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Here's the first ad in a new $40 Million dollar Australia Tourism campaign featuring spots produced by Baz Luhrmann, the Aussie Director famous for Moulin Rouge and others fillums. You may recall the kerfuffle over the previous campaign Where the Bloody Hell Are You? which was a PR success but a fizzer at actually motivating people to travel Downunder. The prime Japanese market in particular couldn't get its head around that bloody stupid slogan.

So this is what we get for $40 Million. Another fizzer in my opinion. Luhrmann says he's trying to connect "emotionally" with his audience in this campaign. Works for me. I found it laughable. It starts with New York skyline footage with some bloke saying over the phone to his squeeze "Look, I just think we need a break". Then at 13 seconds in we get a close-up of what appears to be dogshit on a rainy sidewalk. Then some sheila whinging about a cock-up in her publishing job. And its all downhill from there. Worst part...and the part that had me laughing...was the pathetic line superimposed on the screen "She arrived as Mrs Mathieson, Executive VP of Sales and she departed as Kate". Yeah right. Knowing Australians, and particularly Outback Australians, she would have arrived as one half of "The Yanks" and left as "Those bloody stupid Yanks".

The Second Ad in the Australia Tourism Ad Campaign "Boab" is even more naff with the superimposed tag "He arrived as Mr Lee, Assistant Finance Manager...He departed as Lee Ming"

Somehow I think the outback Aussies would have had much more fun with that guy's name. It would have been more like "He arrived as Mister Lee, Assistant Finance Manager...he departed as Mister Wong.

Let's have a look at who Dinosaur McCain has been "palling around" with shall we -

This is the notorious portrait of a Naked Sarah Palin hanging in a Chicago bar. Full story here - Dive bar scores hit with Nude Sarah Palin If the link is down or overwhelmed it basically says "she’s the subject of a nude portrait, unveiled Thursday and drawing crowds to the Old Town Ale House on Chicago’s North Side.

"The polar bear is there because she doesn’t believe in global warming and the polar bear will go extinct because of it," he said. "I thought it was a nice touch."

Apparently the bar is drawing quite a crowd. My guess is the portrait will be copied around the world - especially if she and her running mate, Angry McCain get in. In that case will the last person in America please turn out the lights.

BTW the prudish Chicago Tribune has a story with a censored photograph of the portrait and is conducting a poll on whether it is offensive or not. Last time I looked 60% of respondents did indeed find it offensive with 40% saying it was not offensive.

I'm loving the continuing saga of the Somalian pirates and the Russian tanks aren't you? You do know that the latest ship to be seized by these villains had a cargo of Russian T-72 tanks and grenade launchers? Now it seems the pirates have been arguing amongst themselves in true "Treasure Island" style.

A spokesman for SAP - the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme, a local maritime group...(they aid and support pirates?)...said an argument broke out last night amongst factions in the 50-strong pirate gang over whether to free the cargo of tanks and 20-man crew.

There was a misunderstanding yesterday between the moderates and the radicals on board who do not want to listen to anyone.

I love that - the moderates. Presumably includes those who think it OK to terrorise crews and seize ships.

The moderates want to back-peddle. The Americans are close, so everyone is tense. There was a shootout and three of the pirates were shot dead.

Which still leaves 47 of the saps to be dealt with. The ship is surrounded by American and European warships and the Russians are coming. Somehow I don't think the pirates are going to get either the cargo of tanks or a ransom. Of course in the old days piracy was a capital offense punishable by gibbeting - secured in a cage and left to drown on the making tide. I'm all for it.

My friends over at Boing Boing have put up a YouTube video that supposedly has an audio track of a heckler hurling insults and swearing at Barack Obama during the first debate yesterday. Its an obvious fake but it seems to have backfired badly as viewers took it for real. Xeni Jardin - one of the BoingBoing team - obviously finds it funny and wrote (presumably tongue-in-cheek) that she's outraged but then has to explain the joke with an Update: I presumed the fact that the video above is a one-note quickie parody of a rapidly spreading political rumor based on this original material would be apparent to all comers. I was mistaken. For that, I -- HORSE SHIT! -- apologize. Thank you.

