Have been having some 'puter trouble. Tried downloading ICQ from some CD onto my PC. But it couldn't manage it. Then my main browser (Opera) bit the dust. (Well, technically perhaps not. Maybe there's some glitch out there in cyberspace.) I think some of the ICQ files elbowed out the browser files or something. Anyway, I downloaded a Mozilla one. This seems to work fine. Thank God for that!

Touch wood everything will be okay from now on. It really freaks me out when I have tehcnical glitches. I start hyperventilating and everything.

I'm like a junkie, ferchrissakes. My whole world just starts to fall apart if I think I won't be able to blog.

Blog-addiction must already be a serious problem. Before long it will be in the DSM, I reckon.

Just signed up to this pay per-click search engine program. It's here if you wanna have a look. There's a permalink down below, too, just under the dating site banners. (By the way, I've already earned a whopping 3 bucks US from that Friendfinder one. Impressive, eh? Already well on the way to cyber-moguldom...)

A fine example of the leftist malevolence driving many of those shaping the minds of this nation's youth.

Fluffs are no-doubt creaming their beanies over this "sheriff" line. More disturbing evidence of Bush's cowboy delusion etc.

But what exactly was Dubya's intention? I suspect that as well as communicating a strong sense of allegiance he was being mildly humorous - as he is wont to do occasionally.

Take the line: "There's nothing deputy about this relationship." It's kind of colloquial, slightly self-parodic. Has a bit of nuance, light and shade - which is why retarded, credulous fluffs can't process it and immediately go spacko.

Saw a very slick, fascinating doco last night on political cartoonists. Crikey, I thought I was highly strung. But these blokes? Gawd. They were just full-on wired, like pubescent whippets on crack!

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Fitzy the Boofhead is arcing up again. He's so emotional this guy. He just goes for it hell for leather - and damn the bloody consequences! - like he used to on the rugger field in his youth. Quite lively and amusng, but is it, er, appropriate for the opinion pages of a major newspaper?

In this piece he cracks the shits with John Howard, wheeling out the ol' "arselicker" angle. Yet, predictably, he expresses teenybopper-like adoration for Clinton, as all fluffs do.

Hey, but didn't Bill order a coupla bombing runs of Baghdad back in the late 90's? Oh, well, it had UN approval or something, so it was okay. Or, we know he was doing it for the right reasons, so we'll trust his good judgement, etc.

The Boofster concludes with these paragraphs, which predict the Government's grovelling behaviour in the hypothetical case of Howard Dean being elected prez, and yanking the troops out of Iraq: "Do John Howard, Alexander Downer, et al, then do a screaming U-turn and declare that is exactly what they were thinking, precisely the policy they were going to propose and, come to think of it, just about everything Dean says makes them want to leap to their feet with acclamation?

"Do we have no gravitas of our own?"

Well this ain't gonna happen - that Howard Dean bloke's got a butterfly's chance in hell, I reckon - but still, you could easily flip this scenario the other way around to illustrate fluffy wuffy hypocrisy.

That is, if a Howard Dean (or a Hillary Clinton?) were to become president and, surprisingly, keep the troops in Iraq, and seriously continue to wage the war on terror, "Do Peter FitzSimons, Anne Summers, et al, then do a screaming U-turn and declare that is exactly what they were thinking, precisely the policy they were going to propose and, come to think of it, just about everything Dean says makes them want to leap to their feet with acclamation?

"Do they have no gravitas of their own?"

Answer to the first question: Yes, they will, of course. And they'll also probably burst into tears of joy, then happily offer to kiss the guy's butt and clean out his limo with their tongues!

Answer to the second: Nope. They don't. Not even a friggin' scintilla.

Damn fluffs. They shit me big time.

I clicked on a Blogger ad about how to make a few bucks blogging. I think it's more for business blogs etc, but there are some good points in the intro page.

It includes some thoughts from Jeff Jarvis, who is an online publishing guru or something: "One of the rules of marketing that I learned early in my career: segment the market until you get it small enough so that you can be the leader of it. The same applies to blogging. If being popular is what you care about, specialize in something, says Jarvis. Become the online expert at something. This makes a lot of sense to me."

I like this. "Specialize in something... Become the online expert at something."

Hmmm. What, though? I suppose I'm an expert at shat-off-ness, since this whole blog is basically one long bitch session - mostly about lefties, moral relativists and New Age nutbars. (You know: fluffs, the lumpen squitterati, the alternative establishment.)

But there are heaps of bloggers who specialise in that. And they work much harder than me. See, basically I'm pretty lazy.

There! That narrows it down. I'm lazy as well as shat off about fluffs.

But there are probably hundreds - if not thousands - of other bloggers like that out there. My niche needs still more defining.

So, er, what exactly is it that shits me off about fluffs? Well - apart from the fact that they are surreal idiots with their heads stuck up their arses - they invariably earn heaps more money than me. That really shits me. Take this peckerhead, for instance. The guy's rolling in it!

How ironic is that? I'm the would-be capo, and I'm damn near skint. Yet this self-described "mendicant" is up to his heart chakra in friggin' moolah! (So's his cat, by the way.) I tell you, I'm ready to punch the friggin' monitor...

Still, this does narrow my area of expertise even more. I'm now an authority on lazy shat-off-ness about New Age fluffs with cats who earn heaps more money than me.

There! How's that for a niche? That's about as nichey as you can get, isn't it? Surely there is no one else on the planet who can challenge my knowledge in this area?

So, er, where's all this dosh that's supposed to flood in?

Damn shonky internet money-making schemes! They shit me.

Ha! Another niche!

Watched Lateline last night. It ran a story on the killing of that bomb-maker al-Ghozi who escaped from prison when Howard was in the Philippines.

Understandably the Oz Government was pleased to learn of this small victory in the war aginst terrorism. Yet reporter Greg Jennett described its reaction thus: "The Australian Government's enthusiasm for al-Ghozi's death bordered on the ghoulish."

Downer's calmly spoken response followed: "It is with great delight that the Australian Government has learnt that al-Ghozi has now been, um, has now been, um ... well, he's actually been shot.

"Perhaps one shouldn't say we're delighted that someone's been shot, but nevertheless, we are delighted that he is no longer on the loose."

Does that sound near "ghoulish" to you? Crikey, what's wrong with expressing a bit of satisfaction that such a murderous scum-sucker had bought the farm? I'd describe his reaction as "bordering on the subdued" myself. I'd also describe Jennett's intro as "unequivocally emotive and biased".