When I went to the tip today, I took Basil with me. Since there wasn't any room in the back for him as I had to put the back seats down to fit the bin, I had him ride in the passenger seat up front, doing what i believe the Americans call "Riding Shotgun" I guess a throw back to the old sage coach days, when the driver needed an armed guard for protection. Basil normally loves car rides, but being up front was not for him. He got out at the tip and was very hard to get back into the car. I guess he didn't like that he couldn't lie down stretched out, or that he couldn't get to the windows on both sides. Whatever it was, I wont be doing it again. Basil is a back seat car rider and that's just fine with both of us.
I think I know why my current inspiration for the latest Dream Stealers story is political. Tasmania is having a state election on the 20th of this month and every second television commercial is about it. It's one of the strangest campaigns I've ever witnessed. Most of the ads are about individuals who happen to be standing for election with various people, probably relatives, saying what nice people they are and how good they'll be for the state without actually saying anything about policy. One of the adds talked about it's candidate for what seemed an eternity without even showing a picture of him, they trotted out his Mum (I think) and a guy in overalls, the main speaker was some older guy in a suit, I suspect it was his father. The only adds that actually mention policy specifically are that one party is apparently in favour of building, well okay, 'improving' a road, while the other is going to improve hospital care in some unspecified way that they're not already doing. (They're the ones in power at the moment.) Sure, it's an important road for Tasmania, it's the one that links the two biggest cities, but it does seem a little odd to be the only issue at stake. And as for hospital care, how about a GP or two? There isn't a GP within a hundred and fifty kilometers of here who's taking on any more patients! My wife and I will have to go all the way to Hobart in order to have medical care and checkups. I guess that road being upgraded will be handy. The other odd thing about the up coming election is the average age of the politicians. They almost all seem strangely young compared to similar samples from NSW, or maybe that's me seeing through my Dream Stealer goggles again. That's one of the odd byproducts of the Dream Stealer world after all, as I established early on in the Barefoot Project, all the major movers and shakers in the Stealers world are in their early twenties or so. Maybe I could use this bizarre scarcity of policy as a feature of Stealers world too, it would make sense with the baby faced politicians being more about personality than substance.
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