BONWAG

In the interests of scolarly research, here’s another web outing for those who this year continued the dual scotish tradition of singing Auld Lang Syne and then starting a right old row about what the words are, or what the whole thing actually means.

Have polished off three quarters of the Harry Potter series now, so I guess I’ll be ready when the kids start running at brick walls in the train station for no apparrent reason. Just don’t ask me to explain the rules of Quidditch.
And, as is my wont, I haven’t done it sequentially: Goblet of Fire (number 4), Philosopher’s Stone (number 1), and then Chamber of Secrets (number 2). Now reading ‘Prisoner of Azkhaban’, which aparrently got some dood kicked off a flight in America in the midst of all the secuirty scares after September 11. True story.

We hope everyone has had a great Christmas Day and is looking to settle into the new year.
We had a great time; Ainslie orchestrated a formidable Christmas feast for our three wise relatives from the east, while the kids enjoyed their presents and food – and watched Shrek twice.
We are so lucky. We heard about some of the disastrous situations in Sydney for Christmas; homes destroyed by bushfire and more of the same expected for the days ahead. Shades of 1994? (I remember that Christmas too well).
If you’d like to leave any Christmas wishes or notes for us, or the other Bonwaggers, sign on to the Message Board; it’s just been upgraded :-)

In case you’ve not got a package under the tree from us – and, come to think of it, even if you have – here’s a cute (almost too cute) game from the team at Orisinal.com – a Pocketful Of Stars. Easy to learn and fun for a quick play :-)

Terry Jones, one of the members of the Monty Python team, wages war on one of my pet peeves of recent journalism – the ‘War On Terrorism – in this essay from the Telegraph

Ainslie’s just been appointed Academic Student Advisor of the Arts Faculty of The University of Western Australia. Hooray!

It’s scary that, according to an American college survey, The Simpson’s next-door neighbour Ned Flanders is the second most commonly connected name to Christianity. The guys at Greenbelt (a US Christian Festival) had a Tribute night for Ned, which attracted a lot of interest (positive and negative..)

Caleb offers all his best for the holiday season

If you’ve ever wondered what the Internet was like in the early days (we’re talking before 1995) Google has completed the task of backdating its collection of articles from ‘Usenet’. (You might know Usenet as ‘The Newsgroups’ or the ‘Bulletin Board’ system, which is probably the third largest system on the Internet these days; behind the World Wide Web and e-mail.)
The archive now dates right back to 1981, and there’s about 700 million postings in there, everything from soup recipes to dialectical materialism, including some of my postings on my opinions on Australian TV. There’s a good collection of all the notable moments of modern history gathered together on the announcement page.
Although the information is largely unqualified and mostly useless, it’s interesting because it’s such a huge collection of knowledge. It’s probably best summed up by one of the pioneers, Gene Spafford:

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea — massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

Qantas has announced their plans… and logo for the new ‘Australian Airlines’, to be launched next year. The Kangaroo is even more unrecogniseable in the new version of the logo; so much so, that it’s looking like something else altogether…