Sadly, technical problems that had this site offline for most of last evening have caused the last week’s worth of comments to disappear. Apologies to future historians for the gap in the record. Everything else appears to be working again now, touch wood.
Author: William Bowe
William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.
View all posts by William Bowe
William. How unfortunate!
Have just returned home and wanted to see what was happening.
Dreadful, this is, indeed.
What a huge loss, given the commentary, political action and pertinent sad events.
Nevertheless, carry on, William.
Solicitations.
Crikey Whitey.
xx
CW, surely you jest 🙂
Scotty, you are so a dog.
What, even Tabitha’s doublets of wit and wisdom? Oh well, there’s always a silver lining.
Any number of people ought to have the missing stuff in their browser cache, from which it could be retrieved.
How to do that, Geoff?
Please.
Don’t worry, I didn’t say anything important.
William,
Google cache kept some of the comments from the last week (not all, unfortunately). I’ve sent them to you as a text file if ever you want them. At least some of Tabitha is kept for posterity.
Cyber Pac-Man strikes again!
Perhaps adepts possessing the gift of the google will be able to retrieve what’s lost for future pseph archeologists who simply have to know; obsessives, nut-cases, scholars, and the more than idly curious. Hardly a loss likely to have driven former librarians of Alexandria into a frenzy of teeth-gnashing and weeping, but a loss nevertheless.
The inter-tubes have had a dramatic impact on the way this election campaign has been conducted and perceived. We know it, sometime next year, so will the majority.
William, it’s wonderful to have you back. For one ugly, awful moment there, I was forced to confront the possibility of getting a life for the next 19 days.
Thank goodness all of tabitha’s output is not lost( thanks Jon). In the reign of Akhenaten she’d have been a sly graffitiist, ever ready to adorn the walls of Giza’s pyramids with her coupletic wit and wisdom.
Crikey
If you really want to retrieve the lost posts then.
Search google on “poll Bludger’
Search within results, either November and or Crikey etc.
The click on “cache” in the corner.
You can then save this to your computer.
Can use other variables on search within to retrive more, eg Tabitha, or the post heading that William used eg Deakin.
Should be able to retrieve a fair bit.
Some used this method to retrieve posts from Bryans blog after he closed off the comments section.
William, commiserations on the loss of data. Perhaps you should copy each day’s worth of bilge and save it offsite somewhere (he said, no doubt unhelpfully). But this leads me to ask: do you have all the chat from 2004 stored somewhere? It would be an interesting exercise to see who was predicting what three weeks out from polling day. Perhaps you could unearth some gems of prediction?
I made a comment about the ‘dream teams’ of Newell/Adams and McKew/Hogg, in the context of the CCC comments made by Adam, especially the ‘burn his Communist Party card’ if CCC gives prefs to Libs. Students of political history will find this funny, as it was the leakage of CPA prefs away from Labor in 1961 (combined with the DLP vote) which got Sir Jim Killen across the line in his Queensland seat, with Ming just falling over the line to scrape back by two seats. But J Howard is not Ming and Kevvie is not ‘Cocky Calwell’ and there’s no DLP to prop up the Rodent’s regime. And Queensland will be the place it’s decided, as the swing sure looks substantial up there.
But to return to “The Golden Girls of O7” – the blokes in these teams are smarter than the average bear and they would need to be pretty tough too, in order to cope with their high flying partners!
Patrice doesn’t look as wound up as she was in her university days ( and as the ‘Macleans girl’ I think – she certainly did appear to have good teeth, which can be useful for a female politician – yes the ‘double standard’ is more like the national flag of Oz).
As I recall it was pretty difficult to win any sort of political argument against her – the boys didn’t have much chance as her beauty did rather intimidate them – the combination of intelligence and rather flaming ‘Latin’ looks put most verbal jousts beyond doubt.
Maxine seems to have plenty of energy, if her ‘dancing performance’ at the that Eastwood Festival is anything to go by, but some very fancy political/strategic footwork would be delivered by Mr Hogg, who wouldn’t have let her do it (or would stop it quickly) if it didn’t perfectly show that she has a great deal more energy than the PM – and a much bigger future in the ALP than our has-been PM has in Government – but yes I hear you Howard Huggers – better ‘has been’ than ‘never could be’, as a few of Labor’s leadership ‘aspirants’ were – and that’s the key to this election, isn’t it ? The ‘cricket bats’ were out for Johnny last time, but Latham stepped in to cop all the shots right on the noggin. Latham should be the last guest of the PM at Kirribilli, along with poor Beazley – what a dinner party it would be!
