Announcing - Flag Elation!

It is the flag that does it for me, and I believe it does it for thousands and thousands of Australians. I would like to think we could see the flag on every street corner.
Bruce Scott (Nationals, Queensland) Member for Maranoa (Hansard, 27 February 2006)

***

Are you one of those thousands and thousands of Australians? Is it the flag that does it for you? Or are you one of those other Australians who wonder what all the fuss is about?

Whoever you are, Flag Elation is ready to help you take your patriotic fervour to a whole new level! In stock now:

For Him: Aussie Flag Lycra Posing Pouches - she's going to love it when she sees one of thes little numbers bursting with your national pride!







For Her: Aussie Flag Peekaboo Bra and Crotchless Panties with lace trim (red, white or blue)! Show off your national assets in these beauties!








For Both of You: Scottie's Ribbed Rubber Johnnies! Run one of these up your flagpole and you'll really rouse her patriotic passions!

Plus - extensive range
of Aussie Flag Ticklers and Stims for adventurous patriots! Send for
our exclusive catalogue today!




(Images by His Excellency, Lord Sedgewick of Strathmore)

Meme for Melburnians

The following report appeared in The Argus on Monday, January 5, 1891:

SUPPOSED INFANTICIDE

The dead body of a male child, apparently about 4 weeks old was discovered on Saturday in St George's Road Toorak by a man named Cameron. The body when found was wrapped in a piece of sacking, covered with a piece of black cashmere. It was taken to the Morgue by Constable Umbers and, when examined, it was found that the skull had been fractured and that there were bruises on the back and arms. An inquest will be held in due course.

I got to thinking today about how one of our current newspapers would report this event. How would it look on the front page of The Hun or The Age? What would the op-edsters have to say about it? Over to you.

Oh, alright, you don't have to be a Melburnian to pitch in. I'm sure someone at our national "Organ of Record" would have something to say on this item too.

Start hitting those buttons, people.

Chewing the Fat (Redux)

Shaun Cronin's post Survival of the Thinnest at Larvatus Prodeo is just the excuse I need to revive this oldie on the subject of obesity and my own physical perfection:

Lean, mean thinking machine Andrew Norton of Catallaxy Files and the Australian Libertarian Society seems to have developed a morbid obsession with fat recently. Principally it seems to be other people's fat: lesbian fat, lefty-columnist fat and most recently whiny fat people fat. In this last post, Andrew links to this Medical Journal of Australia article which identifies a number of causes of the increase in the number of whiny fat people in the Australian population. The article also canvasses and quickly evaluates possible approaches to the problem, commenting:

Even when "individual" treatment programs are effective (and they require continuing follow-up and involvement), the costs of making such programs widespread are likely to be prohibitive. Such programs are also unlikely to be accessed so readily by disadvantaged groups — increasing the already apparent socioeconomic differences. Public education should also be wary of overpromoting the virtue of thin bodies and inadvertently contributing to the development of eating disorders — the emphasis needs to be on healthy bodies. We must also guard against the victim-blaming approach, which can lead to obese people being labelled, if not bullied or demonised, and parents being criticised for their fat children to the point that issues of cruelty and child abuse are raised. A gain in physical health could easily be offset by deterioration in mental and social health. [my emphasis]

On that last sentence Andrew has this to say:

In individual cases, a tactful and kindly approach may well be the right one. But the language of 'victims' is likely to be counter-productive, encouraging people to think that their weight is the result of forces beyond their control, rather than their own actions. How many fat people have you heard saying 'it's my metabolism', as they tuck into another over-sized meal? Why justify such excuses? Fat people are mainly to blame for their own weight, and to the extent that they are not it is usually their parent's fault.

It's pretty obvious that Andrew is no endomorph. My guess is that he's a mesomorph; ectomorphs (like me) generally learn from experience that we can eat like pigs without turning into whiny fat people, much to the envy of our whiny fat friends. Comfortable in this knowledge we can turn an indulgent ear to their complaints about their metabolisms and respond with a sympathetic remark such as "Yes, I'm glad I don't have a lousy metabolism like yours. It must be hell being a whiny fat person."

Afterword: with so much earnest comment to come on The Biggest Loser it's going to save me a lot of work reposting this. Just to remind you all:

• I'm not fat;
• I'm not much impressed by all the self-righteous moralising I read around the place about how fat people should just stop eating crap and exercise more;
• I've taken the piss out of the whole thing once already and right now I can't be bothered doing it again.
• I'm not fat. OK there's that bespoke suit from twenty years ago that I can't get into any more, which is a bit of a shame in one respect because a three-piece white self-stripe does look rather natty but on balance it was no great loss because it was always a bugger of a thing to keep clean.
  

What I Plan to be Reading as Soon as I Can Get My Grubby Hands on It

I noticed in today's Age that the second instalment in Arturo Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste series - Purity of Blood - is out in English translation. Furthermore, the review mentions that there's to be a Captain Alatriste film later this year with Viggo Mortensen as the captain. An obvious piece of typecasting, that - like casting Antonio Banderas to play Roald Amundsen in a remake of Scott of the Antarctic.

Last Week's Lost Weekend Posts (I)
Philosophy Cornered

Sorry to go all meta on you - well no, not really - but I've been putting a bit of thought into the question why do so many bloggers and blog commenters write so much crap? This led to some reflections on the nature of human reason which, while nowhere near as detailed as Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, nonetheless yielded some valuable insights that are worth sharing with you lot. That about does it for the dilatory opening remarks - you can consider yourselves bloody lucky to have got any at all - let's hop into the argument.

I. Gummo Trotsky is perfectly rational in all respects.

I see no need to defend this proposition - it strikes me as intuitively obvious. I know that there are a lot of you out there for whom it's not intuitively obvious, but this post isn't addressed to you. It's addressed to the few readers I have who are sufficiently rational to recognise the obvious truth of the proposition. The rest of you may as well piss off and read something more suited to your intellectual capacities - like Winnie the Pooh.

II. All disagreements between Gummo Trotsky and others are caused by their failure to be as perfectly rational as Gummo Trotsky.
Corollary: you lot are only rational to the extent that your opinions and beliefs agree with Gummo Trotsky's opinions and beliefs. With one exception. Obviously anyone who is not Gummo Trotsky but who holds beliefs identical to those of Gummo Trotsky believes themselves to be Gummo Trotsky and is therefore delusional - and, eo ipse dixit dominus domino theorem, not rational. Got that? R D0 I HV 2 SA IT A77 AGN N TXT?

III. Perfect rationality is only attainable by someone who is identical to Gummo Trotsky in all respects.

I know that's going to be hard for a lot of you to take but really, I have thought very hard on this. Once I realised that I was perfectly rational, I naturally turned to the question why me? How did I get stuck with this appalling burden? The simple answer is that it's partly an accident of birth, partly the result of my upbringing, education and experience. And the bad news just keeps on coming.

IV. Only Gummo Trotsky is identical to Gummo Trotsky.

That's an empirical fact, but it's also demonstrable a priori. Even if I did have a monozygoticly* twin brother (which I don't) his upbringing and education could not be identical to mine in all respects. Neither could his life experience; in fact whatever potential he might have would have been hopelessly warped by living in my shadow, always aspiring to be someone he couldn't be - me. On the whole, he's lucky he doesn't exist. It's probably better for the rest of the world too.

Conclusion: The only perfectly rational person in the world is Gummo Trotsky.

