The Adventures of QueerPenguin

Growing Interest + Summer Time All Year Round

So Uncle Pete's telling those naughty children at the Reserve Bank not to raise interest rates - again - otherwise they won't get a banana.

And I'm sure that's because of sound economics and absolutely nothing to do with the Howard government desperately preventing the lie that it can single-handedly keep interest rates low being exposed.

Any half-decent electoral strategy team in the ALP should now temporarily put IR reforms on the back-burner and jump all over this. Make clear there was absolutely no way Howard could have predicted, unless he had a crystal ball, that interest rates would be higher under a Labor government.

What's that - interest rates rose significantly under the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments, that's how the Howard government was able to make this forecast?

But, but - what about that non-Labor government that ruled for a bit between Whitlam and Hawke- you know the one, the one with that old guy who bangs on a lot about human rights? Wasn't the average mortgage rate 1.87 percentage points higher than the rate applied under Whitlam?

And who was Treasurer then?

REALLY?! No shit.

I predicted back in September last year that Labor can only win the next election (or, I should really say, the Coalition can only lose the next election) on the proviso that a/ interest rates rise substantially, b/ the full sale of Telstra leads to a total collapse in rural communications; c/ all the dire predictions of Labor and the unions about the government's IR "reforms" obliterating blue-collar worker rights come true; d/ petrol hits $2 a litre, or a combination of all four.

If federal Labor cannot gain and sustain an election-winning margin now, they may as well just officially announce their intention to remain in Opposition for the rest of the 21st century.

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You know you might be Too Gay To Function when your IPod, while in random Shuffle mode, plays "Hot Stuff" by Donna Summer.

Immediately followed by "Macarthur Park" by...Donna Summer.

Immediately followed by "Bad Girls" by...umm...Donna Summer.

Immediately followed by "No More Tears" by - oh! Barbra Streisand, yay. And - oh, Donna Summer.

No foolin, this actually happened to me at work yesterday. So either the Shuffle function on my iPod is screwed or there's just too much Donna in my life.

She works hard for the money...

Now, Donna - saint or sinner? She still denies ever saying the unfortunate homophobic comments that one typically expects to hear from a Born-again Christian. Unfortunate, in the sense that actually saying such comments in front of a mostly-gay male audience isn't such a great long-term financial strategy when said males constitute most of her audience. In fact, the cynical response to Summer's denial of these statements is that she had to make such a denial in order to sustain a career.

I dunno, though. I mean, what else is "diva" other than an obscure Sicilian word* meaning "demanding, aggressive bitch who sings like an angel but otherwise doesn't have much else good going for her in life or useful to communicate to the world"? Callas, Aguilera, Bassey, etc.

Sometimes you just gotta separate the artist from the persona to fully appreciate their art. Michael Jackson springs to mind here. Donna's record speaks for itself really - perhaps the only female disco singer ever to be also legitimately accepted by modern rock critics.

Plus, the girl's got a good plastic surgeon.

(*Just made that up.)

posted by Sam @ Thursday, July 27, 2006