Proof that nothing serious will be done to deal with mental illness in our public health system: a Senate committee has gone and reported the obvious.

Also, and curiously, news of the cyclone of the moment is making the front pages of all the American news sites (maybe they’re hoping to post pictures of destruction tomorrow, or something). But more importantly, since Larry damaged farms in Queensland and now Glenda is headed for Carnarvon, how on earth am I going to get adequate supplies of bananas?

Browsing through today’s headlines, I notice …

• the Israeli people seem fed up with conflict and voted in a government that might actually help bring about peace, despite the Palestinian people having recently voted in a bunch of extremists, so maybe there’s hope for that region after all.
• that while a few hundred union heavies is the best we Aussies can do when there’s changes to labour laws, over in Paris they can clog city squares with hundreds of thousands of people (and for much less radical workplace changes, too).
• there are signs in India suggesting there might be some distant hope of ending the problem of selectively aborting female foetuses in that part of the world.
• WA is the second highest-taxing state government, on par with NSW and Victoria — although no one mentions that these three states subsidise the other states and territories through Federal taxes quite significantly, so it’s reasonable that our state governments would have to impose harsher taxes.

There’s now a whole new way to access your favourite illogical blog!

Last weekend I went on a small domain buying spree because Go Daddy were running a special. So in addition to buying some domains for my next secret project of doom, I also purchased one that allows me to leverage a unique naming opportunity offered by pre-existing offline circumstances.

Presenting … www.hourann.com!

It’s the same blog you know and may not necessarily love, with an all-new and entirely unpronounceable URL!

Due to some rather unpleasant family issues, I saw my mum off at the airport last night. But it wasn’t all bad news.

Now that stage 7 of Roe Highway is completed, there is a freeway running more or less straight from my house to Perth Airport. It’s a very nice drive, with only four traffic lights the whole way, and halves my travel time for that journey.

Despite this, I’m quite worried about the new road’s impact on the environment, particularly local wildlife. On the new stretch of road there’s these big electronic signs saying “Beware Kangaroo”.

So I’m left to wonder. If this is an area where lots of kangaroos are bounding around, why the hell did they go build a freeway through it?

This evening on Stateline the new WA Liberal leader, Paul Omodei, said that folks ought to “give me a fair go”.

Somehow I doubt the same courtesy was extended to Matt Birney, who’d barely finished learning the ropes. I really don’t think our local media were giving him a fair go when they harped on about the gaffes he made, most of them from inexperience. And when Birney announced that he was stepping down, which was also shown on Stateline, the media pack were rude enough to just stare in silence when he delivered the jokes in his speech (some of which were actually funny).

So now the Kalgoorlie Kid is gone. I may not be a Liberal supporter, but I recognise a good back-stabbing when I see it …

This afternoon at the Busport, I noticed that Transperth’s talking SmartRider (on the posters in the information office) has grown legs and arms. And he’s now got a buddy, a talking MultiRider who’s half his height and seems rather mopey about being phased out. Alas, I don’t have pictures, but suffice to say the cheese factor is way up there.

I look forward to the day that the dude in a SmartRider suit — for that’s what the photos on the posters showed — stands around on platform E and hands out pamphlets to unwitting commuters as they head to work.

Meanwhile, the use of my real SmartRider (which is devoid of limbs, lest it be unsafe for my pocket) continues to plod along with the same level of reliability as most state government IT projects. In other words, it works fine as long as you follow the instructions … unless the machine reckons the bus hasn’t reached its stop yet, or is among the string of buses I caught last week with “Out of Service” machines.

Proof positive that everyone in the trial only cares about the free stuff: the other day, when they offered $50 to SmartRider users for being in a focus group, their first quota was filled in 40 minutes and their second quota in two hours.