Stray - 10Dec03 Thick & fast.

There's an old Jewish saying; if you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans.

So with my vested interest in keeping god in a lenient mood, and because many of you will be directly affected by them, here they are. I can say most of this is reliable as I'm going to be paying for the tickets soon.

Christmas day I'll be flying to Brisbane. Tim, bless him, has secured me a free ticket to the Wudfud festival, and I just got a mail from the organisers offering me another. So I guess I'm going twice. I know Marnina, Tim and ninety percent of Tony will be going, I know Michelle isn't. Holly Cassie and Naomi?

I need some advice: how easy is it to hitch from Brisbane to Melbourne? I'd like to fly from there to Christchurch in the middle of January, but if it's going to be a hassle I'll just leave from Brizzie.

If anyone with knowledge on this could get hold of me as soon as, it'd be appreciated.

Three to six weeks in New Zealand waiting for my Canadian working holiday visa to come through, catching up with as many people and places as possible.

Overnight through Honolulu to Vancouver and into a skifield job I should have by that time lined up from here.

The season'll have about two months left in it by the time a arrive, which is about right. After that things get nice and grey, but the good bet's still on the film industry.

But there's a lot of other things piling onto the to do list, which I'd hate to see not get too done. Like heading for south america and building sustainable communities with the Zapatistas. I think that's what they do. Or hooking into a theatre group and writing for the stage, or not the stage if we kidnap an audience and dump them into a performance in a forest or abandoned building or something. I'm just brainstorming here.

Things are as fucked up in Australia as they've ever been, politically speaking. Refugee children in concentration camps sewing their mouths shut and jumping onto electric fences, the minister for the environment building atomic waste dumps on aboriginal land and saying its better to deal with the droughts and forest fires than ratify the Kyoto protocol. Most people still like Howard and the opposition's felling old growth in Tasmania for ten dollars a tonne and apologizing to the u.s. for any misunderstandings. Amnesty International is calling us one of the worst human rights abusers in the world, the supreme court and U.N. are horrified.

Better get settled into it as Liberal's definitely going to win the next election, same tactic as they did the last one. A lot of people here really do hate refugees.

While I'm making angry young predictions for the new year, I will state categorically that Bush will still be in power after the election. Sorry to all the Americans I've met and who are on this list - I know you hate that man, but your country is simply no longer a democracy. No president in history has ever been voted out during a war and there _will_ be one for the election. Plus they'll do what they did last time, except not just in Florida.

There's something interesting though; every president elected in a year ending in zero since 1820 has died before completing his final term, except Raegan who was shot in the lung but recovered. So Bush should probably die a horrible death within the next five years.

I don't wish death on him, just pointing out a pattern.

Actually I'm in a good mood and not taking things seriously at all.

Daniel.