Such is life.
There are many Ned Kelly resources online for those interested in learning more about Australia’s most famous bushranger. For instance, Picture Australia also has many images of him while the State Library of Victoria has an online version of the Jerilderie Letter, a letter written (or perhaps dictated) by Kelly describing his view of his activities and the treatment of his family and, more generally, the treatment of Irish Catholics by the police.
Kelly had had originally written the letter to a politician known only as ‘Cameron’, but that correspondence was suppressed from the public and was not made public until it was published by the Melbourne Herald in 1930. If you found the version I lined to earlier hard to read, here is another site dedicated to that letter, with the text of the letter in both HTML and flash formats. The letter has inspired much debate about whether Kelly was truly an outlaw or a hero.
There is an excellent site dedicated to Kelly’s famous last stand at Glenrowan, and another good site which has collected most of the research on the evolution of the Kelly gang.
Here are some more sites you may find useful or interesting.
Timeline of the Kelly gang.
Another Ned Kelly biography.
More photos.
Ned Kelly’s stay at Beechworth.
And when you’re done with all of that, why not take a small quiz to see how much you’ve remembered!
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Double parking? Double taser.
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Corporate Magazines Still Suck
Happy 40th Birthday Rolling Stone. On this day in 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone Magazine was published, and it came with a roach clip. It was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J. Gleason It embraced and reported on the hippy counterculture during the late 1960s and 1970s, and its rise to fame was synchronous with such bands and artists as the Grateful Dead, Beatles, Doors, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. It is the magazine that trashed Eric Clapton, broke up Cream and ripped every album Led Zeppelin ever made!”
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Vintage Vertiginous Vaudevillian
Ben Dova the Drunk Daredevil, contortionist, Hindenburg survivor and one of the 10 most unfortunately named people on the internets.
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The unreleased 1998 documentary “Frat House”
In 1997, Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland created a film documenting the savagely brutal hazing rituals that take place during Hell Week at U.S. college fraternities. Frat House was completed and won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at 1998’s Sundance Film Festival, an award that was later rescinded. HBO was slated to air it later that year, but pulled it for reasons that remain debatable to this day. It has never seen an official release.
Frat House (60 minutes, Google video, )
Lawyers representing several fraternity organizations and frat brothers charged that Phillips and Gurland, among other things, staged events, recreated scenes, and that the frat featured in the most severe segments doesn’t pledge during the spring semester when the footage was shot.
In interviews, the filmmakers stood by their work, saying the only questionable matter was that some of the pledges were in fact already members of the fraternity.
In order to get a firsthand view of the happenings, Phillips and Gurland pledged and went through Hell Week at two northeastern U.S. schools. I’m not going to spoil the way it turns out, but it’s a compelling and interesting watch. Whether or not it was fabricated, the film is a horrifying and realistic exploration of a side of undergrad life that most of us happily avoided.
Todd Phillips had previously directed Hated: G.G. Allin and & the Murder Junkies and then went on to the big time, helming such… um… classics as Road Trip and Old School. Andrew Gurland went on to make Mail Order Wife, a verry well done and… well, fake documentary.
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School Shootings – not just a North American problem
At least eight people are dead in a shooting at a school in Finland. Apparently some are blaming Youtube, as the killer posted some videos of himself shortly before the attack. How to get inside the mind of kids who do these terrible things? Are they just “bad seeds” or are these killers created? Clearly marginalization and alienation play a role. Many would-be -killers seem to share these fantasies of grandiose mass spectacles , many psychologists think are inspired by their immersion in violent video games and movies. There’s still controversy over the idea that watching violent TV/video games/etc can make kids more aggressive, and if that translates to violent behavior. I’m curious how often nationalist and racist rhetoric is also often deployed by these kids and wonder why that is: The Finland shooter, Auvinen called himself a “social Darwinist” who would “eliminate all who I see unfit”.
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Throw the tourist from the train.
Throw the tourist from the train. Ejected from a train for refusing to stop taking pictures from the train. Well, for not stopping anyway; the refusing part is unclear. The nation is now secure.
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Putting puppies in prison
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Save Your Precious Eyesight for Television
Why do we like, have to like, read so much in school? Why can’t there be like, a library with only like, books with like, not a lot of pages? Lazy Library, for those with short attention spans, tight schedules, or a report due tomorrow.
RobDurdle.com 
