Best Australian 'Aussie' movie ...

I've given Red Dog a 10, along with The Castle and Crocodile Dundee.

Ordinarily, I don't think 'most' Australian films are particularly good, but once every now and then, a little pearler like this comes along and it rejuvinates my hope in Australian Film. And yes, I am Australian.

Exceptional movie. For what was intended of it, it delivered perfectly.

The Castle is definitely my favourite Australian comedy.

But my favourite Aussie film is Bad Boy Bubby!!

best ever book of coincidence
http://www.amazon.co.uk/COINCIDENCE-ebook/dp/B004YDSU42

I can cut and paste some of it...Here is a chapter on IRONY (pgs 75-83)

IRONY
Irony is a by-product of the reaction of memes upon our lives. Memes are dynamic and attracted to certain conductors, they cause a reaction that can leave irony in it’s wake.
Irony can seem like just one of those things but as an ironical twist of fate can quickly demonstrate, you ignore it’s potential at some risk. The books on the ‘Darwin Awards’ are a veritable gazetteer of tragic ironies.
We are usually so meshed into our lives that we are unable to appreciate the workings of irony except in retrospect. To be alert for ironical possibilities might appeal to the occasional writer or philosopher but is a brain strain for most of us.
There are all kinds of irony, but we find tragic ones most compelling. For example, as when the son of the inventor of the Lifesaver’s sweet, committed suicide.

When we approve of a certain irony, we have a phrase for it, ‘poetic justice’. This is how the Darwin awards describe the fact that RJ Reynolds, the founder of a tobacco company died of lung cancer. Not only he but also his son, RJ Reynolds II died of it, and also his son RJ Reynolds III. I don’t know if RJ Reynolds III had a son, but if so, he’d be smart not to call him RJ Reynolds IV, thereby breaking the chain. The chain of memetic irony that seems attracted to that name.
Another example of poetic justice would be the Iraqi terrorist that sent a parcel bomb. He didn’t put enough postage on it, so when in 2000, Khay Rahnajet received his parcel with ‘Return to sender’ on it, he opened it. Maybe he was just trying to retrieve his bomb or maybe he just forgot or didn’t see the return, but he’s no longer around to ask.

A couple of other historical ironies would be when the Civil War general, John Sedgewick on the union side surveyed the entrenchments of Robert E. Lee’s forces. It happened at Spotsylvania, Virginia in May 1864. He said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist….”, and was shot promptly dead before finishing his sentence.
In Paris 1931, the English novelist ridiculed the fears about the water supply. He publicly drank a glass of water to demonstrate it’s safety and then died from the resulting typhoid that he caught from it.

We have all probably been made to eat our words occasionally. Pride comes before a fall as the aphorism claims. When such sudden twists of fate happen, it is easy to imagine a cosmic joker making ridiculous our claims. Irony and coincidence are often combined to make a mockery of our best efforts or fortunes.
As reported by the Daily Mirror (October 2nd, 1990) and also the Reader’s Digest book on ‘Bizarre Phenomena’, a man received a sports forecasting dividend payout of 371.70 pounds. Unfortunately in the very same mail delivery was a tax demand for exactly 371.70 pounds!

Irony is a perverse force. You call a dog ‘Lucky’ only to have it flattened on the road. Words often ironically invert their meaning over time. Through common usage, a word can come to mean the opposite of what it originally meant.
Take the word ‘boy’ for instance. At first, it meant a fettered man, then an indentured servant and now means a male child. The word ‘knave’ has traversed along a parallel path, but in an opposing direction. At first it meant the eldest son, then came to mean a male servant and now means a rascal.
Take another word such as ‘agoraphobia’. Today, it has come to mean a fear of wide open spaces. It is derived from ‘agora’ the Greek for ‘marketplace. It has reversed the true meaning of agoraphobia. An agora, just as in middle eastern markets were generally enclosed claustrophobic places full of jostling, noise and bustle. They weren’t wide open spaces at all. The fear of them would be more akin to claustrophobia, if anything.
Pop and rap culture often inverts the meaning of words as a way to distinguish the members of a group from others. So it is that words like ‘the bomb’ or ‘wicked’ or ‘ill’ or ‘bad’ can be said with positive force rather than a negative way. Youth can thereby delineate their own hip cognoscente by using certain words repeatedly and differently from the norm. This then culturally accretes into a more widespread use and like any fad or fashion, could be said to be memeticly empowered to sometimes become so widespread as to become the new norm of meaning.

