April 28, 1999. Top headline in the Age today, in reference to talks in Indonesia/East Timor:
Mr Howard fails to win a public promise that warring groups will be disarmed.
This is a surprise? The whole paper could be filled with the things John Howard fails to do. Must've been a slow news day, or a very young and naive cadet got to write the headline cos everyone else was down the pub. I suppose news of dozens more civilians killed by NATO in Kosovo barely registers these days, but surely some footballer getting in a drunken brawl is ever so slightly less common and just a tad more news-worthy than Mr Howard failing to achieve something.
April 20,1999. Can this really be the first rant of this year? How very slack of me. If it's any consolation, I'm sure there are quite a few never-completed or never-uploaded rants lying around various hard disks somewhere. It's not like I'm a total deadhead. At least I don't listen to Tina FUCKING Arena! Or the Backstreet Boys. Sheesh!
So, anyway, that's not my rant. What I did want to rant about was the fact that Charles Dickens, especially 'The Pickwick Papers', isn't recognised as being as piss-your-pants funny as it actually is. I have to stop myself from giggling aloud when I've read it on the train. And why? why?! didn't anyone of the hundreds and thousands of people I've spoken to, passed in the street, run down in my car or received hate mail from take two seconds out of their busy lives to say 'Go read Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers'?
As Kamahl would say, 'why are people so unkind?'