No, not us.  Well, kind of us.

Here's a look at the kind of Google Chat discussion that we have on a regular basis...

Some background : we have two top-knot pigeons which have been entertaining us with their courtship dancing for the past couple of months. Today, it went to a whole 'nutha level...

Skribit is the coolest blog topic maker-upper-thingamajig...ever!

Because there's always been so many of them around, right?

But don't take my word for it (why start now, right?), go have a look for yourselves over here to find out more about it and jump on board.

straight from the riotous fun of the Copenhagen Climate Conference...we bring you...

The Environmental Movement’s Fossil of the Day Awards: 

1st: Ukraine

for having worst reduction target in the world – a 75 per cent increase from current levels.

2nd: Australia

...and other non EU industrial nations known as the 'brollies' or umbrella group...  for proposing that "carbon capture and storage" projects qualify as CDM projects. :/

3rd: Ukraine...again!

for not telling anyone how it is spending the €300 million windfall it pocketed from selling surplus emission credits to Japan.

HT: Giles Parkinson via Business Spectator

Feeling like a holiday? Well, as far as value for money** to some destinations, your timing couldn’t be better.

There are loads of great travel deals available at the moment, so take advantage of them for some R&R.

Online travel company Expedia.com.au, in conjunction with foreign exchange specialist HiFX, recently produced the Expedia Foreign Exchange Index, which reveals the top 10 destinations where Australians can get the best value for money while travelling.

The top 10 countries to visit based on the index are:

1. Iceland – stunning with beautiful wilderness areas
2. Poland – amazing history and architecture
3. Fiji – relaxing with loads of pristine beaches
4. Mexico – rich and vibrant with a colourful history
5. Russia – a shopper’s dream with plenty of high fashion stores
6. Sweden – full of character and quaint villages
7. Romania – dotted with fantastic castles
8. Hungary – has 22 wine regions
9. Norway – features 24 hours of daylight in the summer
10. Argentina – known for tango, music and delicious barbeques.

The Expedia Foreign Exchange Index is updated on an annual basis.

** Traditionally, Iceland has been a very expensive place to visit from anywhere...let alone Australia.  It's hard to find a place on earth further away from Australia than Iceland...  And yet, here it is, on top of a list of value for money destinations.

We've always wanted to go...but time & cash are currently fairly significant obstacles.

Oh, and wanting to visit some other people and places first :)

A man assaulted a service station attendant with chocolate bars, Parramatta Bail Court heard yesterday.

Peakhurts man Rex Payne allegedly threw Cherry Ripes, Crunchies, Picnics and Killer Pythons at an employee from the BP Service Station on the Princes Highway at Carss Park while in a drunken rage.

During the attack, he repeatedly demanded the employee call the police, saying he had been hit by a car.

Payne was arrested when the police arrived.

Police said Payne had recently inherited about $800,000.

Registrar Donna Evans granted Payne bail, warning him to stay away from the service station, adding "particularly the Crunchies, Cherry Ripes and Picnics".

This "news" article was printed in The Sun Herald (one of Sydney's major Sunday papers) on 10 August 2003.  Yes, 6 years ago.  While Diane and I were packing, we found the page which we'd removed from the paper and kept.

We take pack-rat-dom to a whole new level.

So, I'm now posting it here for two reasons :

1. we can now throw out that snippet of paper, and
2. we can continue laughing at how ridiculous this is, and the implication that inheriting $800,000 might send you into a drunken rage and attack people with chocolate...naturally.

Tens of thousands of homeless and unemployed people, many on fixed or low incomes, cannot see how they will ever own their own home.  Fusion Australia has initiated the development of unique "villagettes" so that people on welfare benefits can have a chance of owning a home and finding a productive place within a healthy community. The plan has caught the attention of community leaders in Ghana, Nigeria, Canada, India and South Africa. They are inviting Fusion to partner with them as they address the significant challenges they face in housing and employment.

The Villagette development, named "The Mountain View Community Estate" is situated in Rocherlea, a suburb of Launceston.  As well as providing affordable housing the project will stimulate urban renewal, create employment, provide vocational training and develop a community where people have a chance to thrive and contribute. A unique feature of the program will be the recognition of community service as part payment for the dwellings.  Fusion has initiated the project in cooperation with Launceston City Council and in partnership with the Tasmanian Government.

The price of housing will enable people to buy their own 1, 2 or 3 bedroom dwelling, with repayments being about the same as the prevailing Housing Department rental and is already proving very appealing to potential buyers. The Villagette will include a small retail complex that will complement existing services and will include a community hall, community veggie garden and recreation areas including swimming pool, half court tennis court.  In a number of ways it will add to local recreational amenities for families.