As far as I can see, that conclusion is incontestable. Quod erat demonstrandum and all that. If there's any smart arse out there thinking they can refute the argument by the simple expedient of substituting their own name for mine throughout, think again. If you really were the rationality hot-shot you think you are you would have come up with the whole thing for yourself, before I did. You didn't**.

* - Incidentally, if every human life begins at conception, every pair of monozygotic twins includes one entity which, by definition, isn't human. Bit of a puzzler that.

** - And don't forget, either, that I came up with this a week ago. So if you've just come up with a similar argument and posted it on your blog, you're still stuffed.

Last Week's Lost Weekend Posts (II)
My Saturday, By Gummo Trotsky, Age Whatever

Note: I wrote this on Saturday, 18 February. In today's Age, Ray Cassin pays out on all the TV critics who have been sucked in by The Biggest Loser. Ross Warneke isn't mentioned by name, but the "typical review" of the show that Cassin pays out on sounds a lot like Warneke's.

Zeppo Bakunin is of the opinion that I should give up reading - or at least restrict myself to fiction in future. He's got a point - reading blogs, blog comments and the papers hasn't doing much for my mood today - and he's had to put up with the consequences.

The trouble started this afternoon, when I looked in on a comments thread into which I'd dropped a little jocule, to discover that my comment had been bloody nit-picked. To make matters worse, I was pretty sure that the comment was nit free - but all I had to go on was vague memories of what I'd read in the PSSC Physics text back in the late sixties and a couple of somewhat dated books of the "complicated science stuff made more or less intelligible to the lay reader" genre. Neither of which I was able to find, naturally.

While Comrade Bakunin took himself off to the gracious City of Stonnington for a performance of Opera in the Park - which, he reported to me later, turned out as more of a Sixties style spontaneous audience participation "happening", with the singing and orchestral performance enhanced with improvisational percussion using found instruments such as wine bottles and bins, groups of amateur players performing improvised Theatre of the Banal dialogues on picnic rugs and a few solo performers on mobile phones - I took myself to the supermarket, to pick up some provender for a little ragu I decided to whip up by way of comfort food. Got home in time for MIIB on Channel Ten.

In the ad breaks I slipped out to the kitchen, sliced some celery very finely, started in on the onion, finely sliced to match the celery. I got half the onion neatly sliced before I realised I wanted the bloody thing minced and it was too late to do that little trick where you make parallel cuts down the onion, almost to the root, and then slice it and voila! Minced onion. Instead I had to do that holding the knife at both ends and chopping up the slices thing, which looks nowhere as neat in the mise en place.

Obviously, once I had the ragu cooking and the pasta on to boil (that came later) and the mushrooms had been sliced and tussed in as a last minute finisher, I started to run out of excuses to nick out of the room during the ad-breaks. Which included a fair few promos for Ten's latest foray into inspirational television, a home grown version of The Biggest Loser. The voice-over artist for the ad promised us an elimination. The ad also featured a scene where a guy was crying while a woman in a somewhat confrontational posture said something I couldn't quite make out.

After Zeppo got back from Stonnington, and reported on the avant-garde doings in Stonnington, we both sat back and watched Eric Bana play that troubled guy with serious anger management issues in The Hulk. The promo came on again and I remembered that The Biggest Loser had been reviewed in The Age Green Guide, somewhere. Somewhere turned out to be page 7 and the reviewer turned out to be Ross Warneke in his Rewind column. Whatever generation he is, he does it little credit in this article:

IT'S confession time. After more than 20 years of writing and talking about television, there are some shows that I know I will not like, even before I see them. Lately it has been reality shows built around exploitation and humiliation. Not the team game formats of Survivor or The Amazing Race, but the shows that are constructed solely around the belittling and shaming of contestants.

So when Channel Ten announced it was planning an Australian clone of the American fat-farm reality show The Biggest Loser, I knew I would hate it.

...

But I confess: I am hooked on this show. And I am not alone.

How did Ross get hooked, despite his belief that it was going to be voyeuristic, degrading. pathetic and tacky? Well we'll come to that later. First we have to disarm any potential critics:

... the politically correct will claim, as they were doing even before the series began, that it is no more than an exercise in humiliation aimed at serving the voyeuristic demands of the masses - and making money for a commercial TV network.

And now that's out of the way, Ross feels it's safe to tell us why he likes the show:

I was one of those who assumed much the same thing - until Monday. What changed my mind was that the producers have been smart enough to select 12 contestants with whom we can feel some affinity and some compassion.

I'm buggered if I can think of a way to satirise this blindingly stupid paragraph. All it amounts to is that the producers got Ross's number: they were clever enough to pick a group of contestants whose exploitation would give the audience a nice warm inner glow of meretricious fellow-feeling. It may be exploitation but it's decent exploitation, which makes all the difference.

It's at this point in the review that the top of my head blew off. I handed the Green Guide over to Comrade Bakunin and he actually read on from there, to the finish of the article:

These people are not being exploited. They have volunteered to appear on the show. They know from watching the American series of The Biggest Loser screened by Ten last year what they will have to endure. Some will be humiliated.

They know that lots of us will be following their progress, laughing at them sometimes, crying for them at others. And it might hurt. But is that any worse than having to live an entire life in which you know that you are seen, rightly or wrongly, as a loser?

Then he came up with that friendly suggestion that I lay off the reading for a while, or at the very least, stick to fiction. Right now that sounds very sensible, although it's going to make topical blogging a bit difficult. I'll have to consider other possible projects - a complete fisking of A la Recherche de Temps Perdu perhaps. That ought to provide a fair bit of material to be going on with.

Before we turned off the TV, I caught that biggest loser promo one more time - and finally made out the words that the female trainer was saying to that bloke who was in tears: Why do you feel you're such a piece of crap?

A Night to Remember, A Night to Forget

It happened in the back garden of one of Melbourne's most eminent conservative academics on a December night a few days before Christmas. Each year, the Professor and his family - wife Victoria and daughter Regina - put on an evening of pre-Christmas drinks for their friends. Me and the ex got invited through our social connections with the Professor's daughter, who was a little, even rather a lot, to the left of her father on political issues. As you might imagine the political positions of the guests reflected those of their respective hosts, so it was a very mixed gathering.

I forget his name - for present purposes we might as well call him Cedric Cudham and have done with it. Of his appearance, all I remember is that he wore a pair of coke bottle spectacles and academic deshabille - a pale cream open-necked shirt which may, or may not, have been graced with a cravat in lieu of a necktie. He spoke with an accent of the kind that once prompted a long-lost girlfriend - a working holidayer from the Old Dart - to ask "Why do so many people in this country work so hard at sounding like middle-class gits from Surbiton?" She laughed when I told her that they weren't working at it that, in fact, they picked up their Surbiton accents at our most exclusive private schools. In Cedric's case, I think she might have been on the money; whatever the source of his accent, he put a lot of effort into letting everyone know that he had one.

For Cedric, the Professor - who actually preferred to be called Albert or Bert - could only be addressed as Professor or Sir. Mrs Professor was Victoria and Miss Professor, their daughter, Regina. The rest of us were just you as befitted our status as nameless non-entities with no connections who could assist his rise to a lofty eminence of academic mediocrity. In other words, he was one of those kiss up and kick down guys.

The conversation was at that vague stage between the opening - when people are sounding each other out with questions like "So, what do you do for a crust?" staying well away from controversial topics, preferring to talk pop-culture instead until they've got some idea of how to get into the interesting stuff without provoking a blazing row - and the conversational middle game, when those controversial topics finally get opened. Possibly Cedric was impatient to get into his middle game. Whatever the reason, he asked apropos nothing at all "What do you think of this Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in custody then, Regina?" Talk about bringing out your Queen too early.