There are also words that can seem unusually apt. If they weren’t engineered that way, then undoubtedly there’s an irony at work. I was always struck by the unusual term for the so called abortion pill, ‘RU486’. Perhaps you are familiar with the term of being ‘86’d’ which means being banned. Typically it would be said by a bar owner that bars an unruly client as in “You’re eightysixed.”
Now if you say the anti abortion pill name out, it sounds like, “Are you for eighty six.” Appropriately enough, you seem to be asked if you wish to ban this person, this potential baby.
I’m pretty sure that the credited inventor of this morning after pill, a Professor Etienne Baulieu and the other medical researchers associated with it were not familiar with the bar banning use of the phrase, ‘being eightysixed’. The ‘RU’ stands for Roussel-Uclaf. But then that is how irony and memes work best, in an unconscious way.


Ironical things can happen because our mental life isn’t static. Even when nothing much seems to be going on, the dynamism of memes are affecting our lives. You can do an experiment to show this dynamism of memes. For instance, think a few seconds about something that you don't necessarily encounter, say for example UFO's. Alright, you think a minute then forget about it. Right, at the point you just about forget about them and only your unconscious brain retains the thought, then a meme will attach to attract other examples of what it is you was thinking about. I know this sounds esoteric, but it is how life imitates art. So anyway, within a few days there should be references that you come across pertaining to the thought. This might be a trailer on TV or a conversation with a friend, and when you get really good at it, there will be myriad coincidences of this sort and it will seem like you are almost creating the universe as you go along.
Of course unless you are on LSD or something, we rarely experience or achieve this flow. Ironically the opposite of that which we intended can happen. Irony is often an indicator of memes in action. Because of what I believe about memes inoculating themselves, a good meme can appear sometimes to be a bad one and vice versa. This is an ironical twist in that to achieve a result, you have to take a course that seems to lead away from it. Like the legend of the holy grail, those that seek it won't find it.
My take on actions leading to unintended results is that memes naturally contain their opposite. This seems contradictory but when you create a meme like a theory or a business, the successful meme inoculates itself by incorporating it's opposite. Like the exception that proves the rule, the universe can seem to be governed by a cosmic joker. This leads psychologists to postulate 'death wishes' or indeed all kinds of stuff that would seem counter productive to long life.
Irony is with us in many mundane ways but we are blind to it. An action we take to avoid something can often precipitate the very thing we wish to avoid. A dramatic example of this could be the lady who was worried by gas pressure fluctuations. She decided to replace it with an electric oven but it was faulty and exploded killing her. A true story from the 1980’s I read about. Now usually, our ironies aren't as final but neither so well documented. If you look for irony and coincidence without lust of result, you can find them. On a personal level, I might think of someone and then see on television, a city where we once were. Not a radical irony but typical of mundane ones.
Irony is often overlooked and almost never rigorously examined because examples of irony can seem so banal. However it is the presence of banal irony that can alert us to memetic governance. A couple of banal examples from 2003 such as when rap star 50 Cent tried to get in a club in Febuary (from the New Musical Express), in San Francisco. Riding the wave of his MTV/radio hit, confusion in the street caused by 4000 ticketless fans, prevented him from singing his hit ‘In Da Club’, in the club.
If asked to predict another irony regarding 50 Cent, I would guess that something in his future would prompt the headline or showbiz phrase, ’50 per cent’.
Another odd fact relating to wordplay came from the rescue of POW Jessica Lynch, during the April invasion of Iraq. Palestine is a charged term in the middle east, and this rescued girl turned out to have been a Palestinian, but one from Palestine, West Virginia.
Now I appreciate how banal these examples are, but if ‘God is in the details’, then so memetics can be said to be in the interstices of our lives. It is perhaps worth thinking that during the 1970’s a virulent strain of flu was popularly though erroneously called ‘Hong Kong Flu’.
Thirty years on, and the outbreak of ‘SARS’, the first virus to induce panic and serious containment measures did indeed come from Hong Kong or it’s immediate vicinity.
Another example of mundane irony is when Ted Heath was prime minister of England. For reasons I forget, he was nicknamed ‘The Grocer’ or ‘Grocer Heath’. He was succeeded to the party leadership by Margaret Thatcher, a bona fide grocer’s daughter.
Politics is often rich in irony. Someone helped to power is often the nemesis of the helper. Politics often illustrates the adage of biting the hand that feeds you.
Political systems are also rich in irony. On the surface, our western capitalist and democratic systems seem to be quite selfish. They often reward greedy endeavour, yet paradoxically this system seems to bring a society that enables and gives freedoms to the most number of people.
So a society that respects the individual seems to bring about more civilised benefits for all whereas communism which was supposedly for the benefit of most people, actually benefit the least. Paradoxically again, the communist systems have ensured an untouchable elite of dictators and higher echelon of ruling families as exclusive as that of any royal families. Now that’s just my personal belief, not an ax I’m grinding as part of memetic theory but consider this. If it wasn’t for some greedy avid collector of certain artifacts (say Greek urns or Russian ikons), then the coherent collection of artifacts that is often bequeathed to a museum and for public display would not have been assembled. So it can often be that one person’s avariciousness can actually benefit the greater good of society. When riches are supposedly equally distributed in society, then it quickly piles up again.
Selfish acquisitiveness can become a benefit for all through bequests. Indeed, we see many museums that allow access to all, to have been enriched by bequests of private collections.

