I am two weeks away from a man bun. Reaching for one of my wife’s hair bands to gather up great pillows of greying hair into a neat ponytail on top of my bonce is something I thought I would never have to contemplate. The temptation to reach for the good kitchen scissors and start hacking away is almost impossible to ignore. I’ve thought about it. Let’s face it, almost all of us have.
These are strange times, no doubt, made stranger still when we glance enviously at the sufferers of male pattern baldness through Zoom windows.
My strong advice is put the scissors down and walk away. The dreaded home hair cut will only amuse your friends and leave you looking like Charlie Manson having a bad hair day for weeks to come. Put the scissors down.
In these trying times, there is good news for the hirsute and glabrous alike. And lots of it. The end of this is coming and sooner than we thought.
New South Wales hit 80 per cent single dose a week ago and just kept on going. Blacktown, one of the designated local government areas of concern and one of greater Sydney’s lowest socio-economic areas, hit 90 per cent single dose a week ago.
As of Thursday evening, the Premier State has had 84.11 single dose of those aged 16 or more, with 56.63 fully vaxxed. The 70 per cent fully vaxxed threshold will be hit in ten days, two weeks ahead of schedule with the 80 per cent threshold two weeks later, almost a month ahead of where the health bureaucrats expected us to be.
New South Wales is just a few points shy of the UK’s single jab rate of 89 per cent. Covid-19 Ashes victory is in sight.
There is no sign of the malaise that has hit other countries where vaccination roll outs have leapt into the majority only to stall shortly afterwards.
There is a clear correlation between those states where the pandemic is alive and furiously kicking and states where Covid-19 is less front of mind but given this, the figures across the nation are also deeply satisfying. WA has been the slowest out of the blocks, but the vaccination rate has picked up pace. It is estimated the state will hit the 80 per cent threshold in the second week of December.
And that’s it, folks. The nation becomes 80 per cent fully vaxxed state-by-state on or hopefully before December 10 with states and territories hitting their marks.
These are superb figures and point to an end to citywide and statewide lockdowns forever provided state premiers keep their promises. Well done, everyone. Well, almost everyone.
In open defiance of their “Everyday, everyday” chants, protesters stayed away in droves from the Melbourne CBD on Thursday, but all indications are they will assemble in number on Friday to constitute what may be the worst AFL grand-final parade the city has ever seen.
It promises to be another sea of recently acquired fluoro, none of it in team colours, while the fluoros sing some of Australia’s patriotic ditties, including a Telstra corporate theme song and steal the thunder from Daryl Braithwaite at the Cox Plate next month with off key renditions of “Horses”.
Why “Horses”? I guess the important thing is not to think about that too much.
These people have been so frequently beaten around the head and shoulders with misinformation from rabid anti-vaxxers, reality has become a vague speck on the horizon invisible to the naked eye.
Last night on Telegram, the chatter box of choice for the anti-vax crowd, one young protester complained that he had been the unwilling recipient of a good squirt of capsicum spray courtesy of the Victoria Police Force. He had been feeling poorly ever since and the thought occurred that he had been unwillingly subjected to what anti-vaxxers call “experimental gene therapy”.
Another replied confirming the dark theory. His brother was a cop, he explained, and had let the cat out of the bag and the vaccine up protesters’ nostrils. Yes, capsicum spray had been loaded up with the dreaded vaccine, and it could only be assumed the young protester had fallen into one of Victoria’s 74 per cent single vaxxed category.
Others lamented his fate and suggested remedies of vinegar-based solutions (whether orally or by enema, it wasn’t clear). Either way, let us bow our heads in silent contemplation for what that young man is putting himself through right now.
Meanwhile on Facebook Marketplace, one Melbourne-based punter had a large-ish pile of fluoro tops and pants for sale. “No longer need them and quiet (sic) too big for me to wear,” he explained. $150 the lot. All stock must go.
What’s the point of having a near natural disaster without associating it with a good, old fashioned conspiracy theory? The serious quivering on the Richter scale in southeastern Australia on Wednesday morning was not, as we all were led to believe, an earthquake but according to the anti-vax aligned Q-Anon cult, a sign of explosions in underground tunnels where children were being tortured and drained of fluids for the immediate consumption by the rich and powerful.
Sure. Why not?
On the ground rather than under it, we have the anti-vax movement’s great historiographers to thank for much of the frivolity.
Rukshan Fernando calls himself an independent journalist which is odd because he promotes anti-lockdown rallies on his Facebook page to his thousands of followers and only then attends them pretending to be an autonomous chronicler of events with no skin in the game. Fernando moves through Melbourne rallies with a camera, babbling about peaceful demonstrations while filming demonstrators act violently.
It’s an intriguing though not entirely persuasive piece of propaganda.
On Tuesday, Fernando was disappointed that some protesters from the previous day’s violence outside CFMEU HQ had been correctly identified as neo-Nazis (I counted three founding members of the neo-Nazi group, the United Patriots’ Front in attendance).
Determined to prove the absence of neo-Nazis, Rukshan took to wandering through the crowd as it assembled in Elizabeth Street on Tuesday morning, asking if any were neo-Nazis. Heads shook solemnly. Some babbled about the New World Order, others about saving the children. It was a masterclass of propaganda for idiots until Rukshan came across a member of the Proud Boys who was proud to acknowledge that he was a neo-Nazi leaving Rukshan to shuffle off to other less challenging interview subjects.
Joel Gilmore is another fake journalist with a camera on his shoulder. On Tuesday, Gilmore filmed a scene where protesters attacked police cars at the northern end of the CBD. One protester ran over the top of an unmarked police vehicle. Others kicked and punched cop cars in pointless collisions between fists and metal alloy before fleeing. Gilmore fled with them offering a profanity laden commentary that police had “knocked people over” and “run them down” in open contradiction to what he had just filmed and what those of us watching had seen with our own eyes.
Hollywood beckons for these guys. Once they get a handle on green screen CGI fakery, anything will become possible.
I keep saying anti-vaxxers lie. All the time. And they do. But let’s not forget that they are also very, very funny.
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