Regina didn't take up his invitation; she said something non-commital and turned to another topic. You might say she castled short with a view to putting together a solid pawn position, but that's straining the metaphor a bit. But Cedric wasn't to be put off that easily - he pursued the topic until someone broke in to ask: "Well, what do you think of the Royal Commission then?"

It was a voice I recognised easily. It was that of my beloved - this was back in the old days, well before the night we broke the sacred oath we took one night that we would never be that couple in the restaurant who've decided to go out and talk their difficulties over on neutral ground, with a good meal thrown in to help keep things more or less civil, then fail miserably in the endeavour and put all the other customers off their food.

I recognised the look on her face too - seeing it, the last thing that I would be inclined to do would be offer an opinion on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody but Cedric was made of much denser stuff. "Well, I think it was gross waste of the taxpayer's money," he declared, "if you look at the statistics you'll find that most of the deaths in custody in Australia are of white prisoners but no-one's interested in having a Royal Commission into those."

Where precisely the dialogue went after that I don't recall, but it rapidly turned into one of those blazing rows that everyone had been trying very hard to avoid. Most of the blaze was on Cedric's side; there was a distinct chill on the other side of the table where my then-beloved was sitting. The two of them were gathering a bit of an audience too - there was a lot of jockeying for positions in the western stands, where it was easier to watch the spectacle of Cedric's facial expressions. All you could see from the eastern stands was the icy cold tigress-with-a-litter-of-cubs-to-feed glare of his interlocutor which, admirable as it was, was nowhere near as entertaining. Everybody looked very earnest and po-faced but there was a lot of traffic from the garden into the house, particularly the toilet, where people used the relative privacy to vent their feelings as best they could and restore their composure. I spent a good five minutes there myself, stamping my feet a few times and damn near biting off my index finger before I could get back to the impromptu entertainment.

When I got back, Cedric launched into a remark beginning "With all due respect ..." and faltered because nowhere in the course of the dispute so far had he bothered to find out who he was talking to. "Helga" offered the Valkyrie of my dreams.

"With all due respect Helga ..."

Helga pulled hard on the length of rope that he had just wound around his neck. "Don't give me 'with all due respect'," she said "We both know that means you don't respect me at all. I would never insult you by telling you that I respected you when I obviously didn't. Just come out and say what you have to say."

Poor Cedric was gobsmacked. His face glowed a deep scarlet and he sputtered a few times while he struggled to cope with the novel idea of delivering an insult without prefacing it with some mealy-mouthed periphrasis. He'd been called out to fight like a woman. It really was difficult for the poor chap so when he spoke again, it was with all the force of a stutterer finishing a long struggle with the word "pomposity".

"Alright Helga, you're a fool ..." he began, and went on to enumerate her several follies before restating his position with a few variations - there should have been a Royal Commission into white deaths in custody and the whole damn thing was a complete waste of time because no wrongdoing was found on the part of the police.

"They had a duty of care to all of those prisoners," Helga said, quietly but firmly "And they failed in that duty."

Once more, Cedric was gobsmacked. "But they all committed suicide!" he cried, "That's simply preposterous."

At this point, someone else jumped into the conversation - a retired businessman in his late fifties or early sixties, who had taken to writing crime fiction to make a few readies to pad out the income from his investments. "Actually, that's a pretty good point, regardless of whether a prisoner's black or white - while they're in custody the police do have a duty of care."

Finally, Cedric recognised that the audience was against him - he was outmatched on intellect, knowledge and simple good manners. He turned to his one last hope for salvation. "Well, what's your opinion, Professor, Sir?" he asked.

The Professor merely gave him a quizzical look and Cedric quickly subsided into silence. A few minutes later he said his goodbyes and left, working very hard at not looking like a man who is slinking away from an argument that he has just lost, making a complete fool of himself into the bargain. Once he was gone the conversation turned to the post-match commentary. Someone even made the mischievous suggestion that Cedric had primed himself for the evening by reading up on all the controversial topics he might find himself arguing about, the better to impress others - particularly Bert - with his compendious knowledge. OK, so that was me. Helga found a private moment to apologise to Victoria for her involvement in the whole kerfuffle.

"Oh, don't worry about it," Victoria reassured her, "It's about time Cedric was brought down a peg or two."

I learnt later that, in the New Year, Albert and Victoria had to get someone in to replace several cracked tiles and regrout the entire floor in the toilet.

Afloat Again!

Crossed my fingers and posted The Weaaselversary Post just now, to test whether that problem I was having on Sunday had gone away. Looks like I'm back in business.

There's still some refitting to do, come this weekend - a new template,a bit of a purge of the BlogIntern and switching fom Haloscan comments to Blogger comments. Commenting at this blog is generally light anyway but it's worth noting, so your pearls of wisdom and acerbic ripostes don't get lost in cyberspace.

The Weaselversary Post

This Week The Age is running a series on ten years of the Howard government. The general consensus seems to be that Howard owes his electoral success to low interest rates, low interest rates and low interest rates. Over at The Hun, Andrew Bolt has put a little more effort into analysing the Weasel's political success:

It seems Labor, at least, has finally learned not to be goaded into stupidity -- into monstering Howard just for saying an obvious truth, but one not endorsed by dinner-party moralists and snow-field socialists.

Of course, it should have learned this lesson long ago -- in 1996, when Howard won his first election.

That's pretty telling in my book - Howard is pretty much an expert at goading his political opponents into stupidity. It's also something of an unwitting self-revelation on Andy's part - when you come down to it, this is why he admires the little bugger. So much so, that he reckons:

LOOKING back over Howard's 10 years of government, it is in fact hard to spot anything he should be downright ashamed of having said.

That's not to say he hasn't made mistakes -- whether claiming children were thrown overboard or believing Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.

And looking back over Andy's columns, you'd find it hard to spot anything he should be downright ashamed of having said either - most of that stuff has disappeared down the pay-per-view memory hole. But the page does feature an advertisement for an upcoming collection of Andrew's "best" columns under the title still not sorry.

Last Post

OK, so I just wiped out all of yesterday's output, yet again, by posting that last item. Which may have been wiped out by this one.

Had to happen eventually, I guess. Four years is a pretty good run. Time to arrange a temporary mooring with a view to finding a bigger berth later.

The Tragedy of the Uncommon

Courtesy of Daniel Barnes in this comment at Catallaxy, here's a tragic tale of what can happen when the irresistible intellectual force of Objectivism meets that stubbornly immovable object, human nature. If the story told here is true, I ought to be ashamed of myself for laughing at it so much. That's why I prefer to think someone's taking the piss. Here's a taster:

I have a relative in Florida who thinks my philosophy is abominable. He worked three “shit jobs” (one of them was cleaning sludge out of swimming pools), Home Depot and some other job wheeling dead patients around a morgue, all of this, while he was undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer. I laud his stalwartness, but I don’t share his level of ambition to scratch in the dirt for subsistence survival. I want more out of life than working without sleep for years on end, risking an auto accident due to sleepiness, and having no time to recreate. I’ve been there, and it was insane. I once had a dream that I could save money by working 16 hours, 7 days a week. In the end, the IRS won big, and all I could save in two years was $900. I’m through with working the hard, stupid way.

