both movies have an in-your-face sense of place. "Slumdog Millionaire," showing us India, has us running all over the slums of Bombay and touring the Taj Mahal. I get it. It's India. "Australia" fills the screen with the map of Australia and giant red rocks and expanses of dry wasteland. Yeah, that's Australia.

2. Both movies tell an elaborately plotted story through the eyes of a little boy. In "Slumdog," the boy, Jamal, plunges into a pool of shit to get his story going, and in "Australia," the boy, Nullah, plunges into a water tank to advance the plot. Our hearts are, of course, supposed to mesh with the heart of the central child character. This is a time-worn method of emotional manipulation, but it works pretty well in both movies. Both boys, for all their troubles, are magically lucky.

3. Both movies have lovers who are torn apart and brought together repeatedly, and both have key scenes where there is a lot of violent chaos and the lovers are running around looking for each other as time is about to run out. Both movies have big close-up kisses that seem to be about the cinematic history of big close-up kisses. There's no real fire between the lovers in either movie. They are big, pretty movie-star heads, but I didn't for one second believe I was looking at 2 human beings who were passionately in love with each other.

4. Both movies weave in a very familiar work of American pop culture. The whole story of "Slumdog Millionaire" is framed by a single performance on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." This is the coolest thing about the movie and is extremely well done -- using flashbacks and quiz questions that relate to the past. "Australia" is strewn with references to the movie "The Wizard of Oz" that come and go and don't really pay off very well. Wishing, home... whatever. But it is pretty amusing when Nicole Kidman's character awkwardly and abysmally tries to tell the Oz story and sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" to the boy and manages to inspire him in spite of her inadequacies.

5. Both movies have bathtubs. I'm slightly obsessed with the prominence of bathtubs in the movies. You'd think the most interesting thing in the world was a woman in a damned bath. "Australia" has the conventional lead actress taking a bath for no good reason. Hmm... 2 characters have to have a conversation. Let's put the woman in the bathtub. Depending on what rating you want, it will either be a bubble bath or it won't. It's embarrassing. "Slumdog Millionaire" has a memorably unusual use of the bathtub, so that was fine.

6. Things "Australia" has more of: cattle, horses, spears, bombs, airplanes, ships, sentimentality, pectoral muscles, drunk guys, fistfights, aborigines, contracts. Things "Slumdog Millionaire" has more of: shit, TV, doing laundry, guns, beggars, torture.

7. "Slumdog Millionaire" was a lot shorter and a lot better. "Australia" was a big epic that was completely old-fashioned except to the extent that there was supposed to be something hip about being intentionally old-fashioned. I'd rather watch "The African Queen" again, and if I need some hipness, let me watch it with hip people and we'll say hip things.

The first victim of global warming.

There now, it's extinct! The white possum of the Daintree Rainforest, Queensland, Australia. Aren't you ashamed? Gone, gone, gone forever. Never to return. Because you drove a car, you heated a house, you breathed, you bastard.

Jorn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House, never saw his creation.

And now, at age 90, he has died, and the question whether he will ever return to Australia and see it has been answered for good.

From Bill Bryson's book "In a Sunburned Country":

Nothing so daringly inclined and top-heavy had ever been built before and no one was sure that it could be. In retrospect, the haste with which the project was begun was probably its salvation. One of the lead engineers later noted that if anyone had realized at the outset how nearly impossible a challenge it would be, it would never have gotten the go-ahead. Just working out the principles necessary to build the roof took five years -- the whole project had been intended to last no more than six -- and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty A$102 million, fourteen times the original estimate.

Utzon, interestingly, has never seen his prized creation. He left the project in 1966 in a dispute over rising costs and has never been back. He also never designed anything remotely as celebrated.

"Aboriginal pawns in nanny state's porn game."

There's a headline. The underlying story is not funny, involving racially discriminatory censorship in Australia.

ADDED: There is no porn at the link, though I do find what's there highly objectionable: The government banned pornography not for everyone, but for Aborigines, for their own good.

"The only openly gay male athlete in Beijing pulled off one of the great upsets at the Olympics in a spectacular fashion."

And NBC did not mention that Matthew Mitcham — who won the gold medal in the 10 meter dive — is gay.

Ah, but you say NBC didn't inform us of anyone else's sexual orientation? Yes, it did:

NBC did not mention Mitcham’s orientation, nor did they show his family and partner who were in the stands. NBC has made athletes' significant others a part of the coverage in the past, choosing to spotlight track athlete Sanya Richards' fiancee, a love triangle between French and Italian swimmers and Kerri Walsh's wedding ring debacle.

Mitcham was the only openly gay male at the Olympics. His surprise win was stunning, and NBC had great footage of his reaction as he realized he'd won. So this was one of the stories that deserved expansion with a little human interest documentary. Was NBC just afraid of putting off viewers? I suppose there are some people in the audience who would interpret any sort of emotional presentation of his background as some sort of in-your-face proselytizing.

