An election call is immenent in Australia today or perhaps this week.
Like Canada, Australia is a parliamentary democracy and votes by party.
They also curb the time between the call and the election.

Colby Cosh takes a look at the voting process and ads some personal asides.

It’s as close, I think, as a secular person like me ever gets to the pleasures of collective ritual. It may even be closer than a present-day churchgoer — whose place of worship is typically an architectural abomination filled with children’s artwork and horrible music — is allowed to get. You could never accuse the exercise of possessing majesty, but it does have dignity. The artifacts at the polling station are largely what you’d find at the business office of a motorcycle-parts importer, but when you go to vote, you are received with respect and even solemnity. There is a mutual understanding between you and the clerks that you are formally exercising a privilege earned by the efforts of countless honourable forebears, great and small, over centuries of history. The hush in the school gymnasium or church basement drives out frivolity; it reminds you that you are there to represent your dead ancestors and your descendants not yet born. Voting is truly the bourgeois sacrament.

I always find myself admiring the polling personnel and the scrutineers. These are ordinary citizens we trust with the application and guardianship of an important law. But they have not learned, and will not learn, the priggish imperiousness of the cop or the civil servant. And who would say they perform their duties less well? Their record is amazingly free of scandal and abuse in modern Canadian history, yet we don’t often pause to thank them.

Wish I’d said that.
It is mostly more innocent and hopeful than church most of the time.
Maybe because it doesn’t ‘happen’ every Sunday, and we give the politicans and ourselves a chance.

Blog Ads
Jeff Jarvis looks at the corporate interest in blogs and the potential for advertisers. I’m tempted to say there is a potential blogger born every minute.
I don’t think advertising in itself is ‘good or bad’, nor is the idea of making money off your blog.
It is a mutual arrangement, but one I have chosen not to make. Enough concessions are made in the broadcasting world, and I chose not to use this blog space for any peddler hawking his wares.
Having just deleted another 480 comment spams, it is difficult to acknowledge the worth of advertising. It is also hard to do so when you see ‘christian’ spam like Cre8d receives.

Barbie
I took a box of toys over to a donation bin the other day. The trap door is up high and the box was too big to dump in all at once. Good thing too. The young lady who had given up some of her toys had accidently included some Barbie clothes I fished out. Parents everywhere who step on Barbie shoes in their bare feet, or squint at that spec of glitter and pick it up before the vaccum does, deserve a great deal of credit. The latest in the Barbie world…Marie Antoinette, I will refrain from any comment. Some things speak for themselves.
Link via Exclamation Mark

I can’t say something like this without some heavy wrath decending upon me, but Lee Anne Millinger of such small hands can.

It’s a good thing the Fourth of July doesn’t fall on a Sunday every year. In response to requests from some of the older members of our congregation, this morning’s service used a patriotic hymn for all three hymns. Because we’d been out of town and missed church last Sunday, I was really longing for worship this morning. Somehow, these hymns didn’t cut it for me, and I felt as if I were singing praises to my country instead of the King of Kings.