Reasons to be Cheerful

Isn't it good to know that the Australian Government won't be having any truck with illegal phone taps of innocent citizens? Thanks to the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill, introduced into Federal Parliament today, we can rest assured that Wise King Otto will never have to stand up in Parliament and explain how tapping the phone calls of completely innocent citizens was all done in the interests of national security and the Attorney-General told him it was all OK really. That's strictly an only in America thing.

The Explanatory Memorandum to the bill is pretty clear on the future here in Happy Valley:

4. In implementing recommendations of the Blunn Report, this Bill will amend the Act to:

(a) insert a warrant regime for access to stored communications held by a telecommunications carrier;

(b) enable interception of communications of a person known to communicate with the person of interest;

That's right - subject to a judicial warrant, once this bill has been passed the police ans other security agencies will have the power to tap your phone, just because you're known to communicate with "a person of interest". Rather takes the gloss of on-line dating doesn't it?

Right now, all the opposition to this intrusive expansion of police powers seems to be coming from within the Coalition and the usual legal big-wigs. Well, Big Kim has too many other things on his plate right now - such as staying on-side with his backers without coming out publicly against Simon Crean's pre-selection.

Happy VD

Two days late, this turned up in my E-Mail:

HAPPY VD IT'S PATRICIA FROM LONDON

From Mrs Patricia Azia

Good Morning ,
How are you today? and Compliments of the Valentine's period I hope all is well and there is no problem with business ? Besides i will send my picture for you to know me well as you reply now. However my name is Mrs Patricia Azia from london- United Kingdom. I am the personal account officer to Late Mr _______, 55, who is a british citizen living here in London with his family before his sudden death. This mail is written to solicit your assistance to be presented as a business foreign associate to my Late Client Mr _______ . He made a fixed Deposit valued at USD8.8million (Eight Million ,Eight hundred United States Dollars Only) with a finance institution here in London. Unfortunately he lost his life on July 7 london bus bomb which took place at Tavistock Square-London. To see the details of this bomb blast and my late client Mr _______ , Please click on the <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4668245.stm>

He left no clear beneficiary as to his business foreign associate but all documents relating to the claim of this fund will be processed in your name as his business foreign associate as soon as we agreed together ...

Obviously, Pat (who I'm pretty sure I don't know from Eve), doesn't live in London - she's one of those Nigerian financial wizards who are always coming across neglected bank accounts holding millions of dollars they'll happily share with some mug who'll just give them a bank account number. The unfortunate Mr _______ is real too, but I figured it might be tactful to suppress his name .

Anyway, I know it's now three days late and all, but a happy VD to you too, Patricia. And may you have lots of happy VDs to come.

Serengeti Slash

A couple of weeks ago I made a mental note to keep an eye out for the last episode of Walking With Beasts on our ABC. As usually happens with mental notes, I lost it so, while the last episode of the series screened on Saturday afternoon, I was sitting at my PC writing stuff. So I missed the chance to watch that homo erectus couple having decorously English missionary position sex out on the Serengeti Plain.

By the way, have you heard the one about the Frenchman making love to an English girl? Afterwards, when he's lying back smoking his Gauloise, or a Gitane, or whatever brand Frenchmen prefer as a post-coital smoke, he remarks "Ma Cherie, I am so sorry that I hurt you?"

"No that was lovely," she answers, 'Whatever makes you think that you hurt me?"

"You moved."

OK, enough with the ethnic stereotype jokes, even if that one did come from a very respectable London broadsheet. Time to get to the point. Over at Club Troppo, in answer to a question from Anna Winter, Dr Troppo writes:

Perhaps other readers would like to assist Ms Winter in her campaign to ban ‘creepy’ fanfic by providing other examples of things that should never have been allowed. Ms Winter has expressed a special interest in fanfic based on bloggers.

I hope you'll excuse me if I pass on the opportunity to write a piece of fanfic about myself and, say, Andrea Harris of Spleenville fame. On the other hand, some might find this alternative narrative track for Walking With Beasts creepy enough to warrant banning:

One of the young females in the erectus group has commenced oestrus¹. She signals her willingness to mate to a nearby male by bending forward and oscillating her rump.

The male approaches the female and tentatively sniffs at her vulva. Stimulated by the scent of the pheremones it is secreting, he tastes it. he quickly becomes sexually aroused and positions himself for coitus.

The alpha male of the group sees the couple about to mate; enraged by this challenge to his dominanace from the younger male, he pushes him away from the female. The two males fight - as they do the older male also becomes sexually aroused².

The loser is quickly driven off and retreats, turning his back on the winner and the rest of the group. The winner mounts the female and they mate. The mating is quickly over³.

¹ - Yes, I know, modern women don't have oestrus cycles they have that time of the month. As far as I know, nobody has any idea when this evolved.

² - This behaviour has been observed in other species (deer as I recall). Did it happen in early hominids? Who cares - it makes a good story.

³ - Or maybe they went at it for hours, who knows? It all depends on whether you think all that Kama Sutra stuff is instinctive human behaviour, or a cultural development.

Bird Blogging

John Quiggin has taken his first, hesitant step, into the exciting world of bird-blogging. If this catches on, it's pretty much inevitable that someone will raise the question: "Why are the Left so obsessed with birds all of a sudden?"

Say What?

Here's a little guessing game, or scavenger hunt, to help you while away a couple of weekend hours. What's the missing phrase in this quotation (first ellipsis):

The alternative to ... is reading nothing, having no interest in the amazing and the unpredictable. in the brilliance and stupidity of others ...

(Tip of the hat to Zeppo Bakunin for suggesting this post).

Update (Monday, 13 February) - here's the answer:

The alternative to the sharemarket is reading nothing, having no interest in the amazing and the unpredictable, in the brilliance and stupidity of others and never realising the opportunity to make money through the labour of others.

It is about taking an interest in the world. It's about opportunity and risk and taking both by the horns.

Marcus Padley in Saturday's Age.

A New Golden Age?

A couple of things struck me, while I was going through The Age Green Guide on Thurday to see if there was anything remotely worth watching coming up in the next week. Apart from Desperate Housewives, which would be much improved if they dropped Teri Hatcher's character Susan, and gave us more of Gloria Cross as Bree, there's not much. Scrubs has disappeared from Seven's programming schedule - last week's episode, of which more later, was screened at 1.40am Wednesday, Seven's usual dumping ground for programs that turn out to be too clever for the commercial stations' preferred demographic - people who like crap TV so much that they'll even sit still during the ad-breaks. The absence of Scrubs from the programming schedule was thing number one.

Thing number two was a review, by Jim Schembri, of a coming episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jim writes:

For a first-class demonstration of just how far ahead of us the Americans are when it comes to post-PC comedy, you simply must check out this golden episode from season four [of this series].

If, as Jim's remark implies, we are now in an era of post-PC comedy, it obviously comes after an era of PC comedy, preceded, in its turn, by an era of pre-PC comedy (see Figure 1).

TV Comedy Timeline (Australia)
Era		Major Events/Comedy Shows	Start
Post-PC	Late
	Middle
	Early		10 years BP
PC	Late	Pauline Hanson's maiden speech in Parliament ends the PC era in Australian Politics.
	Middle
	Early	The Big Gig
Pre-PC	Late	The Naked Vicar Show, Kingswood Country, The Comedy Company, The Gillies Report (proto-PC or full-on PC?)
	Middle	The Mavis Bramston Show
	Early	Dawn of television.	50 yrs BP

Figure 1.