That's cool. We don't all share the sophisticated humour of Xeni babe or the guy who shared the vid with her - Andrew Baron of Rocketboom. But here's the rub - if you dare to criticize the posting of this silly video on BoingBoing (apparently the world's #1 blog) you run the risk of being disemvowelled - your comment stays but they take away the vowels and the letter y making it rather hard to read. Not impossible though. Try it for yourself. Go across to BoingBoing and make a comment like Why did you post this stupid video? and see what happens. I did. They haven't yanked the vowels on me yet but they no doubt will. I'm already on notice for saying to Cory Doctorow last week that if he didn't know the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist it painted him as rather ignorant. I also added Get it right for Gods sake and was censored by the Moderator for my rudeness. See my comment under Metronicity

I notice 16 of the 46 comments so far are either critical of the posting of the vid or critical of the disemvowelling of comments or both. I'd like to see 500 anti comments and see how they go keeping up with the disemvowelling moderation. So what are you waiting for? Get across there now and tell them what you think. Extra points if you work steampunk (BoingBoing's favourite topic) into the comment. Have a noice day, you hear.

BTW the phoney audio is lifted from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket - which means YouTube is in violation of his copyright.

An amazing series of more than 1500 paintings of Aboriginal rock art has been re-discovered by archaeologists in north-west Arnhem Land in the far north of Australia. As well as aboriginal and animal subjects, the paintings depict pearl luggers, coastal steamers, destroyers, biplanes, bicycles, rifles, cars and missionaries in white dog-collars.

The rock art was discovered by Aboriginal art experts in the Seventies and then lost to the world until a doctoral student at the Australian National University, Daryl Guse, rediscovered them with the help of a local elder.

The 1500 works in the Djulirri rock shelter in the Wellington Range chronicle Aboriginal contact with Maccassan traders from Sulawesi, and Europeans from the early sail ship days right through to WWII.

The floor is also amazing. There are stone axes, grinding stones, human remains, wooden artefacts, a buffalo thigh bone and shards of glass worked into tools scattered everywhere. A collapsed wooden platform covers a large area.

The rock shelter was of international significance, and of unprecedented artistic and historical merit, Griffith University archaeologist Professor Paul Tacon said.

Meanwhile the philistines of the world line up to pay millions for Damien Hirsts diamond-encrusted skulls, pickled sharks and other arty rubbish.

The French have sent a navy ship to conduct more dives (this is the 8th) on the sites of La Perouse's ships "La Boussole" and "L'Astrolabe" that were wrecked off the island of Vanikoro in the Solomons in 1788. Australians will remember these ships as having sailed in to Botany Bay in Sydney when the English First Fleet arrived.

Previous dives have already recovered some 3,000 objects - including cannon. Unfortunately the website Operation La Pérouse is only in French.

Wikipedia has this to say on early salvage attempts -

On 25 September 1791 Rear Admiral Joseph Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux departed Brest in search of La Pérouse. His expedition followed La Pérouse's proposed path through the islands northwest of Australia while at the same time making scientific and geographic discoveries.

In May 1793, he arrived at the island of Vanikoro, which is part of the Santa Cruz group of islands. D'Entrecasteaux thought he saw smoke signals from several elevated areas on the island, but was unable to investigate due to the dangerous reefs surrounding the island and had to leave. He died two months later.

