creepy crawlies, and just a little politics
Matty - Huntsman spiders are harmless. My cat Monty is real softy, a few days ago he saw a huntsman spider walking across the floor, before I could stop him he ran across and grabbed the spider in his mouth. He let out a yelp and spat it out, it ran away and I scooped it up on some paper and put it out. Monty got a tiny raised mark (less than a mosquito bite) on his lip but was completely fine. (For overseas folks, Huntsman spiders are big and look like a tarantula, but are harmless.) Also, the stories about the ulcerous spreading wounds from white tailed spiders are a load of rubbish. University researchers about 5 years ago discovered that white tails are also harmless, the ulcers and necrosis that won't heal are caused by a soil microbe entering small cuts, the microbe and white tails like similar soil conditions so that's why people thought that white tail bites caused those horrible rotting flesh woulds.
In our old house we have"colonial style" windows (a window made up of several small panes with wooden bars between) which are a pain to clean so I don't bother too often...the spider webs accumulate on the outside, and we sometimes get a treat of having blue wrens hovering against the glass while they pick up caught insects from the webs.
And politics... I am a VERY political person, a member of a political party (the Australian Greens) but I am a bit shocked at the aggression in this thread. WE should be able to express diverse and contradictory opinions without getting nasty about it or turning on each other. That is a fundamental trait of a pluralistic democracy. There is a certain level of respect due to any human being no matter how much we disagree with them. Attack the issue, not the person.
I'm not sure if "how to vote" cards are distributed at polling booths in other countries, so forgive me if I explain the obvious...
In Australia the voting system requires a number to be entered against the name of every candidate on the ballot paper. (we don't have electronic voting - ballot papers are always kept in case of a challenge to the result.) So you put 1 against your favourite candidate, 2 for your next preference, 3 next and so on till there is a number against every name on the paper. Some state elections you only have to number up to 5 but all federal and most other states you must number the whole lot, your worst candidate you put the last number. In senate elections there can be dozens of candidates so it is easy to miss a number and invalidate your vote, so parties always give out leaflets as you enter the polling office. Each party or independent candidate ususally has a couple of helpers at each polling office handing out "How To Vote cards" favouring their candidate. My partner and I always hand out for the Greens. Most voters take a HTV card from each representative, when they enter the privacy of the booth they choose the HTV card to suit the candidate they like and copy it across onto the ballot paper, then put their ballot into the box and put all the HTV cards into the rubbish bin. This is a huge waste of paper but has become an essential part of the system - about 90 percent of votes usually follow a HTV card. Any party who didn't hand out HTV cards would be annihilated at the polls, so they are sort of a "necessary evil." (there are alternatives which I won't bore you with but they are not yet legal...)
Anyway...One thing I enjoy about the Aussie way is how even fierce rival parties get along. As a "Greenie" we try to do the environmental thing by recycling HTV cards. There are strict limits as to how close party helpers can get to polling booths (so we can't corruptly influence voters in the booth) so we can't go in to collect used HTV cards. We put up a cardboard box with a hand written sign on it urging voters to carry their used HTV cards outside and dump them in the box, where we will re-use them. We sort the jumbled mess of cards into a pile for each candidate and give them back to their helpers (our rivals on the day) so that they can continue to hand out the leaflets for our rival candidates, as well as us retrieving our own leaflets for re-use. Usually it ends up with all rival groups taking it in turns to sort and return, though occasionally some won't participate, usually only the really hostile anti-environmentalists. There are likely to be ten or more people all wearing opposing badges and supporting rival candidates, but we all chat to each other, there is little unpleasantness even though we are bitter political rivals. We cop some flak from the occasional rude b but that is unusual. My partner was elected to council a few years ago and was open about being gay, after he lost out in the next election (by a mere 27 votes...!) we were handing out at a Fed election and one person gave him a few words of anti-gay abuse but that has only happened once and the helpers from the other parties all offered kind words of support (my partner was pretty shaken at the time) and condemned the rude voter.
So we can agree to disagree without getting aggro about it.
Voting is compulsory in AU and in most elections over 90% of the population do vote. (If you have a strong moral/religious objection to voting you can be exempted but generally it is accepted as a duty of citizens to vote.) The logic behind this is that generally people who don't choose to vote are from lower socio-economic and educational backgrounds, who generally vote more towards the left, so by making voting optional you automatically skew the vote to the right compared to what the WHOLE country actually wants. Also where voting is optional you get the problem of parties or candidates offering inducements to get reluctant people to vote, ("pork barrelling") which again corrupts the process. So I wholeheartedly support compulsory voting. You get many benefits from living in a democracy, with those benefits come a few responsibilities such as voting, paying taxes and jury duty.
Anyway I'll hand the soapbox over to the next speaker...
Chris.