As you can see, there's still a fair bit of work to do on the timeline. At the moment it's an open question whether we've got to the Late Post-PC era or whether in fact we're still struggling to get through the Late-Middle, or worse yet, the Middle-Early or even the Early-Early. Some might maintain that we're still in the Late-Late-PC. Wherever we are, last week's episode of Scrubs showed that there's a way to go yet.

Sure, it featured Michael J Fox, an actor with Parkinson's Disease, playing Doctor Kevin Casey, a doctor with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Which ought to get it plenty of Post-PC cred points - what could be less politically correct than casting an actor with a well-known degenerative illness as a doctor with a chronic behavioural disorder? And then playing it for laughs for most of the episode. Unfortunately Scrubs has too many PC hangovers - an ethnically diverse cast of characters, female characters with careers and so on. The most absurd of these PC inclusions is the dwarf janitor, who regularly beats his less vertically-challenged colleague in roof-top wrestling matches. And all the post-PC cred the episode picked up with the string of OCD jokes was blown away in the final scene and the preachy "philosophical" final voice over.

To finish, I'm inviting anyone who can scrape together the least skerrick of interest in the subject to nominate TV comedies and significant events that should be included in the TV Comedy Timeline.

SIUYFA

If you live in Melbourne, you already know that BATBYGOBSTOPL is an acronym for something or other. By now you're bound to have seen that Metlink television advertisement explaining the acronym. The one that strikes you as completely humourless and witless on first viewing and doesn't grow on you - except perhaps in the sense that tinea grows on you - with repeated exposure.

Travelling to the Victoria Market today, by Metlink Tram, I had the misfortune to notice a poster featuring the BATBYGOBSTOPL acronym. To add to my troubles my mind immediately went into Now-What-Does-That-Stand-For-Again (NWDTSFA) mode. Which spoiled the first part of trip for me, until a young woman sat down a couple of seats forward of me, kindly interposing her scoop-necked T-shirt (worn over an under-sized brassiere) between me and the poster.

The title of this post is an acronym too. It stands for What I Wish They'd Told The Smart-Arse Advertising Agency Creative Who Came Up With This Bloody Stupid Campaign.

How to Starve a Blackbird Chick

It's a fairly typical morning in the back yard, except that the concrete is still damp from last night's rain and the sky is overcast with the promise of more showers to come. There's a female blackbird perched on the back fence, a worm clasped in her beak, still wriggling. She watches me warily as I come out the back door and light up a cigarette.

Her gaze follows me as I stroll across the yard to the gate and back again. We watch each other for a minute or two then it occurs to me to get out of her line of sight. She waits a minute more, then flies across the back yard of the neighbours behind, into the wisteria at the corner of the back porch where she has hidden her nest.

It's always the female; the male is usually perched in some high place - like a TV antenna or a vent pipe, keeping an eye out for worm-poachers and singing out the usual reminder that:

This land is my land,
This land is my land,
From that fence over there to somewhere near the dumpster in the service station at the corner,
Oh and that palm tree's mine too, so you just bugger off sport ...

It'd be a bugger for the both of them if they've been fostering one of those parasitic cuckoos, whose mother flew into the nest one day while they weren't looking and left behind her single egg and flew off again, with no more thought for her offspring than thank God that's done - bird, but it gives you a sore clacker.

Postscript: I started this piece a few days ago, at the start of my alleged hiatus. A day later a fledgling blackbird turned up perched on top of one of the bins. So it looks like that's the breeding season over for another year.

The Ghost of Blogs Past

Curious, how some things come back to haunt you, isn't it? Like when Tim Blair's having a bit of a stuck-for-material day and decides to stick his head up his own blog and play Ghost Whisperer, calling up the spirits of the dead to haunt your nights of insomnia. There I am, on Tim's blog, listed as number one member of the Loser Club, with Chris Sheil, Tim Lambert, John Quiggin, Tim Dunlop, Wayne Sanderson, Gianna, Mathew Henderson-Hau, Antony Loewenstein, Margo Kingston, David Heidelberg and Anonymous Lefty. All of us with annoying little errors in our blog archives, duly noted by Tim.

My boo-boo, and it was a biggie - if you're going to stuff up there's no point doing it by halves, was verballing Andrew Bolt verballing Justice O'Loughlin of the Federal Court in Cubillo v Commonwealth. On February 22, 2004 so the two year anniversary will be coming up soon. Now there's an excuse for a piss-up.

The bugger of it is, that in a column of 28 September, 2005, Bolt cobbled together selected excerpts from sections 393, 394, 395, 511, 408, 1535, 1148, 1159, 1160, 1304 and 1305 of Justice O'Loughlin's verdict (in that order) to come up with this summary:

[Evidence] showed the primitive conditions under which the missionaries were living. It would be safe to assume that the conditions under which the Aboriginal people were living would have been no better . . . Cynical though it may be to some, the conditions at Retta Dixon Home [in Darwin, to where Cubillo was brought] were preferable . . .

I limit myself to rejecting the claim that it was a 'myth' to think of a part-Aboriginal child as an outcast in Aboriginal communities . . .

The evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children such as that alleged . . . [Gunner and Cubillo] have failed to prove that the 'purpose' of their removals and detentions was (or included) the purpose of destroying their associations and connections with their mothers, families and cultures.

Woulda had him on toast there if it weren't for a small boy-who-cried-wolf issue.

Tim's blogging record is, of course, impeccably boo-boo free. OK, so there was that little dust-up with MediaWatch over a US Flag that turned out to be embarassingly Pentagon-debris-deficient but that was all David Marr's fault, really.

Who Are These Faceless Men*?

Anyone who read yesterday's Senate Hansard, could be forgiven for thinking that the government of this country is slipping into the hands of a cabal of anonymous, unaccountable "experts", rather than a Cabinet of well-known, unaccountable Ministers. Well, that seems to be what a few of the opponents of the THERAPEUTIC GOODS AMENDMENT (REPEAL OF MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR APPROVAL OF RU486) BILL 2005 obviously believe:

Senator FIELDING (Victoria—Leader of the Family First Party) (5.34 p.m.) - Everyone has an opinion about abortion. It is one of those controversial issues that sparks great community debate. We have seen that in the last few weeks in relation to the abortion drug RU486. This debate has been prompted by a private member’s bill introduced by a National Party senator, Fiona Nash. The Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005 is designed to shift responsibility for approving the drug from the health minister to the Therapeutic Goods Administration - that is, the TGA - a body which examines the safety of drugs. Put simply, the question is: who decides on RU486? Do we want our elected leaders deciding whether this drug should be approved in Australia or do we want to give that decision-making power to unelected bureaucrats?

Family First believes that this is a unique drug which raises major social policy and ethical issues as well as medical and safety issues. We cannot consider the social policy issues without taking into account community attitudes ...

Family First strongly believes that policy decisions should never be made by unelected bureaucrats; their job is to advise on policy and implement policy decisions.

Senator BARNETT (Tasmania) (5.47 p.m.) - I stand here today to oppose the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005 and its repeal of ministerial responsibility for drugs, including abortion drugs, in the category of restricted goods ...

How can this cocktail of abortion drugs, together with the controversial drug RU486, which is currently under intense scrutiny around the world, be the sole province of a team of unelected officials who would have ultimate arbitrary powers? RU486 can be used in the early to mid stages of pregnancy, up to 20 weeks. What is stopping another drug being designed in the months or years ahead to kill an unborn baby late term? Nothing at all. It would be up to an unelected team of bureaucrats, no matter how expert, in the TGA. What a cop-out for federal members of parliament.