Part of the project design includes a VET (Vocational Education Training) program which turns community need into vocational opportunities through training.  Courses will include Aged Care, Child Care, Retail, Health Care, First Responder's Training, First Aid, Parenting, Horticulture, Active Volunteering and more, all of which will prepare unemployed young people and others for job readiness.  Qualified Fusion workers will provide mentoring and training.

The project will provide jobs in the building sector during the construction phase. It will also stimulate further employment as people receive training and support.  It is hoped that it will create opportunities for local government, schools, churches, service clubs and existing local services. Already, Fusion Australia and Brookes High School have developed a productive connection with training for students in the building trades through Fusion's Home Support Service in Launceston.  This will be extended to the construction stage of the Villagette.

Source: Fusion Australia via Australian Prayer Network

CATS have a power over their owners - and they know it. Scientist have discovered our feline friends use a special blend of sounds to evoke deep emotional responses from their human companions.

Understanding Trujillo

Sol Trujillo has, not for the first time, and perhaps not for the last, ignited a furore, this time over his charge that Australians are racist. While his broader comments mischaracterise a country generally welcoming to people of different cultural backgrounds, there is also some validity to them when it comes to the way he was treated during his stint here.

From the moment he was appointed CEO of Telstra in mid-2005 Trujillo was caricatured – in print as well as cartoons – as a Mexican and the fellow-Americans he brought into Telstra as his ‘amigos'. He isn’t Mexican. While ultimately of Hispanic descent, he was born in Wyoming.

Is it racist to call someone from America’s west a Mexican?

That depends on your perspective, and experiences.

Just as Trujillo’s comments could be seen as containing elements of cultural misunderstanding – of the spiky Australian sense of humour, of the distrust and disdain for anything that smacks of arrogance or slickness, of the mock civility of public discourse and of the deeply-engrained ‘Tall Poppy’ syndrome – Australians may have underestimated the sensitivity of an Hispanic American to being characterised as a cartoon Mexican.

Racial stereotyping doesn’t have to be overtly offensive to offend, although it can be overtly offensive.

There’s a scene from South Park, "The Hall of Stereotypes", which depicts a tour of a gallery of racial stereotypes presented in wax – the black American eating chicken and watermelon, the Arab presented as a terrorist, an Asian with a calculator, a ‘covetous Jew’ and a ‘sleepy Mexican'.

One of the characters says: ‘’Here’s a good one, the stereotypical sleeping Mexican." However, the Mexican is not a wax figure. He wakes, stretches and says: ‘’No man, I’m the janitor. I was supposed to be working but I felt tired. I’m so sleepy."

Is portraying a race as indolent, low-skilled and perhaps untrustworthy racist? Is depicting Trujillo as a sombrero-hatted Mexican bandit riding off with bags of cash on a burro racist?

Trujillo, and some of his Australian colleagues, certainly thought it was. Anyone with even the most rudimentary familiarity with the racial tensions and sensitivities within the US would probably come to the same conclusion.

It may not have been the intention of the Australian journalists, cartoonists and even the Prime Minister – who bid Trujillo farewell with an un-primeministerial 'adios' – to offend. Ours is not a society where the issue of racial stereotyping and the offence it causes has had much airplay, unlike the US; and our humour (and cartoonists) can be aggressive.

Given Trujillo’s visibility in US business and political circles, his comments – and the evidence he can point to in his treatment by Australian media, politicians and some elements of the public – are damaging to Australia’s reputation and our ability to attract executives and capital from the US, where the treatment of Trujillo will be filtered through the lens of American experiences and sensitivities.

Trujillo did misunderstand and misrepresent Australia and, it appears, most Australians, by extrapolating from his own experience and it is apparent from the earliest days that he struggled to come to grips with the fundamental differences that lie beneath the superficial similarities of American culture and ours. However, he too has been misrepresented and misunderstood.

Despite some attempts to rewrite history, Trujillo left Telstra in better shape than he found it, with better technology, better market positions and a better understanding of its customers and how to reach them (albeit with some work yet to do on service quality).

Telstra shares may have been hit by the financial crisis and further damaged by its decision not to participate in the ultimately aborted national broadband network tender, but they also have been among the better-performers in the market, and the company is in far, far better shape than most of its global peers.

Tactically he may have made a costly mistake – and ensured an unhappy end to a controversial tenure at Telstra – in snubbing the NBN tender and publicly contemplating the alternatives but no-one considered the possibility of a government pointing a cannon at Telstra in the form of an open-ended blank cheque from taxpayers to fund an uncosted fibre-to-the-premises network.

