‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

Oct 5, 2008 | Arts, Australian Values, Border Security, Capital Punishment, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Fame, Freedom of Speech, Global Warming, Humour, Immigration, Indigenous, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, PedoPriests, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Terrorism, Uncategorized, USPol, Values, War

‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

 

This is not for you

 

Really. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and we want to record them.
So this is a stocktake for posterity, if you like, that marks a moment, a milestone.

Yes, ValuesAustralia is two years old. This is our 712th post. Singlehanded, eh, Clubtroppo, Larvatus Prodeo, RoadtoSurfdom etc. etc.? That’s almost one a day. (There used to be a billboard for One A Day vitamin pills at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rowntree Street at Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. There was a picture of a man and a woman. The woman was saying, “I’m Jenny and I give John One A Day.” Soon a graffiti artist had added, “I’m John and I’m fucked!”)

And, yes, we’re just about fucked, ourselves. We’ve got a rotator cuff from all the typing and mouse clicking, especially during October and November last year.

(We went to the radiologist. “What seems to be the problem?” “I’ve got a sore shoulder.” “Hmm…we’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray…… Hmm…. Hmmmmmm, our expert analysis of the ultrasound and x-ray indicates you have a sore shoulder. You’ll have to stop using it for a while.” “Thanks….What?)

We’ve never paid for any advertising. We’ve never submitted ValuesAustralia to any search engine. Nevertheless, we got ourselves listed on Google within 24 hours of launching the site. We tried to register the site with dmoz.org (The Open Source Directory) – as you do – but it wasn’t taking orders, and by the time it came back on line months later, ValuesAustralia was already magically listed!

We’ve been #1 for “Australian Values” on Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask most of the time for more than a year and a half. We’re #12 for “values” on Google worldwide, out of 314,000,000 results and on google.com.au we’re #2 for “values” out of 307,000,000. We’re #1 on google worldwide and Australia for “Australian political values” out of about 400,000 results.

Our Google Page Rank is 4 (used to be 5 but they changed the algorithm) which is respectable but we’d prefer a 5 or a 6.

We’ve had over 300,000 aggregate visitors and more than 75,000 spam messages (thank you, Akismet).

Earlier this year we were consistently getting more than 1000 visitors a day – over 30,000 a month, which is okay, although nothing like the big guys.

We’ve made friends all over the world and especially in Australia. We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. We are popular in Saudi Arabia – amongst the top 42,000 favourite sites for Saudis. (That worries us just a bit…Say hullo to Al for us…) We appreciate our readers and those who choose to comment from time to time. We thought a scarcity of comments was a Bad Thing, a Failure, but we noticed that one of the most popular, most entertaining bloggers we know of, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, doesn’t get heaps, either – a few, but not tens like Possum or hundreds and thousands like William the PollBludger.

In May 2007 ValuesAustralia was picked up by the “Stay In Touch” column at the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing us of “rhetoric”.

One of Sir Roger’s posts was selected by ClubTroppo and On Line Opinion in January 2008 as one of the top 40 posts in Australia for 2007. We’re very proud of that.

But it’s a post we made early in 2007 that we are still most proud of. Ken Parish at ClubTroppo called it

“quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence… ”

Yes, Troppo has been good to us and we mourn the passing of Missing Link and Ken’s prolonged work-induced(?) absence. We were also congratulated by Richard Neville (HomePageDaily) and Steven Poole whose Unspeak blog is our benchmark for economy, clarity, style and wit.

We have enjoyed the journey so far and we have no intention at this stage of stopping, although we have slowed down (work, you know).

Bobbo the Clown

Our favourite person in the world, of course, is the clown, Bob Correll (above), Deputy Secretary of DIC, OPM, because he wrote us the letter which inspired our outburst. As we discovered he was (and appears still to be) the person who had taken over departmental responsibility for “Borders, Compliance, Detention and Technology”, or in other words, perhaps, for keeping innocent kiddies locked up in the desert, deporting Australian citizens, supporting the failed state of Nauru, making the lives of genuine refugees a misery, doing it to please the Minister, and all at the touch of a computer key. Previously he had been the driving force behind developing and implementing Job Network, or “how to design exquisite, personalised punishment for people who are already struggling with the stress of being unemployed”. Godluvvya, Bob! How’s the Volvo? How’s the kids? How do you sleep at night?

One of the most satisfying things is how we always beat the Immigration Department on Google.

Our second favourite person is Mick Keelty, just for being such a hopeless buffoon and continually making appalling stuff-ups for us to make fun of. G’bye, Mick.

Anyway, just for the record.

(And a special “hi!” to Lang!)

