See These Eyes So Green ...

One significant advantage of blogging under a pseudonym - especially one as ridiculous as "Gummo Trotsky" - is that it's very unlikely that anything I post on my blog is ever going to turn up on page 30 of The Bulletin, under a picture of a great white shark key-ring. So it's unlikely that my name will ever appear in a paragraph introduced by such banalities as:

I believe you should never look back. Because the only thing you can change is the future.

My mistake - that's the Toyota ad on the opposite page. The one with a photograph of Greg Norman, looking into the distance with the steely determination of a man who knows exactly where his keylight is.

Still, though it's a risk I don't face myself, I can see how you might get pissed off if you knew that an occasional Bulletin reader might notice your name as they're flicking over the filler pages to get from Leo Schofield's article "Stand up for Etiquette to get to Deborah Light's article "Burnt Offerings" on how bushfire victims are getting the run-around from insurance companies (the latter doesn't seem to be available on-line).

Greg Norman wouldn't get pissed off - he gets paid to look craggy, resolute and slightly sweaty above the Toyota advertising copy. And, even if he didn't write all of it himself, it's unlikely he would have lent his name to a campaign with the theme "The Great White Shark says, if you insist on buying a rice burner, get a Toyota!" Even if (speaking very hypothetically) he'd said it as a passing joke in one of his meetings with the advertising agency.

On the other hand, if my name and professional position did score an entirely gratuitous mention on page 30 of The Bulletin, I'd have at least one consolation; it would be much worse to turn up on page 74, just inside the back cover, where Patrick Cook does the genuinely funny stuff. That's a page you can find without having to look it up in the table of contents.