The North Richmond Medically Supervised Injecting Room is back in the news. Following on from a substantially positive review released last month, Dictator Dan Andrews has confirmed that the injecting room, which began as a trial in 2018, will become permanent. This news has shaken the usual nuts out of the usual tree, and my daughters’ school, which sits next door to the medical centre housing the injecting room, has also been in the news. This has been annoying, with the familiar, annoying reporters, and the familiar, annoying pleas:
Category: Not mathematics
A Customer Gets Served
(Marty calls up the Happy Health Care, and auto-identifies himself. He is connected to Daisy.)
D: Hello, this is the Happy Health Care. You’re speaking to Daisy. Is that Marty?
M: Yep, thanks Daisy. Do you have my account info there?
D: Yes. I do. How may I help you?
M: Thanks, Daisy. I got a letter from you guys, saying that because of Covid I’m owed a refund on some of the services that were unavailable, but that my bank details are missing. The letter said I could add the details online, but when I tried it didn’t seem to work. So, I’m hoping you can sort it out for me. Continue reading “A Customer Gets Served”
Giving Experts the Boot
Greg Lynch
It’s story time again. This short one is not about education, although there might be a lesson in there somewhere. It involves a drive-in movie theatre and a car boot. Continue reading “Giving Experts the Boot”
This Blog Might Get Interesting
Yesterday we met for the first time a very nice fellow, who reads this blog and who occasionally comments. He gave us the present above, obviously with a hat tip to our vodka shtick: Continue reading “This Blog Might Get Interesting”
Richmond, Drugs and the Injection of Bullshit
Just a word about Richmond West Primary School, which has been in the Melbourne news for all the wrong reasons in the last couple days. What follows is obviously our point of view, and is not intended to represent the School or any other person.
Our daughters go to RWPS and, with the caveat that all primary schools are screwed up by the Australian Curriculum and modern education nitwittism, we and our daughters love the school. We commute very non-trivially for our daughters to go there. In particular, we have regarded the school as perfectly safe.
Notoriously, RWPS is next door to the North Richmond Community Health Centre, which houses Richmond’s safe injecting room. The injecting room is there because the drugs and the druggies are there. It was a dodgy area long before the injecting room, and it still is, although if anything our understanding and perception is that it’s probably less so. One is watchful, and it is not unusual to see a down-and-outer, drugged or otherwise. But before this week, for four years, we did not see or hear of anything remotely extreme or threatening near the school. What our daughters have experienced more than anything is lessons in empathy, to think compassionately about people who are doing it much tougher than themselves.
The incidents at RWPS this week were obviously much more serious. What is not obvious, however, is what exactly the incidents were, or whether they carry any deeper meaning. The incidents do not appear in any way linked, and we’ve read nothing to suggest that they’re in any way linked to the injecting room. We’ve seen nothing to suggest that such incidents are likely to recur. It is natural to question what is going; two such incidents in a week demands it. But it should be kept in mind that perhaps nothing is going on, that, accepting the area is dodgy, the incidents may have been coincidental and rare.
What doesn’t help is shopping misinformation and fear-mongering, in particular by shit-stirring Murdoch stooges and their fellow travellers. We’ll be reading and looking to find out more. But, we won’t be reading nasty, populist fuckers, and we suggest others avoid this as well.
UPDATE (24/03/21)
And more populist bullshit today. Fuck Tom Cowie and fuck David Estcourt and fuck Anthony Piovesan, and fuck you TV vultures around when school lets out. All of you, either you have no fucking clue, or you’re lying through your fucking teeth.
UPDATE (29/03/21)
And further “Fuck you”s, to the Age’s Rachel Eddie and ABC’s Zalika Rizmal. And a special “Fuck you” to pompous Liberal toad, Matthew Bach.
Hip Hooray
We’re free. A little rest and then back to work on that post, praising ACARA.*
Thank you to all the nurses and physios and occupational therapists at St. Vincent’s, who took such good care of us. And a huge thanks to our surgeon, Dr. Anita Boecksteiner. She is a magician.
*) Seriously. The drugs haven’t quite worn off.
It’s Square to Be Hipping
It turns out we’re now at an age to require new body parts.* So, tomorrow we go in for a hip replacement. (Life’s a bitch and then you get a hip.)
Presumably, we’ll be back in around a week or so. Of course, everyone should work under the assumption that the next five posts will be drug-induced: no one need take offense or contemplate any defamatory interpretation.**
Back to you soon.
*) The problem really started 45 years ago, but whatever.
**) Except ScoMoFo.
UPDATE (05/03/21)
“You’ll feel like a new man once you get your hip replaced.”
They lied: we feel like an old man with a new hip. But, the surgery went well and we’re recovering well. Looking forward to the day when we can kick a torpedo again.
We’ll soon be up and about, back to the noble work of pissing people off.
Amending a Shirt
RatS 5: Woody to Get Hatcheted Again
We’ve posted previously on the lynch mobbing of Woody Allen. Now, HBO is coming out with a four-hour documentary on Woody and Mia. And here we go again.
Documentary filmmaker Robert Weide has written carefully and compellingly about the nonsense accusations against Woody Allen,. He has spent time with Moses, and he has looked carefully at Golden Boy Ronan.
Weide now has a new post, on the coming documentary, what to watch for and why he doesn’t trust it. If you do not believe Allen molested his daughter, then you should read it. If you do believe Allen molested his daughter, then you’re either ignorant or you’re an idiot and you should read it. Here is an excerpt:
For all the years that Mia, Dylan, and Ronan Farrow have been having their say on mainstream and social media, I’ve never seen them put in a position where they weren’t in control over who was questioning them, so I’ve never seen them have to hold up under cross, so to speak. Now, in this documentary, there might be some very “soft” cross questions to make it look like the interviewers are going for the truth, but these will likely be questions where the responses are already known, creating the illusion of due diligence. (And if the answer doesn’t suit the filmmaker’s needs, it can always be left on the cutting room floor.) I know several people who could question these three Farrows … that, in five minutes, would turn each of them into Cmdr. Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny.”
Ask yourself why Ronan Farrow blocks anyone who ever questions his statements on Twitter, no matter how polite or well-informed they are. (This is the same Ronan Farrow who wrote an editorial for The Hollywood Reporter asking why Woody Allen isn’t asked “the hard questions.”) Why did Ronan Farrow never respond to my Tweets offering a $100k donation to the charity of their choice for a shred of “evidence” of any number of his provably false claims? When Ronan and I were both invited to debate the issue live, on stage, at the SoHo Forum in NYC, I responded, “Fly me out and put me up, and I’m there.” Ronan declined to even respond. Ronan is a lawyer and a Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative reporting. I won a prize as “Most Outstanding Student” from the Rotary Club when I was in 8th grade. So what is he afraid of?
UPDATE (08/03/21)
Robert Weide writes about the HBO train wreck, and Weide publishes his non-interview. On the latter, Weide notes
Woody Allen gave an interview to the WSJ months ago. It was cancelled before publication. He also gave an interview for CBS This Morning that was cancelled just prior to air. This online publication asked me for an interview. I consented. Then they cancelled it. Everyone OK w/this?
A Fine Whine
Last week we were contacted by a long-forgotten (but quickly remembered) ex-student. We met for coffee yesterday and, for no reason we could discern, the student presented us with a bottle of wine:
We are aware that a number of our ex-students read this blog. So, it is important that they not think of this post as somehow a hint or a request to act in kind. They should think of it as more of a demand.