Who is Eccles?

Well hi everybody – I feel like a bit of a sneak, taking the name of my favourite Goon Show character (I think it was Spike, but it might have been Sellers). Anyway it shows my age I guess – I used to listen to the Goon Show on the radio back in the UK while my mum ironed my fathers shirts. I did not understand a word of it then, but after a few thousand repetitions since then I am beginning to understand. Unfortunately they have all passed away, but some moments were certainly magic.

What I can relate to in Eccles is his completely gormless and happy-go-lucky attitude to everything. The only character I know who is even more hopeless than me! Well that is probably not really true as I am fiendishly intelligent, unacceptably intellectually aggressive, and almost friendless. But on the positive side I am very opinionated and intolerant of fools. I intend to use this blog to stir up a bit of trouble in this complacent land of vanishing tolerance, 24 hour wall to wall spectator sport and the petty-minded obsessiveness with nasty things like horse racing, pedophilia, rape, murder and teenage car crashes. Some of my other targets will be the crappy education system, the political nightmare of three levels of incompetent government, and the ongoing sickening annual celebration of dead soldiers from almost 100 years ago: typified by the statue of the grieving soldier on Anzac bridge with the point of his rifle stuck in the ground ( a most unlikely event, as if he had to shoot somebody later the barrel would be blocked with dirt. That is, unless he was resting it on his boot, which if you look closely he is not.)

As my first specific tirade I would like to comment on the unfortunate death of an Australian soldier in Afghanistan last week. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really callous, but look at it like this: If such a huge coverage was applied to every American who died in Iraq (and don’t mention Vietnam) they would need dozens of channels covering only military mortality. And of course the basic principle here is – don’t join the army if you don’t want to get shot up. Very sad for his family and so on but they surely were aware of the risk!

Anyway moving on – next week I will present an in depth coverage of the supreme folly of the pulp mill in the Tamar valley, and highlight a few of the particularly stupid things that have been said in the support of this latest environmental traversy. Some upcoming blogs will cover the upcoming fascinating election of Log vs Stork, a retrospective of the APEC farce with particular reference to the petty minded attitudes of Iemma and Walker.

Once I was a pretend anarchistic radical – now I am still poor, but I read the Economist for the job ads.

Eccles