In our first alcohol-was-involved story of the week, a "driver" (and we use the term loosely) managed to embed his car in the roof of a a house in Sydney, Australia.
The car left the road traveling at high speed, the vehicle mounted the curb, hit a concrete median strip, hit a traffic light pole, a metal street light, a traffic light box, and after hitting a mound of dirt the car became airborne for 10 to 15 meters before landing on the roof, narrowly missing the three month old child and her parents who were sleeping inside the house. The whole path of the crash covered about 90 meters, and debris was spread out over several houses, including a piece of the traffic light which was found 120 meters away.
The occupants of the car were freed after about an hour, and taken to the hospital with non life-threatening injuries. The occupants of the house were shaken, but unharmed.
Dr. Mark David Ryan, a Queensland University of Technology researcher asks the question: are Australian horror films scaring tourists away from Australia?
Parallels have been drawn between the Wolf Creek movie and the real-life outback murder of British tourist Peter Falconio in 2001 in the Northern Territory. It has also been suggested that the killer bushman character was inspired by real-life serial killer Ivan Milat.
Which is all well and good, except that to folks outside of Australia and possibly Britain, Falconio and Milat are, with due respect to Joanne Lees and the Falconio family , unknown. It is very, very difficult to scare people off when they don't know there's a story. We are not talking Jeffrey Dahmer, here.
And then there are the films themselves. Here is Ryan's Top 10 list. Now, Australia comes out with some great films and I am a huge Peter Weir fan, but, really, are these the films that make you lose sleep at night? More importantly, do they make you think, "Nope, not going to Australia. Think I'll go hang out in Bedford-Stuy where it's safe."?
Wolf Creek (2005)
Dying Breed (2008)
Black Water (2007)
Rogue (2007)
Undead (2003)
Razorback (1984)
Patrick (1978)
Howling III (1987)
Body Melt (1993)
Night of Fear (1972)
Yes, that's right, not only does the list omit Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (justifiably, too - not my favorite Weir film), it includes Howling III in the list, and not hanging-on-by-a-fingernail at #10, but at #8 - there are two films worse than Howling III on his list!
A generous 7 star user review (average 2.4) of Howling IIIby kelvinthelion on IMDB yields these thoughts:
It has it's flaws of course but it also has a lot of insignificant firsts like werewolf nuns.
and
It really seems more like an action comedy than a horror movie.
Werewolf nuns. Really.
For those who don't know (and I sure didn't), the concept of Howling III is that a "strange race of human-like marsupials appear suddenly in Australia, and a sociologist who studies these creatures falls in love with a female one." Realistically, this will only attract interest if the sociologist is also female.
Personally, I don't think Australia has to worry about horror films driving people away. The thing keeping me from traveling there is the rise of militant kangaroos.
Stop worrying about zombies. Start worrying about kangaroos. As the picture shows, the kangaroo is best known for its violent nature. The pugilistic mascot* for our local Lake Washington High School is an obvious inspiration for the fury of alums like Matt Hume and Jason Mesnick, and now it is wreaking havoc in its native land. Cairns.com.au reports not one, not two, but three kangaroo incidents. It started off innocently enough at the end of August when a kangaroo knocked a 61 year old cyclist off his bike, breaking the cyclist arm. An isolated incident. Possibly just the ravings of a madman, after all the rider was old (well, older than me), and had just fallen. Perhaps he was still in delusional shock from the incident. I mean, you could laugh it off, right? But the incidents keep coming. Three weeks later a kangaroo invaded a psychologist's office in Atherton (Australia, not California), wreaking "more than six minutes of havoc," according to the article (see, I told you: wreaking havoc; I did not make that up), before assaulting an elderly woman on its way out of the office. Now comes the story of a roo running down a motorbike and sending its rider to the hospital with what turned out to be non-life threatening injuries. Again the animal attacked an old (older than me) human being for no apparent reason. The cyclist said the kangaroo "came out of nowhere". The article says only that the kangaroo "fled the scene and remains at large" like Batman or Zorro.
Taken individually these are just isolated incidents, but together they are three isolated incidents, and that's a trend. It's like the swine flu, starting small with just a few cases, then suddenly reaching the tipping point and exploding into a global pandemic, a pandemic of zombie kangaroos taking over Queensland, Australia.
Things seem to be taking a nasty turn in the serpent community lately. Normally docile animals are taking up arms (which, frankly, snakes have no way of doing) and fighting back. First the squirrels started attacking, and now its rabbits.
From Australia comes a report of a menacing pair of rabbits that are taking out snakes near Cairns. The rabbits' victims, a king brown and a brown tree (both deceased) are pictured. Armando del Manso thought the snakes were being killed by his dog, but then one night he was watching from the veranda: “The snake was raised up in the air in the striking position and the two rabbits worked their way around him and killed him in two minutes.”
Two days later Del Manso was bitten by a python in his house. "We are absolutely inundated with snakes," he said. The rabbits, each about the size of a housecat, live under a pile of wood in the backyard with their two baby bunnies.
Although many were incredulous, here is a video (purportedly from Texas), of a rabbit treeing a snake (albeit an inexperienced, domesticated snake - but the rabbit didn't know that).
Zeesh.
You know, it used to be that I saw coyotes around my house, and as the summer progressed I would see fewer and fewer rabbits. Now I still see the rabbits, but the coyotes are nowhere to be found. Makes ya think.
Since August 24 the dog police of Cairns, Australia, have been on a campaign to register the estimated 2000 unregistered canines in the region. Council officers can issue $200 payment notices if they hear barking, or see bowls, pet feces, or toys. As of September 5, 1397 notices had been doled out. Unfortunately, 61 of them (4%), were given to people who don't own dogs.