Senator POLLEY (Tasmania) (6.20 p.m.) - I rise to speak on the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005...

The competence of the TGA is restricted to assessing medicines on medical grounds. Leaving out the cruel human rights considerations raised by RU486, the faceless public servants of the TGA should not make the decision. RU486 is not comparable with any other drug that may be considered by the TGA ...

Senator JOYCE (Queensland) (8.34 p.m.) - This is a very historic time in our parliament. There are very few times that one has the opportunity to have a responsibility for making a decision about a defining social issue that will permeate through the annals of our nation. It will be acknowledged as a personal position of commitment by the senators in this chamber. As with many other historical debates in other parliaments throughout the world, your position on this shall be written down in history and your role judged by history accordingly. As it is a conscience vote, it does the unusual thing of definitively stating who you are and the ethical issues that drive you.

This is a debate about the role of government and on the question of its determination in the lives of others and on the question of life itself ...

There is one thing that has definitely been portrayed during this debate, and that is that this is a highly contentious issue by reason of the closely held views of the citizens of Australia. The proponents of this bill believe that this ethos of political representation should not be respected. They believe a direct political remedy, reflected in the ministerial authority, should be subordinate to an unelected bureaucrat. By removing the path of authority on an issue, we allow the progression of unelected bureaucrats to attain the mantle that we believe, and the community believes, we have been elected for. The minister should be responsible for reflecting a hands-on role on contentious issues.
[my emphasis in all cases]

So who are these bureaucrats and experts who will usurp the authority of the Parliament, if this Bill passes? The bureaucrats are the public servants who work for the Therapeutic Goods Administration of the Department of Health and Aging. Apparently, they are not accountable to the Minister for Health - which would hardly surprise anyone, given the new conventions the Howard Government has adopted on Ministerial and Departmental accountability. And the experts are the members of the Australian Drug Education Evaluation Committee:

Role of ADEC

The ADEC is appointed by the Minister for Health and Ageing and provides advice to the Minister and the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing through the Therapeutic Goods Administration, on:

• the quality, risk-benefit, effectiveness and access within a reasonable time of any drug referred to it for evaluation;
• medical and scientific evaluations of applications for registration of prescription drugs (e.g. new chemical entities, new forms of previously registered drugs and therapeutic variations to registered drugs).

The Committee also provides services to other Government departments, committees and community-based organisations on a wide variety of regulatory matters related to prescription medicines.

But, once again, under the current understanding of the Westminster system, they're not accountable either. If we went back to holding public servants and Ministerial appointees accountable to Ministers, we might have to go back to holding Ministers accountable to Parliament. And we can't have that now, can we?

* - and women of course.

Bat, Ball, Home (Again)

Gummo Trotsky is overwhelmed with ennui. Bloggage will resume in a couple of weeks with another installment of The Enchanted Toasting Fork.

Slow Day at Spleenville

It looks like Tim Blair found himself stuck for material Sunday morning - how else do we explain his decision to get stuck into this Australia Day column by Christopher Bantick?

Bantick is one of those "Melbourne writers" who turn up in the op-ed pages of The Age from time to time and, three days after its publication, Tim decided to set Bantick straight on a few issues and provide a bit of historic perspective:

Back then [in Bantick's youth], there were no wire fences in the desert keeping new arrivals from the rest of Australian society.

“New arrivals”? He’s talking about illegal arrivals, who tend to turn up without passports or any other supporting documents. By the way, Australia’s enlightened post-war Labor government tried to ship refugees home. Here’s what went on in 1949: “The Chifley Government passes the War-time Refugees Removal Act in July, with a view to forcibly repatriating approximately 900 non-Europeans who had been admitted temporarily during the war. They had declined to be repatriated, wishing to settle in Australia.”

Never did I think I would have to explain to my young son why people were locked up in camps.

Did Bantick’s own parents ever explain to him anything about 1950s refugee camps?

Tim describes this, accurately enough, as perverse nostalgia; the same perverse nostalgia Bantick displays in this December 2005 article, where he gets all gooey about the loss of childhood wonder since cyberspace came along. So far, so good - give or take the opposing twists in our funny bones, I might concede that Tim has point - Bantick is running a "We used to live in old shoe box in middle-o-road" number on us. Again. But then he blows it (guess he can't help himself) with this update, linking to one last article by Bantick. One from June 2000, for crying out loud:

More from Bantick: “Every faceless junkie has a name.” Yes. And also your DVD player.

The linked article recounts Bantick's encounter with one of his former students, now begging for spare change outside Melbourne University. I can see the humour in that final quip from Tim - it's funny the same way that kicking someone's teeth out and then calling them "Fang" is funny.

Over at Surfdom Tim Dunlop has also picked up on Timbo's post (OK, so it was before I did) and would like to know, if not even John Howard wants to return to the sort of monoculture Bantick describes in his Australia Day article, just what sort of monoculture Howard does want to return to. I think the answer might be in Howard's Australia Day address to the National Press Club:

Most nations experience some level of cultural diversity while also having a dominant cultural pattern running through them. In Australia’s case, that dominant pattern comprises Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment and the institutions and values of British political culture. Its democratic and egalitarian temper also bears the imprint of distinct Irish and non-conformist traditions.

That is, Bantick's nostalgia and Howard's conservatism bordering on reactionism, point to the same place - not a monoculture but one where the Judaeo-Christian ethic and the institutions and values of British political culture are very much in the ascendant. Forget the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment - recent actions of the Howard government speak a lot louder than the words on that point. Bantick's better age when we were much kinder to newcomers is the same as John Howard's better age when we were all much more in touch with our British heritage and it was no shame for an Australian Prime Minister to be British to his bootstraps.

Incidentally, checking the 23 links Timbo included in his Sunday posts, I found 13 to external sources and 10 back to his own blog. Looks like he was having a bit of a head up his own arse day as well. But we all have those from time to time.

Finally, while I'm having a bit of dangerous fun dissing RWDBs, I can't resist linking to this guest post by Antony Carr at Evil Pundit's:

It's a regrettable but now proven fact that Australian lefties lack both wit and humour.

Naturally, all thinking people would agree that it is quite inappropriate that a prime minister, especially a right-wing one such as John Howard, should display any wit or humour at all. Hence, this statement in his speech to the National Press Club in the Great Hall of Parliament House on January 25 was entirely uncalled for:

The strength and vitality of Australian democracy rests on three great institutional pillars: our parliament with its tradition of robust debate; the rule of law upheld by an independent and admirably incorruptible judiciary; and a free and sceptical press of the sort that we politicians simply adore.

So there you go - all this lefty agonising over Howard's speech, his historical agenda, and what it portends for the future has been a waste of time. The whole thing was a bloody great piss-take: Iron John fooled the lot of us.

Now it's time for me to kick back, relax and stay off-line for at least 24 hours, leaving whatever happens to just happen.

And the Wages of Sin is ... (Daniel 3:17)

Like a lot of laymen, I have a very simple view of the practice of medicine. The basic idea is, if you see a disease you cure it. Unless there's no known cure; then it's up to medical research to find either a cure or someway to prevent the disease. After reading this post at Larvatus Prodeo, I've realised that this view of medical practice and medical research is much too simplistic.

Some diseases, it seems, should not be treated, nor should they be prevented. Cervical cancer is one such disease:

DEATHS from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer - but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.

