Last Sunday my brother talked me into going to Poetry Idol. This is an event held in the lead up to the Melbourne Writers Festival. It sounded boring as batshit (and I’ve only written one line of poetry in my entire life), but one of our friends was in it and it was a literary event and there was free wine and cheese. All this meant I had to go.

It was at the St Kilda public library across the road from the town hall. As soon as I got in there I was pleasantly surprised it wasn’t that bad as I thought and I found myself having fun. Most of the poems were humorous and the performances entertaining.

In all there were 25 poets 4 would win a place in the final. Our friend, Rose, in my opinion was easily in the top 4 – but some junky won instead.

Poetry Idol will be on next week Sunday at 2pm in the St Kilda public library – go and check it out.

I heard a terrible song from the late 80′s on the radio yesterday and it has been stuck in my head ever since.

Now it is your turn to suffer.

Can we talk it over in bed you say…

This version is by Grayson Hugh, but if you want some more torture Olivia Newton-John also did a version.

One great thing about Kevin Rudd’s visit to a strip joint is that it has proved he is a human being. Kevin Rudd was beginning to look way to much like Howard – just a political machine.

Come to think of it how do we know John Howard is human? He never shows any human weakness or emotion. All his actions are politically motivated. In no way are any of his actions based around compassion or feeling for his fellow man.

Kevin Rudd seemed like a clone of Howard, but now he has done something completely un-Howard like – it’s a breath of fresh air. I am far more likely to vote Labour now.

We need a Human leader that knows how to party – vote Labour!

The other day I was playing World of Warcraft (WoW) and an interesting discussion started in guild chat. It seems many members of the US military play WoW, this one guy Uranus (a homophobe named Uranus…that’s something) was saying how gays are still not allowed to sign up. The US military’s policy is still “don’t ask don’t tell”, but according to Uranus a homophobic attitude is almost compulsory. “We are required to be homophobic.”

I told him it was really quite silly that gays are not allowed in the military as some of the best warriors in history were gay, such as Alexander the Great. He told me I was wrong. Alex was not gay! Bullshit.

My guild is mainly Aussie so we told him that the Australian military allows gays, he answered, “that’s why Australia has second rate military.” After this the augment turned personal, and really quite funny.

But this raises a question, can gays fight? Can gays be an asset to the military? If you are in a foxhole with a gay solder will this have unfortunate consequences?

The whole argument boils down to gays not being “real” men apparently. Gays are meant to be sissy – like woman in other words. All the arguments used against woman get directed at gays. Frankly this line of argument is stupid. Woman are physically weaker but gay men are still men. So it comes down to mental toughness, leadership ability and courage.

Women have babies – that’s courage. In my opinion women also have fine leadership under pressure. My guild master and raid leader in WoW is a woman. She has to be in command of 25 people leading them through a dungeon with many hideous monsters. It can be quite stressful and has lead other weaker leaders to crack, to start swearing on vent (Ventrillo is a program used by WoW addicts to talk to each other – it’s like a conference call) and saying things like, “THAT’S A 50DKP MINUS.” She is the best raid leader I’ve had, and has lead our guild to some great achievements. If she was the inferior, weak willed and emotion ruled person that some bigots believe all women to be then this would not be possible.

If sissy women are able to achieve great things why can’t sissy men?

Last night on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope Susie Maroney revealed a dreadful secret, a secret so hideously gigantic that it threatened to destroy her entire life. What is this secret? When Susie was born she was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, luckily for her and her twin it was a very mild case and through the hard work of her mother and family was able to overcome it. She overcame it so well that she was able to keep it a secret from her friends and later on the world.

Keeping something like this secret is rather silly in my opinion. I know from personal experience – I tried to keep my muscular dystrophy a secret for years. When I finally came clean 5 years ago, my friends were shocked and surprised they never even realized I was in a wheelchair before, and they never thought to ask what was wrong with me. In all seriousness it is silly.

Some families have a real cone of silence when it comes to disabilities – parents can have a real problem accepting that their children are anything less than perfect. This can go as far as actually lying to family and friends, on in extreme cases shutting their disabled children off from society entirely. Families do this in the mistaken belief that society will think less of them because they have disabled children. Maybe this is a hold over from the karmic view of disability – that the parents must have done something to deserve their disabled children.

The fact is that the vast majority of people do not have a problem with disabled people. In some cases disabled people are treated differently some able-bodied people feel guilty when they see disabled people. When I was much younger and much cuter well meaning people would come up to me in the street and hand me $20.00 just like that. This happened on more than one occasion one time it was as much as $50.00. Every time I would try to give it back but they would refuse to accept. I believe they did this out of miss placed sense of guilt maybe in the fact that they weren’t disabled or they felt they had never given back to society. All of these people felt sorry for me, but I also felt sorry for them.

The fact is that disabled people are ordinary everyday people. Anyone could be disabled; you could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Next time you see someone in a wheelchair think, “That could be me!” If you were disabled would you want people to feel sorry for you? Would you want people to treat you differently?

When Susie Maroney revealed to her husband that she was born with Cerebral Palsy he didn’t care at all – she is a person not a disability.