Cairns is located on the extended pinkie finger of northeastern Australia. Aside from dog registrations, its largest sources of revenue are tourism (because of its proximity to the Great Barrier Reef), and sugar production (because of its proximity to sugar).
Among the 61 non-dog owners are 45 who had dog warning signs on their gate, several cat owners who left their cat's water bowls outside, a budgie owner, and a woman with a collection of fiberglass animals (pictured).
No fines from the 1397 notices had been enforced as of September 5.
Theives broke into a business in the Sydney suburb of Lidcombe and used a semi to haul off an entire shipping container of vodka, 17,400 bottles worth. They broke in about 1 o'clock Sunday morning, loaded up the container, and drove out through the back fence.
Although it sounds like saying "lint comb" when you've got a cold, Lidcombe (post office pictured) is actually a working class suburb of Sydney at the junction of three railway lines: Richmond/Emu Plain, Bankstown, and Liverpool.
Lidcombe used to be known as Rockwood, and the Rockwood Cemetary just to the north of Lidcombe, is currently the largest cemetery in the southern hemisphere. Not wanting their town to be associated with the cemetery, in 1913 the townsfolk combined the names of their sitting mayor, Mr. Larcombe, and previous mayor, Mr. Lidbury to create the new town name of Lidcombe.
If you know the whereabouts of the stolen vodka please call the Lidcombe police as they would like to know where the party is taking place, too.
New word! New word! Language is fun, isn't, it? The word for today is the Australian term hoon. Thought to originally be a contraction of Houyhnhnm, the race of horses from Gulliver's Travels, at the start of the 20th it was associated with purveyors of ill-repute, but has recently taken on a legally sanctioned definition that can be summarized as vehicular hooliganism: excessive speeding, burning doughnuts, loud noise or other anti-social vehicular behavior.
Starting in 2006, several jurisdictions across Australia have passed rather draconian laws to deal with the hoon problem. In Victoria, for example, the punishment for the first offense is having the car impounded for two days, second offense up to three months, and third offense can result in permanent loss of the vehicle. You can even be charged if you are a passenger. Punishment is obviously severe, but the really draconian part of it is that the charges are at the discretion of the police officer and there is no appeal. Wow. Once a penal colony, always a penal colony, I suppose.
The oldest hoon nabbed so far is an un-named 79 year old caught doing 160 kph (100 mph) in a 100km zone in July (car pictured). The previous oldest was a 78 year old who was caught doing 170 kph. On the other end of the spectrum, the youngest person so far charged was 5 year old Laney Franklin, who had her motorbike impounded for riding around a park (news coverage video below - and, yes, I think it's odd that the adults are not named, but the minor is).
Three months after the hoon laws took affect in Victoria, there had been an average of 4 cars impounded per day with 99% (437 out of 441) being male, 49% (217) were by drivers 18-21. And after 2 years, the Victoria police say that, surprisingly, only 39% of the perps were speeding, while more than 48% were charged with the incredibly vague "improper use of motor vehicle" - basically, they lost their cars (without appeal) because they were annoying. And the rate of impounding has climbed from 4 to 10 cars per day (I suppose kids are just more annoying these days - and stay off my lawn!).
I guess the really interesting thing I found was the incredible disconnect between the bloggers and the mainstream press. There is a lot of hoon law discussion, but about all the newspapers write about are "est" stories: oldest, youngest, fastest. Nowhere in the mainstream media is there a discussion of rights or due process or anything similar, but there are lots of blog posts about it.
If this were going on in the United States I'd say the terrorists had won, but I don't know of any terrorism going on in Australia. Their tragedy here is that they are choosing to erode their own freedoms for no particular reason. It is like they are doing a slow legal devo out of boredom.
In the eternal battle between man and fish, this was a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Concerned that a wobbly-kneed customer might be under the influence,
staff at a service station in Darwin, Australia, called police. The officers arrived just as the man was leaving the station and pulled him over, and when they approached the car he offered them a fish, which the officers politely declined.
The fish, about a foot long, was likely a Saratoga, similar to the one pictured.
The 44 year old driver registered a 0.235, and was incarcerated. And as for the fish? "As far as I know it's still in the car," says Superintendant Farmer.
Daytime temperatures in Darwin regularly reach 32C (32*9/5+32=107F). Fish wins.
A tween-age girl got a dislocated shoulder when she tried to rescue an echidna from a storm drain at a McDonald's in Taralgon, Australia.
When she saw the spiny animal go down the drain, the girl, aged 12 or 13, depending on the report, wrapped her hand in a towel and tried to rescue it, but when she reached in the echidna extended its spines, trapping the girl's arm against the drain wall.
When a firefighter reached his gloved hand in to try to free the girl 20 minutes later, the echidna recognized the better part of valor and walked forward, releasing the girl's arm, but not before she had dislocated her shoulder trying to free herself.
Echidnas, also known as a spiny anteater, are actually monotremes, and are the only mammals aside from the platypus to lay eggs.
The girl needn't have worried. The locals say the echidna is often seen in and around the drain.
No joke: someone in Adelaide is playing hide the pickle, or more accurately, hide the $10,000 worth of cucumbers. Fine: gherkins are not the same as cucumbers (but they rhyme better), and those are Australian dollars, not US, so it's more like $8500 dollars stateside, but still, that's a lot of missing cucumbers.
Says Chief Inspector Kym Zander, "The issue with the cucumber is how do you and I tell who owns a different cucumber? We're having difficulty establishing where [the cucumbers] are going."
