We could be happy (down) underground

I used to be absolutely fascinated with Australia in my later years in high school and into my time in the Navy. The first thing that I'm sure caught my attention that time was the (probably with extra hyperbole added for free!) disproportion of men to women and the resulting lack of respect women down under got from men because there were just so many women. There were many hormones clouding the judgment, I'm sure, and I was additionally suffering from a severe case of White Knight Syndrome, which I now find to be sexist against women (by thus assuming that women both want and need to be cared for by a big strong man).

My fascination with the continent that's also a country didn't really wane with losing my virginity because I discovered this absolutely CRAZY AWESOME way of electing people to office. This was a time when I was pretty much politically clueless but nevertheless opposed to both parties. Australia uses Alternative Voting (also called Instant Runoff voting) where it's mandatory to rank order your preference of candidates for a ballot to be accepted. If no one candidate gets a majority of first place votes, the person with the least number of them gets excluded and those ballots go to the second name on their list. And if no one candidate gets a majority of votes, the candidate with the lowest amount gets dropped, and those votes go to the highest ranked (still-included) candidate, and so on until one candidate gets a majority of the votes.

Mind you, I still think it's a great system and in time I think it could break the tyranny of a two party system, but it will never ever happen here. The Right will claim that it's against what the Founding Fathers wanted and the Left will claim it's disenfranchising their voting bloc. I don't know, maybe I'm assuming that they think that poor = stupid.

But I digress.

Australia doesn't seem quite so shiny to me anymore, though I admit that it's looking betting in comparison to New Zealand as of late. (Update: Apparently the New Zealand legislature has delayed their absolutely horrible Guilt Upon Accusation copyright law.) If you thought poorly of corporations like the RIAA and MPAA for their contempt of their consumers, you've obviously never seen the misplaced cynicism the Australian government hold towards its citizens' ability to make their own decisions regarding consuming creative content. Either that or they believe the bullpucky (Thank you Dr. Maddow for adding that to my vocabulary) about videogames turning people into homocidal maniacs (Doom and Littleton, CO, anyone?).

Oh yes, Australia's famous (at least in my mind) for what I like to call their Ministry of Censorship. They're the government organization that assigns ratings to things like movies, music, and video games. If they refuse to provide a classification to something, then that item can't be sold in Australia, thus effectively censoring such a thing. Call me weird, I have a problem with people telling me what I can and cannot watch or listen to.

That isn't to say I hate everything coming out of Australia. Not by any means. Look at Yahtzee's game reviews and The Night Air podcast. I just have no desire to live there anymore.

The Night Air is something that Wil Wheaton turned me onto in one of his posts and is actually really great in a different sort of way. Wil refers to it as， "the lovechild of Joe Frank and This American Life, babysat by William S. Burroughs" and that pretty much nails it. If you're unfamiliar with Joe Frank as I am (How he got on NPR with such a normal name is completely beyond me), think of him as a less conservative Paul Harvey.

As for Yahtzee, well we've already seen that you don't need to have great artwork to have great humorous content. Randal Munroe draws stick figures in his webcomic and I think they're brilliant. Similarly, the simple animations Yahtzee has during his reviews are simplistic, but his commentary is downright riotous, if a little foul mouthed (which I like).