Thursday 17 July 2008

World Youth Day

Happy World Youth Day to all my pals in Sydney. I hope you're all having a charming time and not being annoying at all, even though it's apparently legal again now*.





* And for those who couldn't be bothered following the link: the extremely potted story is that some act was whipped up in the NSW parliament recently so that anyone found to be "annoying" pilgrims there for WYD could be fined up to $5500, but now a federal court has said that our fundamental right to be annoying within the confines of the law is sacred (ha! They didn't say "sacred", that was just me). Which is good.

2 comments:

Nick Jensen said...

I can't believe someone would try to make rules on such matters. That's just as stupid as "It is illegal to put ice cream on cherry pie in Kansas" (which is apparently an actual law).

Besides, it basically sounds like the parliament funds are running low - I mean, young people are generally annoying, so the parliament is sure to rake in a wad of cash...

Kim/moolric said...

My other friend Rob is a cop, and he had to work for 18 hours on world youth day (which also happened to be his birthday) because of the damn pilgrims.

He told me that while he did see some protesters, throwing condoms and the like, the only person he saw being arrested was a pilgrim who got too annoyed. :)

He also told me that even if the law had been in force, the police are allowed to use their discretion in these things and they would most likely have not enforced it beyond stopping what would normally be illegal harassment. So that's nice.