Herald Accuses Values Australia of ‘Rhetoric’

May 26, 2007 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Fame, Freedom of Speech, Media Values, OzPol Values, Uncategorized, Values

Herald Accuses Values Australia of ‘Rhetoric’

 

Nothing whatever to do with the Government

Values Australia does not want to pretend any false modesty. It is delighted to have been mentioned by its favourite page in the Sydney Morning Herald: Stay in Touch. We think that most people are probably like George W. (and us) and quickly scan the headlines before flipping over to the back page for something a little less depressing. Still, Values Australia is not aware of ever having been accused of being rhetorical and is not sure whether that is a criticism or a compliment. Whatever, Values Australia is determined not to let its newfound fame go to its head. (On a side note, if you found your email running slowly yesterday, it was probably caused by Values Australia emailing all its friends.) As a special celebratory gift to our visitors, we offer this video which we discovered today.   The part of the “Prime Minister” is taken by T Rex;  “Foreign Minister” is played by Ornitholestes,  and “The Next Prime Minister” is played by Pig.   You’re welcome

Little Britain Lives!

Feb 24, 2007 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Fame, Media Values, Values

Little Britain Lives!

 

 

Contractual Obligation Blog

Values Australia was lucky enough to be invited to attend a recent performance of Little Britain Live , at the cost of agreeing to review the performance.

Like The Office and Extras it could never be said that Little Britain was easy viewing. Frankly, it is cringeful, to be watched through the fingers.
And yet we laugh uproariously.

We love it.

We love to see the pompous and the pretentious get their just desserts. Not to mention the losers and the whingers.

Observing the audience through the evening’s performance it occured to Values Australia that the entire evening could have been over in ten minutes with the audience still utterly satisfied, because their greatest, raucous delight came instantly from the recognition before their very eyes and ears, in the (often copious) flesh, of the characters, and the catch phrases that they have come to know and love. It could have been this and still satiated the audience’s appetite:

LIGHTS UP

“No but yeah but or summing or nuffing”
“Computer says no…” 
“I’m the only gay in the village!”
“eh eh ehhhh”
“I’m a ladee!”
“You’re FAT!”
“I want that one!”
“Yeees!”
“Look into my eyes; don’t look around the eyes.”
“It’s a RIGHT kerfuffle!!”
“I want bitty.”

BOWS
BLACKOUT

STAMPING ON FLOOR

STANDING OVATION

HOUSE LIGHTS UP 

Ten minutes, allowing for costume changes and Dr Who’s laconic scene setters and we can all be home in time for dinner. They could do five shows a night and make even more millions of dollars.

So what is this Little Britain?

We know Big Britain is a pompous ass, full of its self-importance, arrogant, condescending, humourless.

Or at least it was, for the Little Britain we see is a Britain that has passed, a Britain of the legends and myths, and more likely rumours, of Walliams’ and Lucas’ childhoods. A Britain Britons desperately cling to in the midst of their confusion with the terrifying present.

It is a world peopled by mannish women and girly boys; the ineffectual, the irresponsible, the unreasonable, the intolerant, the arrogant, the self-pitying, the self-obsessed, the terminally onanistic or solipsistic.

Strangely, though, none are stupid and all are users, existentially needy, grasping and manipulative.

Ours is a mad world, a confusing world, a fundamentally absurd world in which we try to make rational choices based on the phantoms of imagined realities, of ideas which flash past and are gone before we have had a chance to discern what they really might have been.

And so we anchor ourselves to stable myths and cling tightly to comfortable prejudices in order to quell our anxiety.

And just as we begin to learn to breathe in this new, more predictable world, along come Lucas and Walliams to vaporise our illusions, leaving us exposed and laughing hysterically, gasping for breath.

Little Britain is a sleazy peepshow through the moth-eaten curtains of our cultural pretensions whereby we glimpse the squalid, squirming, slimy, writhing horror of a reality we deny. It is a vision through a crack in the fabric of space-time into the X-ray world of an Ed Wood horror movie where people’s fleshy outer selves are burnt away, leaving only their clicking skeletons.

“In the midst of life we are in death,” and yet Little Britain is ultimately an act of life and love.

Strangely, although the characters Matt Lucas plays can seem the most obviously warped and twisted, it is the disarmingly conventional-looking and comfortably woolly “Walliams” who carries the deeper sense of imminent danger, just as happy to trip you into the acid bath of his humour as to walk insouciantly past.

And what is the attraction of the stage show?

It’s not the jokes. We’ve heard them all before. Again and again. There are no surprises here. Precisely: that is the point.

It is the recognition of love gained through a painful challenge borne and met, like the first chinese burn your primary school girlfriend gave you, when you proved you were brave enough to be her champion and her lover, to sit with her at recess and carry her books home from school.