Yes it’s that time of year again, the Why-it-looks-like-my-uncle-O***r (Not TM) Awards are being handed out in Los Angeles. And, for the first time in four years, not a hobbit in sight.

Having seen barely any 2004 releases yet, here are my predictions for the major WILLMUOs:

Best Film: Million Dollar Baby
Best Actor: Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles
Best Actress: Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake)
Best Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman (Million Dollar Baby)
Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, for The Aviator’s only major Willmuo
Best Director: Clint Eastwood ahead of Martin Scoresese
Best Foreign Film: The Sea Inside (Spanish)
Best Documentary: Supersize Me (and what a dork Michael Moore was for putting Fahrenheit 9/11 in the wrong category!)
Best Screenplays: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (original) and The Motorcycle Diaries (adapted). By sheer coincidence, these are the only two 2004 releases that I have seen to date…
Best musical score: Anyone But John Williams (Harry Potter 3, which has been sitting on the DVD shelf waiting to be seen since Di got the trilogy for Christmas)

Hitting the Technorati tag trail today: oscar, oscars, academy awards.

Live comms at SMH online, and The Daily Probe.

And then there is the slideshow on Yahoo news, which is up to 340 photos already.

I was pleased to see that the majority of Australia’s national league netballers have affiliated with the Australian Workers Union. The AWU website has more news of the alliance with the ANPA.

Firefox 1.0.1, the latest version of my browser of choice, has been released. The 4.7 meg setup file for Windows can be downloaded from Mozilla.org. See the Mozillazine announcement.

If you are using Firefox 1.0 or an earlier version, upgrade now. If you are still using that internet “explorer” from the House of Gates (ie, IE), then there is no better time to convert than today!

Mrs Cui Yu Hu turned 104, and received a letter of congratulations from the Prime Minister, John Howard, which reads:

“Janette and I are very happy to learn of your 104th birthday. We would like to join with your family and friends in extending our congratulations and best personal wishes to you on this wonderful occasion.”

But the mailman also delivered a letter from the Immigration Department, refusing her an aged parent visa.

The ABC’s The World Today picks up the story. How Amanda Vanstone can remain Minister for Immigration considering all her department’s incompetence is beyond me.

“The players broke the club’s disciplinary code and have also been found guilty of unauthorised use of a fire extinguisher and a bicycle.”
- Newcastle Knights chairman Mick Hill, 21.2.05

(Please refer to the source and background to this deathless prose.)

It’s quite unsettling to hear the news of Hunter S Thompson’s death, apparently by shooting himself. It’s only last Friday that I wrote a short appreciation of him on these pages.

I’m writing this less than half an hour after the news of Hunter S’s death hit the wires. Here’s the Associated Press report at the Sydney Morning Herald. ESPN.com has linked to an archive page of his work for them over the past three and a half years.

There’ll be a lot more to come on the net about the passing of Hunter S Thompson - a modern-day Hemingway who appears to have chosen the same exit.

See Technorati.

The cancellation of the 2004-05 National Hockey League following an industrial dispute could well mean the death knell of the sport as a viable major league concern in North America. Will we miss it? Give me curling anyday.

For all the reportage running around at the moment, I’ll refer you to the Christian Science Monitor for an overview, and to the extensive coverage of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And who better to explore the class struggle than the World Socialist Web Site?

Meanwhile, the Free Stanley Movement insists that the Stanley Cup can still be contested this season even with no NHL. Listen to this audio report from NPR earlier this month, and note well the following remarks from the Free Stanley website:

With the NHL season cancelled your hockey team could win the Stanley Cup! That’s what our research tells us.To be counted in, you simply have to contact the Stanley Cup trustees and issue a challenge for the Cup.

I wonder if the Canterbury Eagles could be convinced to mount a challenge?

To celebrate the enactment of the Kyoto Protocol this week I am releasing a sidebar version of the aggregated environmental newsfeed that appears on the environment page on this website.

The Greenbar contains news about the environment and related sciences aggregated from XML feeds from: AllAfrica.com, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, E-Law, Forests.org, Greenpeace, Grist, Inter Press Service, MSNBC, National Geographic, Oceana.org, Reuters, the Washington Post, Waterconserve.info, and the World Wildlife Fund.

The feed contains items published in the preceding 48 hours and is updated every two hours. It can be used with Firefox, Mozilla and recent versions of Netscape. It won’t work in non standards-compliant browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Opera.

You’ll find the link at the bottom of the left column of this page or you can grab it here.

If you have any questions or feedback about the Greenbar, please leave a comment.

Hunter S Thompson is probably best known in Australia for using the adjective “pharquing” live to air on the Don Lane Show in 1976. To the rest of us, he’s just a sportswriter for the ESPN website… among one or two other things.

His first column for the Disney-owned behemoth in 2005 was posted a few hours ago: Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray (link updated 25-2-05).

Our pathetic excuse for a Prime Minister - Mister Can’t Do himself, John Winston Howard - can’t apologise on behalf of an inept immigration department, can’t sign the Kyoto Protocol even though it becomes international law today, can’t cancel the foreign debt of tsunami-stricken countries, can’t let the buck stop with him. He can’t sack incompetent ministers either… though that may be because he’d have nobody left.

And he can’t give an answer to Federal Parliament when his assurances that no Australian has been involved in torture in Iraq are placed into question. I’ll leave it to Margo Kingston of the Sydney Morning Herald to pick up the story.