The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.
[New Scientist, 18 April, 2005]

Now, nearly a year later, Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce (whose most recent major accomplishments was driving Senator Julian McGauran out of the National Party into the Liberal Party) has taken up this American moonbat idea:

... Senator Joyce said the decision whether to approve the [HPV] vaccine should not be left to the TGA because "they will talk about the therapeutic aspects - they are not there to talk about the psychological implications or the social implications".

"There might be an overwhelming (public) backlash from people saying, 'don't you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous'," he said.

Senator Joyce - who has four daughters - said he would be "personally very circumspect" about giving such a vaccine to girls who were too young to cope with the potential consequences of sexual activity.
[The Australian, January 27, 2006]

Senator Joyce's statement just oozes sanctimonious disingenuity; what he's really talking about under the euphemism "psychological implications and social implications" is a personal religious objection to the idea of providing vaccinations to protect young girls from a sexually transmitted disease. Of course he hasn't the gumption to come out and say so directly, so he invokes a phantom legion of outraged parents instead. A vast unseen army of religious nutters who would be outraged if the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved a medical treatment which reduced the risks of committing the sin of Lust.

I reckon that if we're going to start banning medical treatments because they might undermine the dominant Judaeo-Christian ethics of Australian society, there's no good reason to confine ourselves to treatments that might encourage the sin of Lust. There are six other equally deadly sins out there - with some help from Zeppo Bakunin and one of his brother's old medical textbooks I've identified quite a few diseases that ought not to be treated because it might lead to very naughty behaviour.

Sloth: cholera, dysentry and typhoid are the biggies here. Back in the nineteenth century, some physician whose name I forget, became a medical legend when he stopped a local epidemic of cholera in one of the poorer districts of London by breaking the heads off all the local water pumps. The wells were all contaminated with sewage. If people are living in poor areas where they only have access to sewage contaminated water, they only have their own idleness to blame. If they got off their arses and did something to improve their situation they'd have the money to move to an area with clean drinking water. So away with all those development programs aimed at bringing clean drinking water to third world villages and away with the water supply and sewage disposal authorities in the developed countries. Public health problem be damned - these diseases are all work ethic problems and the solution lies with the individual.

Gluttony: All those diseases caused by diet or addiction - atheroschlerosis from cholesterol consumption, cirrhosis of the liver, dental caries (see also Vanity) most forms of hepatitis and diabetes - including insulin dependent diabetes. Let the buggers learn to live without sugar - it'll build up their fortitude.

Vanity: cosmetic surgery is obviously out (see also Envy). As are acne treatments, treatments for warts, moles or winestain birthmarks, hair replacement for chemotherapy induced hair loss and all forms of cranio-facial and recosntructive surgery. If people are born hideously deformed, tough - surgical reconstruction might just encourage them to become vain in later life. Oh and all that root canalling and crowning and dental reconstruction that goes on to deal with the results of dental caries. And orthodonty (by the time I get through all the major sins, I suspect we'll have built a good case for banning dentistry altogether).

Avarice: obviously most of the depression that is epidemic in Australia is the consequence of living in a materialistic, consumer society where everyone more or less believes that they will be happy once they have the latest iPod, the latest Nokia mobile phone, etc, etc. It's all down to avarice. So are the rest of the work related disorders.

Anger: Congestive heart disease, hypertension, angina pectoris.

Envy: Penis extensions, breast implants and reductions are all medical treatments that obviously cater to patients' envy of people who are better endowed than they. Less obviously, infertility treatments have to go. Remember:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
[Exodus 20:17]

And that "any thing that is thy neighbours" includes the motility of his sperm and the fecundity of his wife, sport.

By Popular Acclamation

As I expected, Tug Boat Potemkin came nowhere near being voted Australia's best humorous blog. The Daily Flute came close but the laurel actually went to Samuel Gordon-Stewart on the back of TSSH preferences. So it such is. Nonetheless congratulations to Samuel. As for his sponsors, least said, soonest mended.

Looking to next year's awards, I've decided that the 'best humorous blog" is probably permanently out of reach. Right now I'm looking into the possibility of starting up a new community organisation - the Australian Foundation for Survivors of Dentistry, with a group blog on how to make the difficult personal journey from seeing oneself as a dentistry victim to the liberating realisation that one is a dentistry survivor. That might have reasonable chance of winning in the best new blog, best group blog, best overall blog and best community service blog categories.

Oh and that other bit of broken tooth came out this morning without any need to resort to the needle-nosed pliers. Which leaves me looking for a new excuse for feeling totally pissed off with life. So it such is.

Some Reader ...

I wasn't planning to write anything on that article by John Birmingham - the one where he takes the left to task for being completely humourless unlike Tim Blair, Australia's answer to P J O'Rourke. I haven't read enough of O'Rourke to comment on that comparison but, in my view, Tim's work is a match for the stand-up comedy of US comedian Andrew Dice Clay. I never found him particularly funny either but that was obviously something to do with my own personal tastes because on the one video tape I saw of "Dice" in performance his audience were pissing themselves - possibly quite literally - over such pearls as "What's with these bisexuals. Let's get this straight - you either suck dick or you don't!" That one had them all cheering and the little collegiate fists pumping in the air. Homophobic? Maybe, but the guy had found his audience and he knew how to work them. For all we know, off-stage, Clay might have been a flaming nancy-boy, slipping away to the seedier parts of town after each performance for a spot of rough sex, preferably with a stoker or greaser. That seems unlikely though; if it were true we would have read about it in the tabloids.

As I said, I wasn't planning to write anything on John Birmingham and why he's so utterly wrong about how humourless all us lefties are but a lot got written before I got around to it and my thinking on the topic didn't come to much. Then I got this e-mail which included this comment on the piece:

Was thinking - yeah but wonder what Gummo would say..
(no names, no pack drill because I haven't actually asked for permission to reproduce the contents of the e-mail).

Now I can recognise a hint as well as any other bloke - that is, well enough to studiously ignore it.And I would have gone on studiously ignoring this one if it weren't nearly six o'clock in the morning, all the sound and fury of thunder and lightning on the southern horizon signifies nothing - especially not the prospect of rain and a real cool change and I hadn't just found yet another fragment of broken tooth in the gum crater. That's the third so far. I got rid of two tonight but this one needs to poke its way out a little further before I stand any chance of getting to it with the needle nose pliers. Assuming that I still own a pair of needle nose pliers - otherwise I might have to make do some cheap eyebrow tweezers from the chemist. All in all it's a good night to write about John Birmingham, the topic of Phil Ruddock having been all used up a week or so ago.

Birmingham's article (which also gets a good bollocking at Helen's place) finishes with this sad prognosis of the future of a levity-challenged left:

The left, on the other hand, has indulged for so long now in the guilty pleasures of relativism, protected by a value system that says discussion of certain topics is off limits, that any sense of confidence they might have had at one time has now entirely disappeared. And with it their sense of humour.

It's like the old joke. How many angry feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: that's not funny!

I'm old enough to remember when that old joke was a new joke and there was no pussy-footing around about "angry feminists". It was:

How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

That's not funny!

Of similar vintage are:

What do you call that useless piece of flesh on the end of a penis?

A man.

and this cracker:

How many men does it take to wallpaper a bedroom?

One, but you have to slice him very thinly.

Of course, only a man-hating feminist could find that last one funny - to anyone else it's another offensive example of man-hating feminist double standards. It did occur to me that, as a demonstration that lefty humour is still possible, it could be updated a little:

How many cabinet ministers does it take to whitewash a dunny?

It doesn't matter how fine you grind 'em up, they'll never come out the right colour.

