To assume someone is a criminal when he brags that he is a hacker is like assuming someone is a rapist if he tells you he has had sex.

In both cases he may just be a wanker.

• While the actual blast can be quite distracting – particularly if well targeted – a bazooka may take a while to reload. I read somewhere that a recent survey showed that at least 98% of magpies don’t actually know what a bazooka looks like. This probably means that during the reload time a magpie is not likely to be distracted by the mere presence of a bazooka.
• There is also a good chance that the recoil from the bazooka blast will knock your bike over. This is probably more distracting for you than it is for the magpie, unless of course you are being closely followed by an inattentive car or truck driver (who may have been distracted by the magpie.) In that case the subsequent sirens and flashing lights and traffic chaos might be quite distracting for the magpie.

I have heard of at least one case of a tennis racket being used as a very effective WMD. I usually don’t have a tennis racket with me when I am riding so I haven’t tried that distraction yet. On a couple of occasions I have picked up a small tree from the roadside and carried that with me for the rest of my ride. That kind of works, but for me it has never had the  impact I imagine a tennis racket would, and small trees don’t make good riding companions.

So lately I’ve settled on the less satisfying but mostly effective distractor of looking just plain silly.

There are of course many many ways of looking silly. If some other nameless cyclist had not come to my rescue I may have had many years of trial and error ahead of me in the search for exactly the right kind of silliness to effectively distract magpies. Fortunately there are many other cyclists doing their best to look silly (that is why lycra bike pants were invented after all) and somewhere along the line some one of them decided to look silly by wearing a hedgehog on his head. Lo and behold he discovered – by chance – that this was an effective magpie distractor. Of course we don’t have hedgehogs in Australia – and the echidna is a protected species – so I’ve had to make do by adding spiky bits to my helmet. So far it seems to be working. There is one magpie about 1km down the road from our place who likes to swoop at least a dozen times each time I ride by him, and I’d say he definitely looks distracted every single time he swoops.

]]> http://bits.8the.net/2009/10/31/wmds/feed/ 1 http://bits.8the.net/2005/11/03/home-grown-terrorist-threat-revealed/ http://bits.8the.net/2005/11/03/home-grown-terrorist-threat-revealed/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2005 03:04:54 +0000 mike http://bitsnew.8the.net/2005/11/03/home-grown-terrorist-threat-revealed/ According to ABC online "John Howard says he has intelligence now he did not have at the weekend". Taking his statement at face value I’m sure most Australians would want to congratulate our Prime Minister. Many of us have noticed over the last few years how very distressing it is to watch an important world leader struggling in that department. We warmly welcome Mr Howard’s announcement that he has more intelligence!

One would hope of course that the trend is long term. Many of the Prime Minister’s fellow Australians regularly experience a temporary dip in IQ points over the weekend and a corresponding rise as the work week resumes. Given that this week has been a little anomalous however – with some observations suggesting that the general weekend decline was extending into Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning – Mr Howard’s readiness to act at a time when much of the populace was vulnerable reveals more about his leadership than his statements regarding intelligence.

Trust me. I’m a Prime Minister.

ABC online goes on to report however that " the information concerns him." This might be a little puzzling except that – as we all now know – the Prime Minister was not making a personal observation but announcing a terrorist threat. Unfortunately he’s not allowed to tell us a lot about it, and nor are the state premiers and others who have been taken more fully into his confidence. Its important to remember that loose lipped premiers can cost lives. And if you can’t trust a politician then who can you trust?

In any case there are a few things we can deduce from the available information.

The first thing we know about the terrorist threat is that it probably wasn’t a terrorist threat until today – or whenever it is that the amended legislation passes through the senate. We know this because the legislation had to be passed urgently to widen the definition of a terrorist act specifically to make this terrorist threat a terrorist threat. If you know what I mean.

The second thing we know about the terrorist threat is that it involves the planning of some sort of attack. Again the legislation is designed to make it easier to prosecute someone planning an attack. That’s a bit of a no-brainer really. Any terrorist threat is going to involve some sort of attack. Maybe with weapons of mass-destruction.