It was not until 1826 that an Irish captain, Peter Dillon, found enough evidence to piece together the events of the tragedy. In Tikopia (one of the islands of Santa Cruz), he bought some swords he had reason to believe had belonged to La Pérouse. He made enquiries, and found that they came from nearby Vanikoro, where two big ships had broken up. Dillon managed to obtain a ship in Bengal, and sailed for Vanikoro where he found cannon balls, anchors and other evidence of the remains of ships in water between coral reefs. He brought several of these artifacts back to Europe, as did Dumont d'Urville in 1828. De Lesseps, the only member of the expedition still alive at the time, identified them as all belonging to the Astrolabe. From the information Dillon received from the people on Vanikoro, a rough reconstruction could be made of the disaster that struck La Pérouse, which was confirmed by the find and search of the shipwreck of the Boussole in 1964. In May 2005, the wreck was formally identified as that of the Boussole.

Both ships had been wrecked on the reefs, the Boussole first. The Astrolabe was unloaded and taken apart. A group of men, probably the survivors of the Boussole, were massacred by the local inhabitants. According to natives, surviving sailors built a two-masted craft from the wreckage of the Astrolabe, and left westward about 9 months later, but what happened to them is unknown. Also, two men, one a "chief" and the other his servant, had remained behind, surviving until 1823, three years before Dillon arrived.

I've just come across this article by renowned American economist Joseph Stiglizt who argues "Why is America paying for the reconstruction of Iraq when billions of Iraqi petrodollars remain in their foreign accounts?" Good question. One answer might be "well you guys broke the country, so you can repair it". I'm talking about the invasion of Iraq - because that's what it is. It was never a war. Americans like to think the invasion of Iraq was part of the so-called war on terrorism which is a bit like the war on drugs - unwinnable and a complete waste of resources. I note that idiot Sarah Palin said the Iraq war was God's Will. Hmmm...maybe it was also God's will that the U.S. should continue this unsustainable occupation and rebuilding? Have a read of this -

Is this any way to rebuild Iraq?
The country has a huge budget surplus. Why isn't it paying for its own reconstruction?
By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
August 15, 2008

Across the Middle East, from Abu Dhabi to Yemen, the dizzying rise in oil prices has fueled a construction and employment boom. Yet in Iraq, one-quarter of the population remains jobless, and Baghdad gets only 11 hours of electricity a day. Four million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes and are urgently in need of resettlement. After five years of war, the country is still desperately in need of rebuilding.

It's not that Iraq has failed to share in the oil windfall. Iraq sits atop the world's third-biggest known oil reserves, and the Iraqi government keeps a mounting pile of petrodollars firmly tucked away in American banks. A new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office shows that Iraqi oil revenues will reach up to $85 billion this year, resulting in a budget surplus of as much as $50 billion. But despite all the money that is pouring in, Iraq is not taking responsibility for its own reconstruction.

Instead, the U.S. military is footing the reconstruction bill. Over the last two years, while Iraq has earned nearly $100 billion in oil revenues (and spent just $2 billion on capital investments such as roads, water and electricity), U.S. taxpayers have plowed $48 billion into reconstruction activities in Iraq. About half of that has gone to the oil and electricity infrastructures. The U.S. has also helped to renovate 3,000 schools, train 30,000 teachers, distribute 8 million textbooks and rebuild irrigation infrastructure for 400,000 people, as well as fund projects to improve drinking water, bridges, roads, sewage treatment, airports and, of course, oil pipelines and refineries.

True, it was the United States that invaded Iraq, and none of the work we've done there since is adequate compensation for the five years of suffering that the Iraqi people have endured. But at a time when the U.S. economy is weak and our own bridges, roads and airports are in desperate need of repair, there is a real question of whether we can sustain subsidizing Iraq's rebuilding on this scale.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Iraqis pay a heavily subsidized $1.35 for a gallon of gas at the pumps in their country, while the U.S. military -- the largest single consumer of oil in the world -- is stuck paying world prices of $3.23 (and up to $8 a gallon for certain specialized jet fuels.) Kuwait, by contrast, offers U.S. forces a steep discount on fuel purchases.

U.S. military operations in Iraq gobble up more than 1 million gallons a day to generate power at bases and to fuel trucks, planes, tanks and ships. Even more fuel is required for cargo and logistics: 70% of the gas-guzzling military truck convoys in Iraq are simply carrying petroleum products around the country. Fuel consumption per service person in Iraq is 16 times what it was in World War II.