It was greed that fuelled the railroads not some nebulous desire to provide transport links for the masses. So even though things are done for the basest of motives, they can translate into being the biggest boon for the common good.

Later on, I’ll comment on the ironic parallels of unintended consequences in morality, in the chapter on God. For now I’ll reiterate that memetic action is often played out upon a field of irony. In other words, when there is irony, there is also an indicator that memes are at work.

Another example, a personal irony was when I bought a cheap retread for a tyre at a distant location from my home in 1988. A few weeks went by, and on the freeway a brown cloud and a bang informed me that something serious had happened. I thought it was the engine at first and miraculously skewed across four lanes and down an exit ramp coming to a stop at the very tyre sellers that I’d bought the now disintegrated tyre.
I've had several 'confirming experiences' that show irony and coincidence and memetic flow to have combined threads.
It is ironical when you search for something and then, unable to find it, you give up when ironically it then practically falls into your lap. Of course some wit said that isn’t it amazing how when you look for something, it’s always in the last place you look (haha). Anyway, there are numerous accounts of Koestler’s posited ‘library angel’ whereby the very thing you look for is found on a page you open at random, and here is a happenstance event of finding what you are looking for concerning the actor Anthony Hopkins. (Taken from Pravda.ru October 30th 2003)
‘The intellectual cannibal from the movie The Silence of the Lambs played by Anthony Hopkins could easily decipher any riddle. However, he would probably have difficulties with the phenomenon that once took place in Mr. Hopkins' real life. The event was absolutely unbelievable - it was hard to believe it even if it were a part of the movie. Once, the actor was given the leading role in the movie Girls from Petrovka. Yet, the book, on which the scenario of the film was based, could not be found in any London store. One day, Mr. Hopkins saw the book in the metro on his way home - someone had left it on a bench. There were pencil marks made on the pages of the book. About 18 months later, Anthony Hopkins became acquainted with the author of the novel. The writer said that he had sent the last copy of his novel to the director (he had made pencil marks on pages), but the latter lost the book in the metro.’
The above story originally came from The Sunday Times, London May 5th 1974. It is also covered by the 1991 Time-Life anthology ‘A World of Luck’, in which it is specified that the book was lost in Bayswater and the selfsame book was found by Hopkins two years later on a bench at Leicester Square tube station.

