"With just over two weeks left, that’s 16 24-hour media cycles or, in less mathematical phrasing, an eternity."

- Bernard Keane, in a paywalled article for Crikey, 5.8.10

In what is surely the finest use of social media since William Shatner performed the tweets of Sarah Palin on late night television, the 85 year-old cartoon archive of the New Yorker magazine has been revitalised, drawings recaptioned with the dee

News yesterday of a makeover in Julia Gillard's election campaigning style surely contained a typographical error when it referred to "Real Julia". It brought back images, firstly of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" but also of "The Addams Family" (more so its motion picture sequel, "Addams Family Values").

That, in turn, takes us way back to July 2010, when the Australian Workers Union put out an unfunny and not particularly clever attack ad, but which suddenly takes on a whole new relevance:

If this link is broken by the time you read this, it's possibly that the Sunday Telegraph has withdrawn the article on legal advice.

The complete lists of candidates in all House of Representatives seats and Senate contests were released by the Australian Electoral Commission tonight.

Here are the people I will have to choose from, in order as they will appear on the respective ballots, and with hyperlinks to party and candidate pages where known. There are six candidates in Grayndler, while in the Senate there are a bewildering 84 candidates for New South Wales in what appears to be 33 groups.

This be a digest of my election-related tweets to date from the time that Julia Gillard called the federal election almost two weeks ago. Australia's first general election in the Twitter era has by general consensus the hashtag of #ausvotes.

Saturday, 17 July 2010:

moving forward moving forward moving forward moving forward
Saturday, 17 July 2010 12:13 PM

"Just think.. if this were a soccer match we could have had 30 minutes extra time followed by penalty kicks. #ausvotes #debate #nilnil"

- me on Twitter, 7.36pm 25.7.10

The Leaders Debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott took place on Sunday night. There's nothing more that I can say about the content. Really. The transcript is here.

Nine days in, and the 2010 election campaign is as dismal as any I've witnessed in the past four decades. Tony Abbott defies serious appraisal, while Julia Gillard's entire first month as Prime Minister has been a massive disappointment.

"Thank you to those who arranged the Leaders debate to avoid clashing with the finale of Master chef."

- NSW attorney-general John Hatzistergos on Twitter, 21.7.10