But sadly, that's a bit of a failure in the funny stakes and quite possibly seditious too. So I'd better make it quite clear that I'm in no way advocating that cabinet ministers should be ground up and used to paint dunnies. Well, not today anyway. In any event, it's unlikely that cabinet ministers would prove a superior dunny paint to Wattyl Solarguard.

Since Birmingham brought the light bulb joke into play, I thought I might get some mileage out of How many neo-cons does it take to change a light bulb? But then I realised that the idea of neo-cons changing a light bulb is absurd. Let's face it, if George W Bush got up in his State of the Union address and told everyone that the way forward in the centuries old struggle between Christendom and the infidels (more commonly known as the War on Terror) was a restoration of hereditary monarchy and feudal vassalage, the buggers would be falling overthemselves to demand the return of ducking stools, scolds' bridles and the Black Death, not necessarily in that order. It took a while to get over that hurdle and I'm not sure the results were worth it:

How many neo-cons does it take to change a light bulb?

The end of the cold war and America's rise to pre-eminence as the world's only superpower (or hegemon) has made burnt out light bulbs a thing of the past.

We'll get the Marines onto it, as soon as they've finished with those drains we asked them to unblock.

Let me tell you, we have a smart missile in our armoury that can home in on that burnt out little sucker and take it out, without damaging any of the plaster ducks flying up your living room wall.

Update: Birmingham's article turns up again in the A2 section of today's Age. The front page of the section says of it "John Birmingham Lampoons the Left". Skimming it over a second time, I didn't feel lampooned so much as bored shitless. And it strikes me that someone who blows his punchline by wimping out on a feminist joke is in no position to complain about political correctness strangling humour. So there.

The Enchanted Toasting Fork - Episode 7

The story so far: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6

There are moments in men's lives - and women's too, no doubt - when all that has gone before is called into question and the habits and opinions of a lifetime crumble under the devastating impact of some new and transcendent insight. It may happen at night on a dusty road between the city one has purged of a troublesome new sect and the next city on your clean up list; it may happen in the depths of a south-east asian jungle, when one is shot with a metaphorical diamond that blows away all your pretensions to civilised standards; it may happen the morning you drain half a litre of sulphuric acid from your baldder and most of it misses the bowl; and it may happen when you are standing in the kitchen of a couple of friends, clutching a cheap "Paw of Renown" from Y'ha-nthlei in one hand, while the other rifles through kitchen drawers searching for that toasting fork you enchanted in a protracted fit of pique and gave away as a wedding present. These moments are called epiphanies. They are rarely pleasant.

Petro's epiphany, if such it was, was a slow grinding one. First, there was the realisation that the monkey-corpse light of the Y'ha-nthleian "Paw of Renown" was hopelessly inadequate compared to the full on corpse-light of a well-crafted Hand of Glory. The light from the birthday cake candles tied between the dead monkey's fingers, and the magical concealment it was supposed to provide, weren't going to last much longer. He still had the rest of Claudio and Cossima's house to search. After what he had seen so far, he wasn't enjoying that prospect. If only he'd taken up the six for the price of five offer when he had bought the paw. At least the house was empty so he might be able to risk turning on a few lights. After the blending of their families, it seemed unlikely that Claudio and Cossima had anything in the way of a spare room where they could stack away unwanted gifts - where then would the toasting fork be, if not in the kitchen? Under the house? In a stack of boxes on a couple of planks laid over the rafters in the roof space? One of those self-storage warehouses?

One after another, the errors and follies that had brought him to this last, most desperate folly of all, ground away at his spirits, wearing him down to the realisation my life is totally, completely and just about irredeemably fucked. Maybe I should check the bathroom cabinet for some St John's Wort. With so many kids in the house they're bound to keep in a good supply. Maybe I should have taken that phone call from Ruby instead of letting it slip through to the answering machine. Maybe I should get the hell out of here. Call Ruby when I get home. Find out if she's up for a visitor. Wonder what she's up to tonight. What do civil celebrants do on week nights?

***

There was no avoiding it - the most recent letter from the seventeenth junior clerk in the office of the King's Chancellor and Chief Busybody was quite clear. For bureaucratese, that is. "Celebrants are reminded that under the laws of the kingdom, marriage is the union of a man and a woman, forsaking all others. This office considers it inappropriate for licenced celebrants to place themselves in situations where they may be seen to be offering either active or passive endorsement to unions which do not conform to the legal definition of marriage. In the light of numerous complaints this office has received on this issue we will have no alternative but to review the licences of celebrants who are reported to have endorsed such unions."

This wasn't aimed at her personally, she assured herself. The fact that the letter had arrived today had nothing to do with the fact that she was invited to celebrate Jadwiga and Jennifer's not-a-marriage-just-a-life-long-commitment on Saturday night. All the same she had no choice but to call Jadwiga - her oldest friend - and tell her she had to cancel. Jadwiga wasn't going to take it well.

"Hello, Jennifer speaking."

"Hi Jen, it's Ruby. Is Jadwiga home?"

"Hi, Rube. You're sounding upbeat as ever. How do you manage that?"

"It's an enchanted princess thing." Ruby said. She had lost count of the number of times she'd had this exchange with Jennifer. "Could I speak to her please?"

"Oh, secret princess business, is it?" Repetition hadn't quite worn the edge of resentful commoner sarcasm off Jennifer's pronunciation off that phrase, "Sure, I'll get her for you."

Ruby heard footsteps then, at a remove from the other telephone, Jennifer said "It's Rube, for you. Wants to talk about princessy stuff again." Jadwiga responded with something indistinct, in a complaining tone. Which, thought Ruby, was typical when you thought about it. Jadwiga had missed out on the whole enchantment thing - lucky cow - so she had no idea what a drag it really was. Ruby doubted that the whole thing with Jennifer would have had a chance to happen if Jadwiga had pricked her finger on a spindle or had any of the other unfortunate accidents that routinely befell princesses and left them dependent on finding - or being found by - a handsome prince if they were to have any chance of a half-way normal life.

"Hi, Ruby. What's up."

Ruby came straight to the point. Despite her best efforts, the vibrancy in her voice could not be completely suppressed. "Bad news, Jadwiga" she said, trying to hold the gush down to a trickle, "I don't think I can make it Saturday."

"I can hear just how much that saddens you, Ruby dear."

"I would, if I could Jadz. You know that."

"Oh bollocks, Rube. You're barely trying to hide how bloody happy you are to be off the hook."

The conversation didn't improve. By it's end Ruby was fairly sure that she and Jadwiga were no longer friends. At least they wouldn't be until Jadwiga apologised for that crack about her vibrant voice being a childish affectation, like a lisp, and all she needed to sort it out was a few hours with a competent speech therapist.

***

In the end, getting out struck Petro as best idea. He closed up the kitchen drawers and cupboards. In the last dim glow of the Paw's monkey-corpse light he made his way to the front door. As he stepped into the hallway he heard footsteps on the front porch, followed by the scrape of a key entering a lock.

Down to Earth Club

"You ever had sex on a train?"

"Naah."

"Would you like to try it? Do you wanna do it?"

Smooth talker. Wish I could come up with lines like that. And hey, don't mind me sitting here across the other side of the carrriage - I'm getting off debarking in two stops.

"Naah. They have security cameras and guards and stuff."

Damn it, girl, you're in the prime of your youth! You're wasting the best years of your life. Wake up to yourself.

Nothing doing. They get off the train at the next stop. On the way out the door he asks: "What about the queue at Centrelink? Ever tried it there?"