This means that even as the U.S. is bankrolling Iraq's reconstruction, it is doing so at an exorbitant price -- and is transferring to the Iraqis extra money, which, it turns out, is being squirreled away in unproductive international bank accounts. The oil windfall is yet another example of the ongoing financial fallout of the war, which is costing the U.S. more than $13 billion a month (not counting the future costs of caring for war veterans and replenishing military equipment).

It is time for the newly solvent Iraqi government to begin helping financially (as well as militarily) to get the country back on its feet. And it is time for the U.S. to shift its focus away from bricks-and-mortar projects and concentrate instead on helping the Iraqi government rebuild its capacity to undertake such projects on its own.

In particular, mechanisms need to be devised and implemented to ensure that oil money is fairly distributed across the country, and that it goes to productive investment rather than leaching away to corrupt bureaucrats and avaricious middlemen. Such mechanisms might include dedicating a portion of the oil money to a special reconstruction trust fund with its own guidelines and administration.

Whatever the specifics, it is important to move quickly. Elections are looming in Iraq and the U.S., and the two countries are trying to agree on America's future role. Iraq's future reconstruction program needs to be home grown -- both for the sake of Iraq and for the U.S. taxpayers who need relief from the endless cost of this foolish war.

There it is in a nutshell - "the endless cost of this foolish war". And I'm betting there'll be even more of this stupidity when that dinosaur McCain and his fundamentalist airhead sidekick get in. Yeah...hate to say it, but I can't see Americans voting a nigger into the oval office. Even if that nigger is a half-caste. And as I've said elsewhere, what happens if McCain kicks the bucket? Are we left with the beauty queen with her finger on the button? Just how dumb are you Yanks?

Meanwhile...back at the ranch the Bush administration has formally proposed to Congress the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting virtually unfettered sweeping authority for the Treasury to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions headquartered in the United States - raising the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.

$700 billion is about what the U.S. has blown on the Iraq invasion.

“It’s a big-picture package, because it’s a big problem,” President Moron, I mean Bush said.

The Chinese must be loving this.

This could quite possibly be the finest example of a WWII Spitfire fighter plane. The chairman of a Chinese shipping company has just paid an auction record NZ$2.8 million (US$1.8 Million) for this near-perfect example of a 1945 Supermarine Spitfire Mk XVI.

The Spitfire has been owned for the past decade by an Auckland flying family, who restored the pneumatics, hydraulics and paintwork after a full strip-down. All it needs now is a major engine overhaul and a new propeller fitted to be in perfect flying condition.

The Chinese shipping magnate plans to donate it to the China Aviation Museum in Beijing. Seems a pity it's not going home to Blighty.

BTW there are less than 60 Spitfires still flying in the world. The price paid today was an auction record but as I understand it, private sales of Spitfires, especially those with Battle of Britain provenance, have been a lot higher than this.

You might be interested in this Supermarine Spitfire Workshop Manual - "The fascinating text, complemented by numerous technical drawings, cutaways and photographs, reveals every detail of the aircraft. From the fuselage and wing structures to the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and its systems, including the cockpit instrumentation and controls, hydraulic and pneumatic systems and even the armour plating fitted to wartime examples.

As well as the technical insight, coverage includes a brief illustrated history of the design and evolution of the Spitfire and a fascinating look at the eye-watering costs and resources required to own and fly an example today. Former and current Spitfire pilots put the reader in the pilot's seat, and if you've ever wondered how to start the engine on a Spitfire, look no further! Maintenance, servicing and preservation are covered, and illustrated appendices provide details of a selection of surviving Spitfires, along with a full list of all currently airworthy examples around the world."

WC Wunderbach Weiss is a new stencil font drawing its inspiration from the stencilled signs on the walls of the catecombs beneath the Paris streets. It's available as a free download from this site.