I wonder if Danielle Ecuyer will have something particularly nasty to say about George Newhouse in Wentworth? I suppose George can always blame the ‘woman scorned’, if that’s how it ended. Can’t believe there isn’t an element of ‘get square with George’ in her candidacy, but we’ll see…when we see her ‘how to vote’ card.
So it’s Maxine to slay the Rodent, Danielle to run interference against poor George and Patrice to pull enough ‘Doctors wives’ in the blue-ribbon Liberal areas to get Kerry Nettle a quota on prefs?
I wonder if the CCC has preferenced the Greens? Surely Patrice wouldn’t stand for some ‘deal with the devil’ i.e. the Libs or by preferencing one or more of the Lunar Right?
It would put ‘Grizzly’ Adams in a very difficult position with the “Luvvies” on LNL – might never live it down. If CCC prefs the Greens and so do ALP, K. Nettle stands a fighting chance at capturing that last NSW Senate seat. Nirvana would be 3 ALP, two Coalition and Kerry Nettle in NSW and the second Senate seat in ACT to the Green or Labor.
Yes, I have a dream – Kevvie and a Left/Labor Senate – only worries about imported US recession and another Tampa can see ALP fall over now – I reckon the Garrett ad will actually work in Labor’s favour – why is it that the political machine men ( and they mostly are men) think the populace don’t want ‘change’ – maybe that’s just what the people want to do, especially the younger ones, who are just bored with Howard and Costello. They may also fear this crumbling regime cannot deal with recession. The message has been too mixed from the Govt – things are great, but recession is just round the corner, so don’t risk it with Kevvie et. al.! The mug punters will say ‘likely story’ until they actually see it, because many of them have no experience of it! 11 years of lies catching up to the Rodent/Smirk ‘team’ should see them exit, but not by a great deal – 5 seats or so given some will swing back late to Government if they are scared enough!
Kinda surprised you don’t have off-site back-up, William.
And by a very poorly timed coincidence, I cleared two weeks worth of cache in my browser yesterday, just before your troubles started, so I can’t help you, otherwise I could have given you the lot. But someone here should have a full cache of the last week of PB sitting on their hard drive.
Adam, I didn’t have comments back then – I guess I’m one of those rare people who becomes less sensible as they get older. Marvel at Poll Bludger 1.0 in all its primitive glory here.
The data loss could have been a lot worse – my entire database was rendered dysfunctional so I had to install my most recent backup, which was from a week ago. Yes, I should be doing it every day, but given my normal standards of organisation it’s a miracle that I’d done it as recently as I had.
Well well William, you certainly have upgraded since Version 1.0!
In other news we’re back in the Twilight Zone with the timing of posts.
Adam – I don’t think William was accepting comments back then. If you’re interested in the 2004 discussion and predictions, maybe contact Chris Sheil, formerly of “Back Pages” fame?
I knew Latham was going to lose from the day of the Mike Carlton interview in March, but sadly I have nothing in writing to prove how prescient I was.
This archive of Chris Sheil’s blog seems to work pretty well. The site performed much the same function comments-wise during 2004 that this one does now.
Does anyone have any cached pages in their browser featuring entire comments threads that have been lost?
William
I’m not sure how to get cached pages from my browser, maybe if you posted how this could be done others could check too. I know you can retrieve some comments thru google and the other search engines and their cache.
Chris Sheils blog makes for sobering reading for the predictions at that time, but the polls were also a lot closer. Though I did not make a prediction I did not rate labor much of a chance and voted green first, more as a protest against labor for putting forward a leader like Latham. The libs have put forward dud leaders like McDonald and Debnam in NSW, Flegg in QLD, Burnie in WA and Hewson, Peacock and Snedden nationally. Most parties learn after such an experience and it appears labor has learnt it’s lesson well.
William, I’m still getting a # and no number, on posts.
Is that a wordpress control or something?
William
I have a number of the missing threads, most in full I think, two of which are partial only, which I have pasted into word documents.
Any good to you?
It happened that I had left them open, which my brain (?) had not registered till now.
Regards
Try archive.org I’m not sure if it still exists or not, but if your really desperate to recover the posts it could be useful.
archive.org does indeed still exist, but it has only archived PB up to 24 August 2007. The last post it has is ‘Seat du jour: Solomon’.
How do I find that?
I use mozilla firefox.
Test comment in dead thread.