Get your reading on!

LINKS!

- Something completely awesome: An angry rant about how Twilight invented werewolves, and the movie Wolfman was ripping it off.

This movie was a complete waste and I feel that it offends ALL Twilight Fans around the world, that including myself. For one, it was a COMPLETE remakingof the Wolf Pack from the Twilight Saga: New Moon. It gives the werewolves a bad name and makes them look like some deformed mutation of a rabid dog.

-  Country music in Australia is going through some tough times. So I guess someone will write a song about it.
- The battle to find places for sex offenders to live once they're released from prison. An interesting conundrum. Safe for work, in case you were wondering.
- Boring science story made readable by including a picture of Christina Hendricks in a corset-thingie. Well played, sub-editor... well played. If your work frowns on pictures of voluptuous women in small bits of underwear, best look away.
- One of the weirdest things I've read in a while: groups of strangers in Japan finding each other over the internet and committing group suicide in cars. A really fascinating read. One of the comments made by a guy in Japan really seemed to capture it. He reckons the country lost its ability to produce adults after it lost World War II.

Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. “I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”

-  A really good article about the attacks on Indians. The writer makes a point that I've been thinking about for a while. What was the cultural background of the attackers? That has not been publicised. What was the socio-economic background of the attackers? What religion did they follow? Were the crimes one of opportunity? All questions that should have been asked at the beginning, and the Indian media missed.
- Shane Crawford picks his AFL ladder. Interesting pick for number one.

 And now a couple of political things:
- Peter Costello on Stephen Conroy. While Costello is still a Liberal, he's working for the Government at the moment. And he was always a really, really smart guy. So when he speaks on tax policy, he knows what he's talking about. And it's not clear that Conroy does.
- "True Confessions: My time in the Young Liberals." Sounds like a scary title, and fair enough too. But the final comments were something I have talked about a fair bit:

In hindsight, my time working at the think-tank was quite worthwhile. Apart from allowing me to indulge in the odd healthy, well-rounded meal, it also forced me to confront my own political prejudices.
By being removed from my cosy left-leaning clique I was suddenly without the protection of groupthink and had to justify my beliefs to a group to whom I was speaking a foreign language.
While I highly doubt any of the Young Libs I met will be marching in the next “Free Palestine” rally I like to think we all made an impression on each other. Certainly my opinion on some issues, like internet censorship, has moderated quite substantially.
I found it was actually rather nice to leave the bunker for some fresh air and mingling with the other side.
But please: don’t tell my friends.

I find that quite an important point. I find so many people I talk to on both sides do not get out of their own little cliques to get an experience about what it's like on the other side. And to be a well-rounded human being, I believe it is essential to do that occasionally.