In the know or in the no!

The third thing we know about the terrorist threat is that it has nothing whatever to do with workplace relations legislation. Attorney General Philip Ruddock has assured us that any connection between the terrorist threat and workplace relations is entirely co-incidental. Workplace relations in the parliament have been a little strained, but Mr Ruddock is such an amiable fellow that he probably hasn’t noticed. From his statement yesterday it seems that his own formula for keeping the peace is to act whenever he receives advice, or accept the blame. Some of Mr Ruddock’s more argumentative colleges seem to be more reticent to adopt that approach. Come to think of it I don’t think I’ve ever seen Phillip get upset or emotional about anything. He really is a remarkably amiable fellow!

The fourth thing we know about the terrorist threat is that the advice was independent – that it came from some outside agency. It doesn’t really matter where it came from – it might have been the Brits or it might have been the Americans. or someone else. Most likely the Americans though – they’re pretty good at giving advice. And we’re pretty good at taking it. And acting on it. Or accepting the blame.

The fifth thing we know about the terrorist threat is that it is home grown. I can’t remember any thing specifically said by the Prime Minister or the Attorney General to that effect yesterday, but that was probably because they can’t tell us too much. In any case the media has been talking a lot about a home grown terrorist threat for the last week or so. So it must be home grown.

The sixth thing we know about the terrorist threat – and this is of particular concern – is that the information concerns the Prime Minister. Mr. Howard knows a lot about terrorism. After all he was in the US to visit George Bush on 911. And he gets a lot of advice. So if he is concerned we should all be concerned. But what if – and understandably he couldn’t tell us this – what if the terrorist threat concerns the Prime Minister himself – personally?

OK! Enough talking! Time is running out! There is a terrorist threat and we have to do something about it! We may not have the benefit of the advice that the Prime Minister and the Attorney General have been receiving, but we do have some intelligence and its probably more than we had on the weekend. So if we put the pieces together we should be able to work this one out!

We have a terrorist threat that might not have been thought of as a terrorist threat before. It involves an attack, possibly with weapons of mass-destruction, maybe blowing things up. The Americans heard somebody who is very Australian talking about it. Phillip Ruddock doesn’t think it has anything to do with workplace relations legislation, but he could be wrong because other people get a lot more upset about that sort of thing than he does. And it could be a threat to the Prime Minister personally.

Hmmm…

Hang on. I think I’ve got it!!! Has anyone checked on Ted Bullpit lately? I think he’s gone and gotten himself all upset about workplace relations and all those ads on TV! And the yanks have overheard him shouting “Someone should blow up bloody John Howard!” Well I’m glad we can reveal the facts at last and all rest easy. That’s a relief! For a moment there I thought Australian democracy might be under threat.

Hang on again – there’s a knock at the door. I’d better post this quickly in case I’m unavoidably detained and can’t tell you about it later.

So we made our appearance, had our 5 minutes of fun, grabbed our tooth brushes and were on our way again. All the way driving there and back I was hoping desperately that we didn’t get stopped for random breath testing – it might have been hard to explain.

Later that night we went to an excellent gig with a friend, heard some great music from a few local bands., and stayed overnight at the friend’s house. About 4:30AM I woke up with one of the worst headaches I have had in years, and no pain killers in the house. I spent the next few hours hurrying from the bed to the toilet to be violently ill. From both ends of my body. Before long there was no toilet paper left. I was wishing we had used toilet paper for our mummy wrappings instead of cloth strips because then at least we would have had left-overs.

Actually no I wasn’t – I was too sick to think anything much at all except “It’s only pain. It will pass.” And it did eventually of course, and later it left me feeling a bit like I was back from the dead. It made me think how much we take pain relief for granted, when for many its not easily available when they need it. It also made me think that its good to be reminded of our mortality from time to time. We too easily forget what is real and get wrapped up in ourselves.