To complicate the matters, many new democracies experience explosion of parties as political energies of people are liberated and can finally find legal outlet. In time, survival of the fittest narrows down the field, but during the transitional phase we have to deal with multitude of what the Poles jokingly used to refer to as "sofa parties" (because their membership could all sit together on one sofa).

The documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that health problems among security staff continued beyond February 2002. Guards complained on January 10, 2003 of feeling ill in several public areas, including the Jackson Pollock exhibition area, where the gallery's highest-profile work, Blue Poles, hangs. In February last year, security and installation staff reported having headaches in the Asian art galleries, symptoms that cleared once they left the area.

You'll be pleased to learn that thanks to concerned citizens like you, we are creating a new division of the Terrorist Retraining Program, to be called the "Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers" program, or LARK for short.

Ahmed will not wish to interact with your wife or daughters (except sexually) since he views females as a subhuman form of property.

The sexiest of the sexy stand out like sexy beacons.

My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.

“Probably – so what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”

"To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable."
[National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy. 1970. The Life Sciences; Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs; The World of Biological Research; Requirements for the Future.]

Weight Management Council of Australia chairman Dr Mark Wahlqvist said men must take control of their weight.

Chaucer’s Pardoner earned one hundred marks a year by selling indulgences, worthless pieces of paper, relics and other valueless items to credulous believers in the religion of the day. Now we have carbon trading, in which new worthless pieces of paper are sold for millions of pounds. It is not, however, the ordinary punters who are now the credulous dupes, but the National Government. The wily Russians have signed up to Kyoto, though they have made it quite clear that they know it is based on false science, because they also know they can make a killing in trading goods that are no more substantial than the emperor’s new clothes.

Each morning when I go to collect my mail I pass a new plaque on the footpath of Darlinghurst Road. I do not recognise the name of the man who is celebrated but he is proudly called a "communist". Imagine the outcry if the plaque read "fascist". What is disturbing to me is how being a communist continues to be seen as a badge of honour rather than a stigma it should be.

OCTOBER: The Friends of the ABC changes its name after noticing the ABC talking to a rival group of concerned citizens during lunch recess. “We were walking over to the quadrangle when we saw the ABC like totally sucking up to Australians for a Diverse Media,” says Tamara Blink, spokeswoman for the newly formed We Can’t Believe We Were Ever Friends With That Bitch ABC.

I called the World Wildlife Fund, thinking I would get a fight. But Richard Liroff, its expert on toxins, said he could accept the use of DDT when necessary in anti-malaria programs.
"South Africa was right to use DDT," he said. "If the alternatives to DDT aren't working, as they weren't in South Africa, geez, you've got to use it. In South Africa it prevented tens of thousands of malaria cases and saved lots of lives."
At Greenpeace, Rick Hind noted reasons to be wary of DDT, but added: "If there's nothing else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it. Nobody's dogmatic about it."

"There are no safe levels of exposure to POPs. So we call for a cessation of their production."

It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.

At Glenrowan (Famous for some thief and cop killer, I gather) A dodgy almost animatronic show with:

• Dodgy sound
• Crappy dialogue
• Out of sync computer control (so we missed most of the mostly-sound-effects-only gun fight re-enactment)
• The highlight: "And this room (a Melbourne Gaol set) will be really good when I finish it."

Of course, the slowly decaying Big Merino at Goulbourn will (alas) probably live on in my menory for many years. (Motel manager at Goulbourn, on being told we'd seen the Big Merino & the War memorial: "Well, you've seen it all then.")
People can say what they like about the crass {Sea|Dream|Movie|Wet'n'Wild}Worlds on the Gold Coast, but at least they are maintained in working order, and look like someone cares.

• No punctuation!
• Interactive is inconsistently capitalised
• Interactive is an adjective not a noun
• Given no particular ordering of "interactives", which would be considered "next"?
• "onto" not "on to" implies that the "next" "interactive" needed to be mounted in some way. No such "interactives" were sighted

It is a very misinformed doctor or nutritionist that would suggest eliminating salt from the diet has any bearing on lowering blood pressure or reducing the risk of heart attack in this day and age. Yet almost with monotonous regularity we are exhorted to reduce salt consumption by perhaps well meaning government sponsored doctors and nutritionists who haven't even bothered to read the in-depth research on this subject.
It is typical of the dogma that surrounds the medical fraternity. If they are determined to "prove" a point they will selectively gather data so they are shown to be right and to hell with the real results. As long as their position is vindicated then they have justified their existence.
Of course most studies are funded by vested interests with a financial interest in the results. So what scientist is going shoot themselves in both feet at once by coming up with a finding completely opposite to what he is being paid to find?
It's too easy to put a pair of blinkers on and focus on just one aspect of a particular problem without looking at the whole! Holistic healers look at the person as a whole - never seeking to isolate a single symptom and treat it with allopathic drugs and chemicals. High blood pressure is invariably caused by many other factors other than salt!

Other than Afghanistan, every country that begins with the letter 'A', ends with the letter 'A'.

"I have made a conscious decision to get the Government more onto the front foot on climate change," Senator Campbell said yesterday.
"Climate change is the pre-eminent environmental issue. We are spending billions of dollars fixing up rivers, restoring habits and wetlands, but then if you do nothing about climate change you won't have any wetlands left.
"I think we need to engage the climate sceptics, those people who are pulling the doona up over their heads, and get past the debate over whether or not climate change is real. There is a dominance of science which does say that the massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions has contributed to human-induced climate change."

The way it works is that those who build a culture, over 40 years or so, have a vested interest in maintaining it. So the old counter-culturalists become the conservatives, even though they still think they are progressives and deride as "conservative" those who disagree with them, though disagreeing is counter-cultural.
Then along comes a generation which has known nothing but the old "counter-culture" and feels oppressed by it, because there are so many rules now about how you should think, and to a fresh mind many are absurd. So you get the first signs of rebellion from the most independent-minded, and soon enough it builds into a tsunami that breaks down the old counter-culture and begins the process anew.

Am I the last person to know this?
I am a fan of murder mystery/crime fiction and read Jennifer Rowe’s “Verity Birdwood” series some time ago. I haven’t seen any new books by her for a while which I think is a pity, so I’ve occupied myself by buying the Emily Rodda books and reading them to the kids. I now find out they are one and the SAME PERSON!!!

And for those who need to know, another one of Jennifer Rowe’s adult books (the “Tessa Vance” series) was turned into a TV show called “Murder Call”, starring Lucy Bell.