Ben Peek

"The High Court has upheld the Federal Government's right to detain failed asylum seekers indefinitely in a decision that has angered refugee supporters and opposition parties.

The court, in a 4-3 finding yesterday, ruled that unsuccessful asylum seekers who could not be removed to another country despite their wish to leave Australia could be held in immigration detention indefinitely.

It overruled an earlier Federal Court ruling that failed asylum seekers should not be detained indefinitely if no country could be found to take them."

apparently it is. idiots.

from mariness

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 (Thanks to Alicia Butler and Slate.com)

every now and then i go through this moment of hunting for new music. the old music sucks, i think, and new things must be found, and at this moment, i do whatever self respecting individual does: i look around at what i've been listening too, and i go right to the opposite side of the music room. sometimes, the result is that less than admirable purchases and downloads are made. things that i normally wouldn't have anything to do with, you must understand, and which, outside this moment of complete reversal, would never have happened. i was caught in one of these moments this week--it's probably surprisingly to everyone that i am not talking about the william shatner song.

in response to this lapse, i took all the music on my computer and dumped it into my windows media player, then hit shuffle. there is apparently seventy six hours and forty three minutes and forty two seconds of music and comedy on this computer. substantially more than i thought i had, and when put on random, jumps from bob dylan to set fire to flames to tori amos and, at the moment, snog.

some of it i didn't even know i had.

i should do this more often.

i have a love for the artwork of dave mckean. my favourite of his work is the graphic novel cages. it's a brilliant, sprawling, magical thing, surpassing any of the work he did with neil gaiman. (which, at any rate, i rather liked, too, especially signal to noise and mr. punch.)

he is directing a film called mirrormask and this is some images from it. the film might suck, but it'll be pretty beyond words.



"When things get bad in life, people sometimes remark it might just be easier if you could run off and join the circus, escaping the realities of every day life and living care-free, touring across the country with a bunch of very colorful people. The overwhelming majority of us don't do that, and for good reason.

There's a totally different side to that circus fantasy that's examined in the upcoming film "MirrorMask," which centers on a 15-year-old girl named Helena who's a member of a family of circus entertainers and wishes she could run off and join real life."