Australia has an energy love affair with coal fired electricity generators and it seems to get on the nerves of every brain cell deprived hippie in the country. They want us to use overpriced and under powered wind turbines or expensive and space restricting solar panels. The problem for the hippies is they do not feel contempt with simply arguing until the cows come home with the government. They want to make waves and cause havoc for the rest of us innocent people. So they break into coal fired power plants and try to shut them down. Do these idiotic morons think its ok to put the rest of us into chaos for their un-educated cause? Wait a second, that’s it they don’t think.

How dare they shut down my electronic life for their pointless pursuit of Al Gorism. See while they are living out his little documentary, he is cashing in and swimming in champagne. The government will not shut down its coal generators while we are sitting on a huge supply, regardless of it’s ‘enviromental’ effects.

Stay in your comunes and smoke the peace pipe, just don’t shut down my 240 volts.

Sometimes you’ll be out and about and see some signs that defy belief, you begin to wonder if man is getting smarter or have some of us lost half our brains overnight. I saw a sign on the back of a long bed truck which read “caution: vehicle subject to reversing”, which no doubt was included with a reversing beeper. Now I hear your rebuttal, that the beeper is for the blind, first of all, just how many blind people do you see walking behind trucks and how many of them can’t hear the truck in the first place?

I’ve seen a new trend in signs warning you about fines for doing the wrong thing, for instance on the train, it warns you not to put your feet on the seat, if you do ‘you might be fined’. What kind of threat is ‘might’? Does a boxer threaten his opponent by saying ‘I might knock you out’, of course not because that shows weakness. Telling the public there is a chance they will get away with it, is enough of a reason for them to try.

Now there are people all over our country putting up signs saying they recognise the traditional owners of the land where their house is. But how much do they really care about those previous occupants. If that tribe where to come around one night in search of accommodation (as was organised by John Safran) would people allow them to stay. Considering you acknowledge their previous tenancy, you would think that its ok for them to come back wouldn’t you? Not so clean cut as that. There is a fine line between the truth and the image people like to portray.

One sign that is quite large and obvious but largely ignored is the sign asking people not to climb the Rock at Uluru. Now I think we should not climb it to be honest, my reasoning for this, Americans. They bring toilet paper, because who wants to come all the way to Australia and not dump on our rock, just another reason why their called septics. They think that a half day trip up and down the rock cannot be done without a bowel movement, so they bring toilet paper. Which means a jolly good number two and plenty of ones to flow down our rock. Now there is a simple way for this to be rectified. Don’t let them climb it! Now I’m sure they figure the climb is part of the lure to getting the tourists there in the first place, but I don’t buy that. You see after 9/11 the Statue of Liberty shut her doors to tourists going to the top, and it still received normal visitor numbers for years until it re-opened. It’s a huge tourist attraction, but that doesn’t mean you can let them defecate on it for the sake of the dollar.

‘Don’t feed the birds’ is a sign all too often ignored at a local park. What parent bothers to explain to their child why you shouldn’t feed the local birds. Instead they cop out on a vital educational moment for the ease of giving their brats food to throw at the wildlife. You see I used an important term there ‘wildlife’ more importantly the word wild. These animals are relying on the visitors for a very basic not natural portion of their diet: bread. They don’t normally have such a readily available source of carbohydrates, yet from us they can eat all the bread they like. These birds and water fowl have lived their quite happily before us and could do so after us, yet they come to rely on us if we bring them food, even teaching their young the importance of us over hunting. Your changing nature in a very dangerous way. But hey it’s only a sign, don’t feed the birds, maybe they mean everyone else except you, yeah that sounds right.

If you are a sport, you will get government funding to keep your sport on the track to future greatness. This is the reason why we have a list of ’sports’ that should be re-branded as hobbies or activities and no more. My first stab is at chess, a ’sport’ played on your rear end at a table, on a playing surface no bigger than your average bedside table. There is a bunch of pieces and there isn’t even noise, just a lot of clock slapping and the occasional ‘check mate’, which in chess could be code for ‘let’s meet in the locker room afterwards to sort this out’. There is a title that all chess players strive for and it’s name is just as pathetic as calling this activity a sport, ‘Chess Grandmaster’. I’m sorry, were you looking for a title that would make you sound like a Merlin the Magician fan club?

My second gripe is at Dance sport, which is so scared of being called something other than a sport, it decided it would be best to put the word in its name. Which means if you dance normally at a party, that’s not a sport, it’s only a sport when you call it Dance sport. It’s where all the over dressed straight faced pansies come together to dance on a parquet floor with giant numbers on their backs (to better resemble an actual sport). There is lots of rivalry and sweat, but it is dancing, we can’t get over that can we?

Anything involving an animal with or without a human is not a sport. Yet there are plenty that are considered sports by whoever makes that decision. Equestrian for example, you ride a horse and get it to jump over fences and into water and around in circles and against the clock, but it involves an animal, that’s not a human sport. You are taking out the human impact and there is too much emphasis on the breed of the horse and it’s training regime. To make matters worse, you can pretty the horse up with strange looking braids and a dorky looking rider and trot around a yard. How is that a sport may I ask?

Orienteering, don’t get me started on this one. You get a bunch of directions or clues and you must use a compass and walk around to find some markers in the bush. That sounds like an activity if you could even call it that. But calling that a sport is a disgrace to the real sports.

Which brings me to my next point, maybe we should use a new set of parameters to discuss which is a sport and which is not. One rule should be if you can have a crowd watching in the stands, complete with music and cheerleaders, that could allow it to be a spectator sport. If it makes high rating television including the increase of alcohol sales on the big days, that’s a sport.

Sport is about blood, sweat and tears, it’s about pushing yourself or your team to the brink of collapse for the overwhelming feeling of victory. Does that sound like chess, or do you think I could use that description when I talk about orienteering?

Give me my sport, on a TV, with beer and national telecasting or leave it in the hobbies box.

Footnote: When I used the standard spell checker on this document, it flagged the word Dancesport when the words are put together, so I acknowledged that by allowing it to separate them. So even spell checkers don’t think it’s a sport.