Irony can shade invention. Henry Ford is credited with the invention of the assembly line, but ironically he got the idea from a disassembly line. He was in Chicago watching hogs be butchered along long tables, and was impressed by the speed in which a pig was turned into pork chops inside a minute by having specialized tasks assigned to the butchers. They even had an overhead track to move things along. (Taken from Strange Stories, amazing Facts of America’s Past, Reader’s Digest, pg338, 1989).
Name pairings and attractions can be often seen as ironic. What this shows is that concepts and connotations that we put names to, have a kinetic life and interaction. Memetic attachments echo down the ages regularly and take us by surprise. One might even think there’s a cosmic joker at work. Such as when an unexplained block of ice from the sky fell upon the car of a researcher into anomalous weather, near Manchester UK.
Memeticists aren’t immune to irony or the whims of fate but are better placed to explain them. Hidden connotations in wordplay can generate irony. Let’s say someone is unconscious of a name’s hidden meaning or heritage or even an anagram of it, they can devolve memes to do with it. A kind of memetic pull steers their destiny without them being aware of it. The care that parents usually take in naming their child is for this very reason.

Memes explain why you can attract the very things that you wish to avoid. By being memeticly aware, we can avoid some of the irony that gravitates towards our lives. Knowledge of memes can delay if not circumvent Sod’s Law or Murphy’s Law that what can go wrong, will do so. An older relative would encapsulate this level of preparedness by saying that “God will look after you but put a brick in your pocket just in case.” By thinking ahead of potential irony, you are putting a memetic brick in your pocket.
Expecting things can deflect bad luck. ‘Be Prepared’ was the motto of the scouts and is also a memetic rule to equip yourself for the future. When the St Louis Gateway arch was constructed, a projected death toll was made whilst being built. No-one died.

As I said at the end of the last chapter, an adage embodying a memetic truth would be ‘Like attracts like’. But then another adage has it that ‘Opposites attract’. Actually there are homilies that express all situations, even those contradicting each other. So we can have ‘Many hands make light work’ contrasted with, ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.’
We say ‘He who hesitates is lost’, but then also advise to ‘Look before you leap.’ We say we’ll ‘Cross that bridge when we come to it’ as a way of deferring an important action but then say we have to be prepared as in ‘A stitch in time saves nine’.
Anyway, what I’d like to draw now is a phenomenon known as the pendulum of irony. It is like hubris.
Once a person or object has acquired recognizable characteristics, then a pendulum swings to attract or devolve memes to negate this characteristic. So it is that an object noted for safety can suddenly be involved with accidents or danger. Or perhaps a noted personality falls from grace in some huge scandal.
Irony acts as a universal governor. So it is that things that seem ‘good’ can come to be viewed as ‘bad’. And things once viewed as ‘bad’ can become fashionable or desirable.
Without this swinging pendulum, there would be no cultural change or change in our moral values, ever.

This pendulum swing of values is correlated by a pendulum swing known to statisticians. It is called ‘regression to the mean’. It is used to explain the averaging out of stock performance. No matter how spectacular, a manager or a stock may perform, there is always a performance counterweight that balances fantastic results with an equally spectacular ineptness or mediocre show that makes all indexes closer to the average over time. On this analogy, it is a performance characteristic that precipitates a swing, but other characteristics can be similarly charted. ‘What goes up must come down’, is the adage illustrating this common wisdom. Like Icarus, those that fly the highest must also burn up the quickest.
Statistics has a cast iron certainty in some aspects. Arthur Koestler in ‘The Roots of Coincidence’ has him musing about the even distribution of dogs biting people in the city of New York. He wonders how the dogs know when their quota has been reached so as to cease biting.
Now that example is a bit tongue in cheek, or rather a bit leg in mouth, but the certitude of statistical distribution makes one wonder what is governing it. A coroner in the county of North Yorkshire described in his autobiography how remarkably consistent the road death statistics were from year to year. If the numbers were less than previous years, he grew to expect and was proven to have correctly anticipated multiple fatalities on New Year’s Eve.


But back to the pendulum’s swing.
Once a characteristic in a person or object is established, it becomes a nodal point that can attract the ‘evil eye’. It can attract the opposite memes to that of it’s reputation.
The steps taken to ward off the baleful stare (or unwelcome meme devolvement) caused by the ‘evil eye’ is well known in folk wisdom. All cultures se