I saw this catostrophe recently in Dickson, in the ACT..

Mike's Pith & Wind - Choice
One of the tenets of this consumer society we live in is that it offers choice, but I’m beginning to think that the concept of choice has become an end in itself. This has been brought to my attention of late with my phone saga, which, I’m pleased to say, is drawing to a close, an unsatisfactory close, but a close nonethless. It doesn’t just annoy me that I’m being beset upon on an irregular basis by shrill phone company spruikers with only a passing acquaintance with the English language - it actually scares me. Well, it scares me a little bit anyway. So, my phone bill is way out of proportion with my income - what if these fast-talking geezers I’m so casually/irritably spurning are actually offering me a lifeline from my suicidal Telstra brand loyalty? But phones are just the beginning.
The Supermarket. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this already, but when I was a lad, the Kettles ran the local grocery store. Mr Kettle used to stand behind his counter wearing a striped apron (and probably a straw boater) as befitted his station, and after some preliminary chat he would pop off down the back as you reeled off your list of items and get them for you, sometimes (oh excitement!) employing his ladder to get a sack of flour from the very top shelf, pop everything into a brown paper bag and tell you how much you owed him, and perhaps even graciously put it onto your tab if you were short a few bob.
One day we arrived to find the Kettles’ store had changed into a mini-supermarket. The rot had set in. Now a trip to my local Camberwell supermarket (which is currently undergoing alterations to read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Little Johnny
There is a small pleasure in hitting a man on the ground when that man is John Winston Howard, a Prime Minister whom I, and many others, find wanting, a man of diminished physical and moral stature. The dislike is caused by the immense economic and social disservice he has done this country through the both corporatisation of the state and the consequent increased cynicism towards politics. He was not instrumental in starting any of these one-way roads on which we now find ourselves, but he has extended them further without the express approval of the electorate.
A man without culture, a Micawber of facts, never seen at a concert, opera or reading fiction, a man bitter at intellectualism, elitism and the arts, reading clearly their scorn of his Philistinism. To me he is a hostage the past, chained to half understood ideas and loyalties, read more