Apercu of Paranoid Times genus

Census night is a night for a little civil disobedience

Ethan Switch - Sunday, August 6, 2006 - 23:40:39 - print it raw

Taken away in the night and watching the cracks of the road pass underfoot, the stakes of the game are high. Sitting idle in many Australian homes right now is a Census form waiting for the night of Tuesday, 8 August 2006.

A night wherein the population at large will face down the barrel of a blue or black pen and mark their lives in a snap shot for the Australian Bureau of Statistics to collate and regurgitate over the next few years to slight astonishment.

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Howard's hold chafes Costello's leadership plans

Ethan Switch - Friday, July 14, 2006 - 19:02:17 - print it raw

Ring around the rosies, a pocketful of posies, atishoo, atishoo, they all fall down. More than just a tissue note from the sweaty palm of former defence minister Ian McLachlan set throats and whispers agog and agagging.

Breaking the new week was enough to rip through the otherwise iron clad conjoined set of Prime Minister John Howard and Federal Treasurer Peter Costello.

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North Korea missiles to face fights against World and Universe

Ethan Switch - Friday, July 7, 2006 - 17:40:55 - print it raw

Launching the week on a scrot full of paranoia and heightened pressure, North Korea, currently under the regime of Kim Jong-il, set ablaze the world arms community firing not six, but eight test missiles.

Speculation is rife that the next step in the evolution of the program will include nuclear warheads strapping young deaths to the ends of the short-range missiles. Potential for nuclear war head deployment is still uncertain, though US reports report that Pyongyang is aglow with underground nuclear tests.

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Eerie Silence

Belvedere Jehosophat - Sunday, June 11, 2006 - 21:28:28 - print it raw

When Lamarckian evolution gave way to Mendelian inheritance and the great houses of science closed their doors on the fine finery of Paris and opened their hearts to the rubble of Stuttgart, a hospital matron with nervous shoulders and disease-flecked lips, in what was eventually determined to be a completely unrelated event, collapsed and died on the third floor of the left wing of the hospital to which she had given the last twenty-three years of her life.

Well, science was young and science was wild and neither it nor its untamed hair cared for nurses dying flimflam deaths in stone buildings that, by necessity alone, were heated by oil lamps and indiscretion. And it was because of this indifference that the grieving family of the deceased nurse was frozen out of the decision-making process as regarding the funeral. Funerary rights, like moonless nights, once brushed aside are lost forever, and no amount of beseeching or completing of forms will see them returned. Time does its thing.

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World Environment Day braces for tomorrow's end of the world

Ethan Switch - Monday, June 5, 2006 - 17:46:21 - print it raw

Creating depowered mutants with nuclear power and uranium markets sparking a cockfight chug apace as the focus on the world and the environment continues to shadow a dark cloud.

"Temperatures rise to burn the scowls, forests fall before sprawling malls and the little critters are skitting away into oblivion as the fishes find no feasible fortress of safe harbour."

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Music

Belvedere Jehosophat - Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 02:14:24 - print it raw

Music is all but banned in the city. To say that the songs are sanitised would be an understatement. After all, there are three committees to which songs, by obligation, are submitted for approval before they can be performed in public or listened to in private. (Of course, it goes without saying that the elders would prefer that the citizens keep their private activity to the absolute minimum.)

These three committees — the Department of Sedition, the Department of Blasphemy and the Department of Awareness — each work independently to ensure that music doesn't create in the citizens the fanciful notions that plagued the city before the elders assumed control.

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