It's possible that NBC failed to obtain shots of the family and the partner in the stands (since Mitcham wasn't expected to win). But if NBC deliberately eclipsed his sexual orientation, that was wrong.

"Subsequent to a sex scandal in a Minneapolis airport water closet for men...."

I love getting my American news filtered through India!

AS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY recovers from the Craig scandal, which forced the Idaho Senator Craig to resign (subsequent to a sex scandal in a Minneapolis airport water closet for men), a US tabloid has published more news which could damage the Republican Party even after Bush leaves office.

A US tabloid called “Globe” has published the news that First Lady Laura Bush is writing her divorce diaries about life in Washington. It has been reported that Laura Bush is unhappy with George Bush returning to drinking and spending more time with Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

According to the Globe, Laura Bush did not accompany her husband even to the APEC Summit in Australia because of her marital discord with George Bush. George Bush loves secrecy and has even asked members of his government not to write about their times in the Bush administration.

It appears that Bush is afraid that his reputation will be further damaged if there are further revelations of what happened inside the White House. The Republican Party has indeed suffered heavily in its so called “Annus Horribilis ” with Karl Rove imitating a rapper, Craig and his water closet, Giuliani dressed as a woman and now the Bush marital crisis.

It's so freaky!

Eating cat.

For the good.

ADDED: Some people in the comments are quite upset by the idea of eating feral cats -- in Australia, where these animals do tremendous ecological damage. It seems to me that if you accept meat-eating and have no problem with Australians eating, for example, rabbits, that you should want to encourage the eating of feral cats. We're not talking about eating anyone's pet. If the animal isn't a pet, it's like other wild game. And since these cats are nonnative and effective predators of native species, these should be the first animals you should want Australians to use for food.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service.... I was punished for political reasons."

"Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different." LSD folkhero Owsley speaks. More:

"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."

By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement....

He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library.

So some library nerd started it all!

Bear [AKA Augustus Owsley Stanley III] has always lived in a quite particular world. "He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level," says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. "I've seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson's."

His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in 1966 in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.

He's meticulous about what he ingests. On a genius level.

As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting that the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of psycho-acoustics.

"The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the dolphins. It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from everything else."

I love reason. Especially, on the genius level. I may not understand it, but I like the way it emanates from a single point. Helps me keep my bearings. It's just one guy saying things like that.

Bear left Northern California in the early '80s, convinced that a natural disaster was imminent.

He predicted at the time that global warming would lead to a six-week-long ultra-cyclone that could cover the Northern Hemisphere with a new ice age. Determining that the tropical northern side of Australia would be the most likely region to survive, Bear made a beeline for Queensland and says he felt at home the moment he set foot on the new continent.

"I might be right about the ice age thing," he allows. "I might be wrong."

He might be wrong.

"After we clean the world of the White House first..."

That's when Sheikh Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly, the most prominent Muslim cleric in Australia, said he would step down. Reuters paraphrases the quote above as a statement that "he would not go until the White House was cleaned out." Somebody needs to learn how to read. Those words aren't a mere wish to see President Bush out of the White House. They state a desire to rid the world of the White House. The place in need of "cleaning" is not the White House, but the world. The uncleanliness is not the President in the White House, but the White House in the world.

The demands that Hilaly step down follow his horrible statements about women and rape: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem."

"All of us in the modern creationism movement today would say we stand on his shoulders."

Henry M. Morris, dead at 87:

Dr. Morris was a hydraulic engineer and taught at several universities before developing his critique of evolution and a history of Earth that spans 4.5 billion years in the 1961 work "The Genesis Flood." The book, written with the theologian John C. Whitcomb, was the first to take a scholarly approach to proving the Old Testament creation story, and it argued that Noah's flood, rather than eons of erosion, sculptured the earth.

Considered the handbook of creationism, "The Genesis Flood" is in its 44th printing, having sold 250,000 copies in English.

"It was a groundbreaking work in that he basically, in this culture, in this day and age, showed that there were scientific answers to be able to defend the Christian faith and uphold the Bible's account," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a group based in Kentucky. Mr. Ham said that picking up a copy of the book in Brisbane, Australia, while a graduate student in 1974 was a transformational moment in his own life.

"The grass-roots movement you see across America right now, with the school board battles, with the students questioning evolution in colleges, all of that is really in a big part due to the work of Dr. Henry Morris," Mr. Ham said. "All of us in the modern creationism movement today would say we stand on his shoulders."

Sounds like one hell of a book... and one hell of a flood.

"When Australian men do it to Australian women, it's O.K. When we do it, it's sleazy."

NYT on the riots in Australia.

"I'm voting to dare these militants, to have a strong parliament and government that would restrain these outlaws."

Says one expatriate Iraqi voting today in Jordan. They are also voting in Australia, the United States, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, Iran, the Netherlands, Sweden, Syria, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.

Here's a voter in Michigan: