We all know the old saying: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

We’ve had the dude who traded a paper clip for a house, another guy who sold his speeding ticket on an online auction house for $NZ52. Faulty laptops, non existent laptops! Kieren Dyer, but who would want him anyway! And who could forget the whole “Jesus Toast” escapades! In the age of E-Bay, securing another man’s trash has become even easier.

Which brings us to Ozheek (not to be confused to our own Oz). Now it seems that Ozheek’s recycle bin on his computer was getting a little large. Now rather than empty the recycle bin, he thought WTF… I’ll try and sell it on E-Bay. I’ve included the link, here, for the auction in case you think that I’m having a lend! 14 bids later and Ozheek is $US50 richer. For the winner; music videos, cellphone “stuff” and yes, porn, is their treasure! As for me, I’m searching around my house for crap to sell right now…

Thanks to a BEEZHOUSE reader, Michael Philippe, for passing this one along.

Is there a worse feeling than hitting an animal while driving? Feeling that bump somewhere beneath you and looking out the rearview mirror, only to see lifeless lump in the middle of the road. Seems the RACV has done a study into the numbers of animal-related accident claims in Victoria for the last year and of an estimated 3700 claims, 2636 of those involved kangaroos. Not really surprising given how erratically they behave when startled, but I couldn’t help but shake my head at a couple of statistics.

There were 186 claims involving wombats. For those of you who live outside Australia, wombats are fairly slow moving animals. Imagine a log that has decided to sprout legs and you have a meter-long bundle of fur that is a national icon. Hitting one of these little monsters is sure to fuck your suspension. What really gets me is how on earth you could explain how you hit the little bastard: “It just came out of nowhere, really really slowly!”

But the one that really gets me is that for 2006/2007, there were two claims for accidents involving ducks. Seriously. There are two people in Victoria who actually owned up to hitting a duck whilst driving AND felt the damage was significant enough to claim it against their insurance. My question is this: “How BIG was that duck?!?” All I know is if I were to hit a duck whilst driving and it caused significant damage, there is no way I would even consider admitting what I hit. Maybe something more believable like a pedestrian…

Food for further thought:

“Oh man, I just shot Marvin in the face.”
“What the fuck did you do that for?”
“I didn’t mean to do it. The car must’ve hit a duck.”
“The car didn’t hit no motherfucking duck!”

Yeah, take that one to the RACV.

Whilst I commend and admire Victoria’s ex-Premiere Jeff Kennett for his involvement in BeyondBlue (a truly worthwhile organisation that deals with that silent but all too real plague of our times – Depression), I cannot put out of my mind the fact that he was instrumental in weakening the health services of this state during his reign.

Each day I spend in Melbourne I am reminded that the mental health services in this state have still not recovered from those times. There is a multitude of people living on the streets and in commission housing receiving nothing but a Salvation Army or Wesley Mission visit when their stretched and independently funded resources can manage it.

Unfortunately I have had first and second-hand experiences with people who have been let down by the fact that there are too few beds in mental health wards. There was one man in particular, in the early 2000s, who had to be escorted by police to a clinic to be administered his medication. Not only a waste of the cops’ time, but they weren’t trained for such duties, and their ranks were thinned by the same government that caused the mental health crisis in the first place. The man in question was the father of a close friend. He could barely care for himself, and had had a number of violent episodes, one of which may or may not have led to (more…)