crazybrave

There’s always a weird moment meeting your blog friends in the flesh for the first time. Fortunately for us, Steev’s attempt to explain to the restaurant staff that the champagne was not intended to taste like mildew and we wanted a replacement gave us all something to distract ourselves with for ten minutes or so.

Nick Crustacean’s wife had thoughfully held off giving birth so he could come, and so did Kay, commenter Jenster, David, Mark, Rach, Matty, Mel, and a few others who I didn’t get to talk to while I was still sober and therefore able to remember much.

The night was very good fun. We did indeed drink the place out of champagne which may have helped. Dean got the conversational ball rolling by asking everyone why they started blogging. And you would start that conversation, wouldn’t you, when your own story involved exciting stabbing incidents and necessitated the demonstration of scars?

We were a bit late getting to the pub, so hopefully Rob and Mick didn’t give up in disgust. Andy will hopefully come next time. Bless him, he’s a bit shy.

I believe at one stage of the evening – the later part, obviously, – I asked TJ to show me her nipple, which she kindly did. I also confessed to Sikkukkut (who comments at TJs) that I had never known how to pronounce his nickname and had always thought of him as Sickunt. So yes, I’m pretty sure I wowed ‘em with the grace and sophistication.

Plans have been settled for a meetup on Saturday. I will book a table for “blog” (because I am so goddam funny) at Little Saigon on Alinga Street at 7:30 pm on Saturday. It’s in the Novotel Building on Alinga St (ie Jolimont Centre).

Further carrying on will be had at the Wig and Pen from about 9-ish. Trickily, the Wig and Pen is also on Alinga Street.

This is an open invitation event. All bloggers, commenters, lurkers, mates and lovers are welcome to come along to either or both parts. Please let others know, and in particular any newer bloggers. If you want to come for dinner, please comment or email so I can get an idea of numbers to make the booking.

One person I’m looking forward to meeting is David, who writes Let’s try that again and is a sensational photographer. Check out his idea of Canberra bloggers surfacing to meet in the flesh:

How cool is that?

I tried to update the previous post but some unidentified html error did my head in. So:

A very interesting angle about how we discuss adoption in the context of the “abortion debate” is at the superbly named Pinko Feminist Hellcat, via the excellent Sju-sju

That is all.

Um, not it isn’t. Again. Pinko Feminist’s writer and President for Life, Sheelzebub (from the USA), wants to create a Ministry, and has asked for volunteers. I have volunteered to be the Minister for Distant Suckholes. Catchy title, non?

Martin at Northcote Knob posted his desire that everyone, and in particular pro-choice people, shut up about Tony Abbott’s adopted son. This injunction to silence pissed me off a little – let’s face it, bloggers don’t blog to be told what not to talk about.

And anytime the answer is “Let’s do what Tony Abbott suggests” I think we need to take a good long hard look at the question.

However I couldn’t work up the energy to scare up a proper answer, particularly given the feralness of a certain ill two year old of my immediate acquaintance over the last few days. So it was with some relief I read the first item in the Crikey subscriber email tonight, where Christian Kerr just said it goddam all without me having to go all feral about it (let alone write it):

1. Hawkie, the Monk and great moments in political spin

Political correspondent Christian Kerr writes:

“The Abbott and son reunion is the most blatant personal problem deck-clearing effort since Bob Hawke got Blanche D’Alpuget to get his drinking and womanising problems out in the open some 23 years ago in her horizontally observed biography of the great man,” a switched-on subscriber writes.

To which we reply “Blud oath, Narelle!”

It’s essential that Prime Ministerial aspirants get personal baggage out in the open – with as much of their own spin on it as possible – before they make their run for the top job.

The logic’s simple. Do so and you can’t have any unwelcome revelations sprung on you when the vital hour comes – or if you have been economical with the actualite and a few more details emerge, you can simply brush them off as old news unworthy of air time.

We’ve said it before. Abbott used the Michael Duffy book and a senior, senior Gallery journo who got played for a patsy to keep serious and well-researched allegations of the front pages last year. Watch him like a hawk.

He’s being helped all the way along by a sooky meeja. Even Lateline last night came across more like New Idea. Hardened cynics in the fourth estate have come over all clucky.

One can but laugh. The meeja at the moment are an absolute joy to behold. With a story like this, all the politically correct posturing that normally seeps from them day after day is replaced with sentimental sh*te.

Another subscriber had a good comment: “One of the things I’m enjoying at the moment is the constant repetition of the statement that Tony Abbott put ‘his’ son up for adoption. Yeah, right. That’s a novel concept.”

Crikey readers, did we say you’re a clever crew?

I am, of course, a Crikey reader, and therefore it seems clever. And observant and fucking cynical. Once I asked an ex politician I knew how to succeed in politics without being a complete cheating cunt. He sucked on his fag, sipped his drink and said “Rat cunning. Absolute. Rat. Cunning. No other way.”

Always assume that politicians are doing what they do on purpose. Because they are. If they’re not, they’re not up to the job.

(And no, this is not just an excuse to trackback the king of trackback!)