Belfast Blogs.com

Their winter is better than our summer.Bastards....

Ten days sampling the Aussie media has left me pondering the power of positive thinking.I recall how some years ago, ITN news presenter Martyn Lewis was laughed at for suggesting that British news was too negative and could benefit from being lightened up with positive stories. Images of front pages about cats saved from trees filled the heads of his cynical colleagues and they chuckled.I did too.But it is true that the British media environment is a profoundly negative and mean-spirited one. The Irish media climate is little different.I've noticed this especially here in Australia, where they are prepared to put a story about a medical discovery or a community initiative on the front page without apology.In some other places I've been, the positive news can seem seriously parochial....

What's wrong with Uluru?On the one hand, nothing.It's a big rock in the middle of the desert, just like it has been for hundreds of millions of years.On the other hand, it's a bit odd when you can go days and not see a single Anangu, or Aboriginal person in the area.All the hotels seem to be staffed primarily by Koreans. The tour guides are all white Aussies, with the exception of the dozens of Japanese guides who exist to ferry the hundreds of Japanese tourists seeking to climb the rock daily.Of course the locals don't like people to climb the rock. Not that the Japanese give a shit. They're not interest in Anangu culture (just as well, as the locals and their culture are quite hard to encounter out here), they just want to conquer the big red rock.Everything is preposterously priced, as...

I'm losing interest in Lisbon.The right answer is so obviously 'no', that at this stage my only real interest in the result is analysing the 'yes' vote as a headcount of how many blindly-led party apparatchiks and buffoons who do what politicians tell them to exist in the country.Anyone who spent anytime actually reading the Lisbon Treaty (no easy task, let me warn you), or the referendum wording, knows that it's got to be turned down. It's dangerous, impenetrable gibberish we're being ordered to sign or else.There may well be enough simple followers and easily-bullied people in the country to carry a referendum though, which is a depressing thought.So I've decided I'm not voting. I'm fecking off to Australia until this craic is over. But if Ireland votes in favour of Lisbon, I might just...

Lost among all the important events of the day, like the Sopranos finale, was an interesting ruling from the Supreme Court.The birth mother of an infant was permitted the right to continue to appeal for guardianship and joint custody of her fourteen month old child, which the father wishes to remove to Australia for at least a year.The father, who is in a gay relationship, had sought to take the child to the ends of the earth with his gay lover, but the Supreme Court has ruled in a majority 2-1 decision that he must at least wait until the mother's court appeals to have the rights to see and know her own child have been heard.Ridiculous? Of course it is. No mother would ever be treated like that in Ireland. It never happened. Only it did, sort of. Swap the genders around and you have the...