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Not quite a MENSA candidate Malik Shabazz - Nation of Islam leader, racist thug, and master of geography.
The filthy swine gets flown to bloody Austria to test the new Can Am Spyder trike:
I'd kill my siblings to get my hands on one of these, but we're not likely to see the Spyder in these parts until 3-4 years from now. Bloody American bastards can buy one in a few months for $14k USD. An impressive price for a niche vehicle. It's no horsepower monster, with 106 hp from a Rotax v-twin engine, but that's still enough to have some real fun with. God damn this thing would be fun around corners. Maybe even as good as the T-Rex, which costs twice as much and has twice the horsepower...
Worth a beer or two Good riddance, arsehole. I hope the worms that eat your slimy corpse don't get indigestion.
Next year, I'm going to cycle from Canberra to Adelaide. Just because. It's about 1200kms. Hopefully, I'll be riding one of these, a Street Machine GTe:
(This is the bike ridden by Rob Thompson, on his epic journey from Korea to England) I'd better start saving pennies. Those things are expensive. Configured the way I want they're around $5-6k. But dang, a fully-suspended bike as comfortable as a couch, maybe fitted with some nice fat-but-fast Schwalbe Big Apple tyres. Sounds perfect to me. As you can tell from the picture, these things can carry a lot of luggage without the need for a heavy trailer. Lotsa luggage is not great when climbing hills, but a lot of the stuff I carry has more bulk than weight. A (much) cheaper option would be the soon-to-be-released Bacchetta Bellandare:
No suspension, but almost as comfy and more stable, if not as nimble. An LWB (long wheel base) bike is a lot more difficult to transport. The level of componentry is generally lower. Still, kitted out the way I want, I'd still probably get change from three grand. I'd rather tour on the GTe though.
A few weeks back I had the use of a Honda VT750 cruiser for the day. As regular readers would know, I hate cruisers. Underpowered, overweight, ugly heaps of overpriced shit which can't do something as simple as go around corners. Still, if cruisers are your thing and you don't have heaps of money, the Honda is worth looking at. The engine has more than enough stomp, it has super-smooth throttle response, the gearbox is crisp, the build quality is high and it's comfy. Will sound wicked with some aftermarket pipes. It's a classy product which does everything a cruiser is supposed to do, and does it well. So yeah, it's a bloody good cruiser. But it's still a cruiser.
Things get even trickier when your movie concentrates on a man like Johnny Cash, whose personal life and career would be suited to an epic 24-part series on HBO. Yet director James Mangold chooses wisely when it comes to selecting the portion of Johnny Cash's life for the movie. Walk the Line is a terrific film. You gotta admire Joaquin Phoenix's cojones at taking on the impossible role of Johnny Cash. He doesn't look or sound like him, but gets close enough to make it work. It's a beautiful performance, particularly when he captures Cash's on-stage mannerisms. Good as Phoenix is, he's almost upstaged by Reese Witherspoon in the role of her career. If Witherspoon's acting career ever stalls, she's got a second life as a country-n-western singer ready to go. She's simply astonishing in the role of the talented young country singer who stole Johnny Cash's heart. It's his pursuit of her companionship that is the focus of the movie: a seemingly unattainable goal for a guy falling apart from the demons of booze and drugs while living an unhappy marriage to his first wife, and perpetually haunted by the memory of his dead brother and baleful presence of his ever-disapproving father. Much has been written about the music in the film, and the talk is true: its brilliantly performed and shot, and there's lots of it. As a person who has hated country & western music all his life, I was humming a lot of these tunes long after the credits rolled. Great as the music in the film is, it's the other parts that really impressed me. I like the way Cash's first wife Vivian was treated sympathetically, as a woman who just wanted a normal home and a normal family and instead saw her husband wrecked on booze and drugs while lusting after the woman he was touring the country with. I loved the performances of the supporting cast, particularly Tyler Hilton as Elvis Presley and Ginnifer Goodwin as the aforementioned Vivian Cash. I liked the way heartfelt emotion in the film never descended into sappiness. This film is a gem. Not a bloated, self-important exercise in hero worship, but a concise and honest look at a fascinating man and the love of his life. Do yourself a favour a watch it, even if you don't have any Cash albums in your music collection.
It's a hell of an achievement to revive a dead artistic franchise, yet the team behind Casino Royale has pulled it off. Who would have bet on that? Not me, that's for sure. Sure, I'd heard all the studio publicity wank about 'back-to-basics' and a 'James Bond for the 21st century', but how likely was it that they'd make something decent out of a character that hasn't been interesting since before I was born? The Bond movies have been an increasingly smelly series of boring cartoons for over thirty years now, yet here's a movie which manages to be top-shelf escapist entertainment while actually retaining some wit and gravitas. It helps that Daniel Craig is the best ever Bond by a considerable margin (he can act, which is a change), and that the script is sharp and funny. The storyline is actually interesting for once, and gets away from the moronic global-supervillain nonsense and predictable-to-the-second plot development. For once, a Bond movie has got the tone exactly right: just "real world" enough to grab your interest, but with the movie-magic punch of action, drama and humour to make it true entertainment. Here's a shock: the supporting characters - both friendly and villain - are actually interesting. The standouts are a brilliantly slimy Mads Mikkelsen as the creepy yet not omnipotent Le Chiffre, and Eva Green as the first non-bimbo Bond girl. But the whole supporting cast are both effective and memorable, and that's a beautiful thing. Gone are the cringeworthy cornball dialogue, the crap actors, the tedious cartoonish action-n-gadgets sequences, the omnipotent billionaire supervillians and pretty much the whole tedious ordeal that this drag-ass franchise has become over the years. This is still Bond we're talking about, so the action sequences aren't "realistic", but they're grounded and gritty enough to keep you on the edge of your seat for the most part. What really impressed me though was the fact that the best showpiece of the movie was not any of the action sequences, but the brilliantly-staged high-stakes poker game. It goes on for quite some time, but is beautifully done and quite enthralling. The movie does get a little muddled in the third act, but even then remains leagues ahead of anything else in the franchise. Kudos to all involved. Considering what they were up against, Casino Royale is a triumph, and by far the best Bond movie. James Bond is dead. Long live James Bond.
The latest gems from the never-satisfied nanny-state bastards: -1-
Read that again and gasp at the vapid, hysterical lunacy of it.
Apparently the Hippocratic Oath had a small-print clause which mandates a healthy dose of totalitarian control issues. Can't these clowns actually demand something sensible, like banning Mundine's horrifying outfits?
Well thank goodness for that. I'm real sorry these idiots won't be in office at the end of the year, aren't you?
Don't bother trying to read it. What's mention-worthy is the fact this darling of the Fairfax press and the ABC includes the following among his list of reliable information resources:
Good sources you've got there Dick. You must be so proud.
My Libertarian chum & Economics lecturer Alex Robson has written three excellent pieces for the papers recently:
I especially recommend the last one.
How exactly would you clean this up?
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Biopics are a tricky thing which can trip up even the best of directors (just look at Michael Mann's hagiographic and incoherent Ali). What timeline do you focus on? What part of the subject's life? How much time do you spend on other characters? What is your source for information on the subject and how reliable is it? How do you avoid making a puff-piece or putting too many warts in a warts-n-all? 
Unhinged 'futurist' Richard Neville gives us 
