I'd like to tell you about Sydney. I'd like to tell you how great it is, but the Catholics have come and ruined everything, as if I was a pagan or a cheerful thief or a couple of horny teenagers or something. And by the way who the hell doesn't covet thy neighbours DVD collection and top-of-the-range sports car? Talk about suppresion of our basic humanity, Jesus Christ. That's how they get you, you know.

Dreadful - and it is such a nice city! You're not going to hear about it until the next post though, unless you skip this which, if you are in any way religious, I recommend that you do now :)
That all should be fouled by the shenanigans of WYD - World Youth Day - is a travesty of international intrigue, exploration, assaying and occasional espionage. I'm running out of words that begin with vowels now so I'll stop.

Now I'm sorry here, beloved-parents-who-are-surely-reading, but I am going to go on for a paragraph or five. Please skip this piece, for the sake of us all (and the children! won't anyone think of the children!!! Actually yes, me. I'd like to tell them all what I think and why they should go out and deal with reality instead of ostriching their emotions for their whole lives, but I don't think I'd get through with all those priests and nuns about) anyway, you don't want to read this. Really you don't :)

Before the city became the slave of the Holy Roman Empire, I mean the Roman Catholic Church, and was overrun with its subjects under the banner of World Youth Day, it was a highly impressive city absolutely bursting with things to do and places to go. Now it's like an evangelical nunnery gone critical, the inmates crowding the streets in slavering packs, all sporting identical red & yellow backpacks that would be the first thing I programmed as a target into the controls at NORAD, and almost all of them wearing huge versions of their national flags around their necks and down their backs, like a superhero's cape. The temptation to hang off these and throttle to the ground each and every one of them has been quite unbearable.

There are youths from at least 30 nations, seemingly they range from about 12 to 16 so it is quite a narrow slice of youth they are going for (catch 'em once they hit puberty, before they've had time to think about it, you might say) and many of the South American groups are painfully devout stopping to pray in the middle of the pavement even at this tender age, many of the Australian groups are loud and over-confident, many of the Germans clean and neat and kinda nerdy-looking. So far, so much as expected.
Many of the Americans, most of them in fact, are singing raucous evangelical songs in mobile gangs hundreds-strong, and there are numerous cringe-inducing cries of "Praise Jesus!" and "Bless the Lord!" in reply to the fact they managed to get some food in a shop or crossed the street safely (I am NOT even joking here... *shudder*), all of them from young teenagers with no sense of embarrassment whatever. Many of them wear beanie hats with `I *heart* Jesus` on them. It is all most depressing.

Anyway I've been told not to kill any of them (by two seperate, equally concerned barmen), so I won't. I will just let them do their thing - and to be fair it must be one hell of a blast to be here from all around the world, in huge groups of your friends, in the middle of a vast congregation of people all here for the same reason and the same event and the same Evil Sith Lord, I mean Holy Father.
It's just such a shame they're all completely off their heads. It's like being in the middle of the world's largest group acid trip, and it makes even less sense than that implies, but hey, I know how things can go wrong in those circumstances so it's probably best to leave them be until it wears off. Sometime around middle-age, I'm guessing ;)

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Now as a point of fact, that name they've got there, WYD, is a complete misnomer. It isn't the World, it's only the christian world, and of that only those countries that can afford to send their victims#SCRATCH# followers to Australia, and all-told there are only about 200,000 people involved in the thing. Hardly much to do with the world, at a mere 0.003% of available people.

And it's not even about Youth really, either. It's about inundating young people - mostly early teens and everyone younger who can't exactly argue with priests and blind-sided parents - with fairy stories and tales of the invisible man, more suited to toddlers I think.
In any case there are thousands of middle-aged men and women hanging about and many of the `youths` seem to have graduated into `yobs` by the way they are carrying on running down busy streets, chanting offensive slogans ("I love Jesus! We love Jesus!" being one I almost die from hearing each time) taking up all the space on the sidewalks and hindering all the proper people with jobs who are trying to have a lunchbreak.

And it's not a day either, so insidiously called so by the organisational Gestapo behind it all, because it actually goes on for a bloody week pretty much decimating the joyful experience of Sydney for the majority, certainly doing a number on the buses (re-routed or cancelled), commuter traffic (denied entry to the centre for 3 days) and everything worth going to see or do (closed, inaccessble or, usually, swarmed with adolescent fuckwits) and even the first insidious tentacular expeditions were oozing their way through the streets a few days before the official dates.

And all of it based on astrology, Christianity that is, like the story of Horus in Egyptian mythology before it which is, let me say, identical to the Jesus story in everything but name. Just 3000 years earlier. Oops, looks like no-one told this lot they've wasted their lives worshipping the sun and stars.

Anyway `world youth day` my arse. Baby's Brainwash Week, more like, and it's just a pity no-one lets me hang MY posters and banners from every lampost in the city.

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Anyway I've got my panties in a bunch because they ruined things quite literally - the major attractions are actually refusing entry forcing queues where no queues have ever been seen or are simply turning people away, places such as the Wildlife World, Sydney Aquarium, the IMAX cinema, Sydney Tower, and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney Museum, and the Maritime Museum are all facings queues outside during peak daytime hours even though they were designed to handle even busy tourist summers. I guess an extra 200,000 people is a little more than what is fair for everyone else, and the WYD/BBW Schutzstaffel thoughtfully arranged it so the hoards of invaders can block up all the museum by day, and come worship at the altar of Sol in the evening, when everything is closed. How kind of them.

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So yesterday, my last day to go out and see a few things I had missed, was ruined. I went to the IMAX to watch The Dark Knight, an amazing film to see there I'm sure, and it was sold out with vast gaggles of slobbering, braindead yellow&red-baggers hovering dementedly in the lobby, filling up (and wasting, let me say) every screening of the film for two days.
I went to the Powerboat Jet for a $100, 70kmph ride across the harbour to get me away from the bloody Christians. It wasn't running, a) because Darling Harbour had been taken over by a massive video screen to show Palpatine in all his inglorious child-touching self to all the delude faithful, and b) because the powerboats engines might disturb the poor frail ears of the Christian fucks who really are intent on ruining my day, oh yes they are.

I went to the Wildlife World - I have never seen a koala by the way and was deeply looking foward to - but there was a queue outside a hundred metres long, every one of the several hundred members sporting a yellow&red bag and/or an oversized national flag, or at least a greying beard, worn cassock and a sweaty hungry look in their eyes. Filthy fucks.

I couldn't even get on the monorail! And believe me, waiting behind a huge crowd for three or four trains to come and go, listening to their stupid, stupid babbling nonsense and moronic salutations to a fictional character little more than a star sign, all super-happy and super-excited and super-about-to-fall-beneath-my-lofted-axe, that is too much for me to bear and not break the 6th commandment, let me tell you.

Whew. You see, I can't actually tell anyone all this, except you. Everyone else in the hostel here is part of the Khrist Kids Klan you see, or they are long-term travellers and indifferent to it all.
But I can't stay indifferent. This whole enterprise is wrong, just wrong. It will waste the lives of at least half these kids and has already wasted the lives of so many people, I can't even begin to state how insanely mad it makes me.

It's just going to take one person doing something that pisses me off in the name of religion and you're gonna next hear about me in the newspapers, that's all I can promise.