Not a sponsor of the World Cup, but alas, with no one to ambush.

I have integrated the old blogs from cricket.rickeyre.com and now.rickeyre.com pre-October 2006 into this blog, adding roughly another 850 messages, including some that have travelled through a plethora of databases since 1996!

I won't be removing the old databases just yet, certainly not until I am satisfied that everything has converted properly and the search index has been recompiled.

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As I've already indicated elsewhere, I'm supporting The Greens in the March 24 state election. The state of the major parties is so bad that neither the ALP nor the Libs/Nats deserve to govern. The best we can do is hope for a hung parliament, with a Iemma minority government held to accountability by third parties and quality independents. The Greens have the best third-party credentials in my opinion, and a more sound choice than the unknown (and often unskilled) quantity of independent candidates in many cases.

I've just written my first WTF for Technorati on Billy Thorpe.

As I noted a few weeks ago, John Winston Howard has defended the rights of people to say ridiculous things.

It's less than a week till the start of the world's third (or maybe even second) biggest World Cup tournament: the ICC Cricket World Cup.

Not one, but two grisly tales reported today by Australian Associated Press:

Firstly, A 37-year-old woman has been charged with stealing a piece of Peter Brock's crashed car containing his racing number "05" while collecting the racing legend's body for the coroner.

A 21-year-old man was arrested on Monday after he allegedly tried to cash a cheque for USD 50,000 at the Chase Bank in Hobart, Indiana that was signed "King Savior, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Servant".

Associated Press takes up the story.

Not much I can say about yesterday's Why It Looks Like My Uncle Oscars as I had only seen one nominated film, which picked up two WILLMUOs.

I was pleased to see "An Inconvenient Truth" win the WILLMUO for best documentary. I saw it at its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival last June and bought the DVD in the week of its release (and have watched it again about three or four times since thus far). There may have been better documentaries over the years, but rarely has one been so relevant to the public conscience.

The CEO of White House Halliburton has finally left our shores. Richard Bruce Cheney, 66, wild game hunter of Casper, Wyoming, flew out of Mascot Airport this morning after two and a half days of what could be best described as a blatant violation of Australian sovereignty.

Laws bent so that his Secret Servicemen could carry loaded guns, large slabs of the Sydney CBD closed down whenever he was driven anywhere - even the Sydney Harbour Bridge was closed down at short notice when he took a totally unnecessary trip to John Howard's party house at Kirribilli. Not to mention some of the most bewildering doublespeak over that masterpiece of public-private partnership, the US war "effort" in Iraq.