However, whatever judgement one makes of his performance the nature of the treatment he has received, and continues to receive, was uncalled for and grossly insensitive. Racist, perhaps.

Article from:

By ALEXANDER DOWNER

(Alexander Downer was Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister from 1996 to 2007)

May 24, 2009 11:30pm

I DON'T know about you, but it's always nice to get emails. Once upon a time you'd look with pleasure at a handful of letters which dropped through the letter box. Now all you get are those threatening looking envelopes with windows. Or if you're Tom Koutsantonis, those nasty missives which tell you about passing unknowingly through a speed camera.

But this is a generalisation. At the height of the Schapelle Corby affair I received 5000 emails in one day from fellow Australians pleading with me to save "our Schapelle" from the horrors of the Indonesian legal system. Or, to be a bit more honest, the few I looked at said that.

I'm sure my successor as foreign minister, Stephen Smith, had his in box bursting last week as people demanded he save the beer mat mum, Annice Smoel, from the ravages of the Thai police.

I felt for him especially when the media started demanding he "do something" to save her.

After about 10 minutes as foreign minister I was a little surprised to learn I was "responsible" for miscreant Australians who got into trouble in foreign countries.

No, no, no, don't get it wrong - drug traffickers, drunks, kleptomaniacs and fraudsters weren't responsible for their own stupidity - I was.

It's about time that great nanny in Canberra, the Federal Government, turned around and told people they are responsible for their own decisions.

I was in Lebanon the other day and went down to the southern cities of Sidon and Tyre. They're fascinating places - old Crusader castles, bustling souks, colourful little food stalls with generous owners offering you a taste of their wares.

But I couldn't help remembering the awful events in those same places three years ago when Israel went to war with Hezbollah.

There were said to be 20,000 Australians in Lebanon at that time and a hefty percentage of them were demanding the Australian Government save them and fast.

Lebanese support groups hit the airwaves screaming that the Government was too slow getting those Australians who wanted to be evacuated to safety. But hang on, Australia's about 15,000km from Lebanon and we don't dock ships in the eastern Mediterranean ready to ferry Australians to safety.

And there was something else. We'd issued a travel advisory months earlier warning Australians of the dangers of southern Lebanon and the risks of going there.

It didn't matter - apparently we had to get them out.

We were lucky. The Australian ambassador, a petite, charming professional called Lyndall Sachs, worked day and night chartering ferries and providing comfort to the evacuees, who hadn't cared about the travel advisories, and whisked them to safety.

It was one of the great achievements of an Australian diplomat. Almost single handedly, she managed to get around 5000 Australians to Cyprus and Turkey.

We then chartered planes to take them back to Australia. I hope they built shrines to her. Some did, at least metaphorically.

But some just whinged. They felt seasick on the ferry and that was our fault. Could they get frequent flyer points for the free flight back to Australia? And all this cost around $30 million dollars - your dollars.

I'll tell you this - I didn't get 5000 emails of thanks but I got plenty of abuse because we weren't fast enough, the ferries didn't go from their port of choice and we were slow because we were racist, and so on. I mean, we'd warned them and told them not to go to the south of Lebanon. They went all the same. And when the proverbial hit the fan it was, you guessed it, "our fault".

Then there was Hurricane Katrina, which flooded much of New Orleans. A mother of an Australian who arrived in New Orleans the day the hurricane hit came to see me in Stirling and demanded I get her son out. Americans couldn't get out but I had to get her son out. I asked if he'd heard the warnings from the U.S. Government that week to avoid New Orleans.

She started shouting. He doesn't follow the news, he doesn't watch TV or read the newspapers. I see, I said. It was my fault he was in New Orleans, was it? What were we to do? Fly helicopters from Australia to America and pick up Australians and leave the Americans behind?

I didn't have the guts to say this as foreign minister but don't you think you should take responsibility for yourself when you go overseas?

If you're too dumb or idle to read the travel advisories and too mean to take out travel insurance when you go overseas then you ought to take responsibility for your own behaviour.

Sure, if there's a catastrophe like the Bali bombings or you're trapped in a corruption scam the government should try to help. But not if you're too lazy and silly to help yourself.

Remember two things when you travel. First, there are no special laws for Australians overseas. Foreigners make the laws over there, not us. And secondly, foreigners do things differently and they're entitled to.

If you go to a Muslim country and get wildly drunk and women start dressing down (if you know what I mean) it can be bloody offensive to the locals. You'll soon be in trouble.

And learn to take responsibility for your own behaviour. Stealing is wrong, even stealing beer mats. I know, I know, the beer mat mum had a few drinks but, no, she wasn't drunk and she was charmingly polite to the local police.

But she was in a foreign country with a different culture and all of us ought to respect that.