OZTRAILYA

OZTRAILYA should not be confused with that other place.

In OZ, nobody ever tries to tell you that your opinions need to be moderated by a government-appointed Advocate.

In OZTRAILYA, a dying government is seeking to pass legislation to kill freedom of speech. 

It is of some reassurance that the current minority government will be kicked out in about six months.  They have no authority and no credible leader. 

Life in the land Down Under will then return to normal and all this Orwellian nonsense - this surreal effrontery - will end. Thankfully.

Alias:  Frank Satyr

Chuck Thompson Knows What to Do

I have just finished reading Smile When You're Lying:  Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer, by Chuck Thompson.  The title lived up to its promise.  In its own way, it's a kind of contemporary classic, actually. It's that good.  Chuck's that good.

Most days, the closest you get to The Truth is a morsel of Bukowski, but he's long dead and no longer churns out his line.  Where are the other keepers of veracity?  The raw and uncut verbal pranksters?  The tell-it-as-nobody-dare, no-bullshit players?  I had all but despaired until I chanced upon the writing of the man referred to at the head of this blog.

Chuck gives us the dirt on the travel industry and travel writing in general.  But he's more than that.  Some of his stories are object lessons for life, some are amusing (meaning that they are laugh-out-loud vignettes), and some are so fantastic that they leap into your long-term memory, never to leave as long as you are extant.

His whole style of his writing reminds you just how inept most wordsmiths are when they go fishing for a metaphor.  Chuck Thompson has no such impediment:  he reels in scores of apt phrases like fat Alaskan salmon. (Mr Thompson came of age in the northern town of Juneau.)

Read Chuck Thompson.  Now.

Alias:  Frank Satyr