Behold, the somewhat weird Herald Sun TomKat Spotter.

Behold, the even weirder Grodscorp Stalker.

(Tips, sightings and underwear ’snowdropped’ from clotheslines will be gratefully accepted.)

How is possible that a Michael Jackson impersonator looks stranger than the man himself?

Who is who?

“I believe I am alive today because God saved me for this - to make people happy. I have a message to give, the same as Michael,” he said yesterday.

Yeah, um. Okay.

Just say you’re a political leader whose career is in serious (some say terminal) trouble after a self-inflicted couple of horror weeks in domestic politics, reflected by three simultaneously disastrous opinion polls. The winter break arrives to give you some welcome relief from the onslaught, a chance to lick your wounds, and the opportunity to regroup. So what do you do to try and reverse your fortunes? Work hard at developing policies? Grassroots campaigning?

Of course not. You visit the troops in Afghanistan for some nice pictures that aren’t at all a cynical attempt to boost your standing in the electorate by co-opting everything the soldiers stand for.

Here’s Malcolm arriving in Afghanistan wearing the sort of gear he needed last week in the House of Reps.

“Welcome to Afghanistan, Mr Turnbull. Mr Rudd’s office emailed to say you’re a dickhead.”

Of course, what’s a trip to the battlefield without a stirring speech to the troops, including a stunned Julie Bishop posing stupidly in the background and a random soldier staring at your arse?

“He must work out.”

And this photo was captioned by Malcolm’s press people as: “The Opposition Leader, The Hon Malcom Turnbull MP, shares a joke with Australian Defence Force personnel during his visit to bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan.” Your job is to caption the photograph with the joke being shared.

Have at it!

This month, I’m partaking in Dry July, “an online social community where an individual or group can sign up to the challenge of a month long sponsored abstinence from alcohol.”

Funds raised from sponsorship will be directed towards charities benefiting the lives of adults with cancer. 

As I’m going on holidays in a couple of weeks where there will no doubt be some drinking involved, I decided to make up for that by not drinking coffee for the whole month of July. And because I’m such a sadist on myself, I’ve also given up chocolate and hot chips.

It’s only Day 2 of this abstinence thingy and already it’s looking like a very long month. The longest month of my life. Ever.

Just so you all know, don’t mess with me this month.

Tony Abbott debates policy using gut feeling.

Coalition frontbencher Tony Abbott says New South Wales is playing nanny state politics with its ban on smoking in cars when children are present.

[...]

Mr Abbott says the ban is over the top.

“I was a child that was regularly imprisoned in a car with heavy smokers,” he said.

“My parents both smoked heavily when I was a kid. Now has it done me any harm?

“You be the judge …”

Forget research, expert opinion and statistics, Tony’s fine so let’s legislate based on his personal experience.

My soul has been redeemed.

Yesterday, I deleted my Twitter account.

While I can now see the attraction of Twitter for some, for me personally, I just found it boring. Simple as that. Certainly, it’s yet another useful online tool in some respects (such as in the aftermath of the “elections” in Iran), but I just couldn’t get into the 140-word limitation, or reading one-sided conversations some of my “followers” or the people I was “following” were having (you have to join up if you have no idea what I mean. And I don’t mean you, Ray Dixon of Bright. I wouldn’t dare suggest you join up).

There were many other small, trivial reasons that annoyed me not worth whinging about here, but at least having tried it now, I can honestly say it really doesn’t do anything for me.

Scott’s attempts to convert me to Twitter = FAIL.

That is all.

Every now and again Leon Bertrand QC takes some time out from fighting the ongoing Bertrand vs. Time Life case in the Supreme Court of Queensland to update his Twitter account. A few weeks ago, on 23 June, he dropped in to whore his post about me being sick.

What is it with the left and being sick? http://bit.ly/Ssbrq

Unfortunately for Leon, his previous tweet (from 12 April) left that tweet looking a little bit silly.

Then there’s Leon’s Twitter avatar.

“Go ahead, punk, make my caramel latte“

Happy new financial year, GrodsReaders! Hope everyone’s hangovers are manageable today after last night’s festivities. I had a pretty quiet one this time around so, being the dutiful Australian citizen I am, I woke up bright and early this morning ready to do my tax so I could send the Australian government any extra money that I might owe it without delay. After brewing a coffee and digging out my receipts and other tax detritus I logged onto the Australian Tax Office website to download the convenient e-tax software. Being a Mac user I was acutely aware that use of e-tax has been limited to PC Windows users since its launch, but I was sure that in 2009 a government department couldn’t still be refusing to support close to 10% of computer users.

It is.

And as it has been promising to do for the past few years (with fingers crossed behind its back), the ATO says it will still “continue investigating [making] e-tax available to different computer platforms.” What complete bullshit, I say. And as Craig would say, “It is the yeah two thousands!”

Word.

Imagine you are a husky fellow of simple tastes and modest abilities. Imagine that, until now, you’ve been a long way back in the queue to the throne, but that suddenly the whole line of succession has been catastrophically blown up, leaving you as the heir apparent.

Where would you turn to find a precedent for your frightening situation? Could there perhaps be a work of cinematic art that might provide a way for you to understand your predicament?

Joe Hockey: The King Ralph of Australian politics.

Ahhhh, school holidays. You gotta love that feeling when you wake up on a Monday morning in the middle of the year and know you’ve got two lazy weeks while every other sucker is still at work. Thing is, you do tend to get bored during that fortnight if you’re not going away on holiday, so sometimes it’s nice to try and find a casual job to tide you over. With that in mind I got out of bed this morning, brewed a coffee, and got to browsing the job pages of backpacker networking site The Gumtree. And can you imagine my surprise when I found this ad:

It all made sense when I read this:

The Coalition and Malcolm Turnbull have received a devastating blow from the OzCar affair, with 53 per cent of voters saying they have a less favourable impression of the Opposition Leader as a result of it.

Mr Turnbull’s approval rating has plunged a massive 11 points while disapproval soared by 13 points in the Age/Nielsen poll taken on Thursday to Saturday. The Coalition’s two-party vote has slumped five points since May in the wake of Mr Turnbull’s call for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s resignation, which backfired spectacularly.

Even The Oz is anticipating Malcy’s political death.

Malcolm Turnbull’s political career has been smashed in just one week, and senior Liberals believe there could be moves within the party to remove him as Opposition Leader within days or weeks.

[...]

According to a Newspoll survey, conducted exclusively for The Australian last weekend, satisfaction with Mr Turnbull’s job as Opposition Leader has suffered the single biggest fall in the survey’s 25-year history. His position is now worse than Labor’s Mark Latham ever was and is at, or lower than, the levels of Brendan Nelson when he was dumped as Liberal leader to make way for Mr Turnbull.

Accordingly, the GrodsBook is now open. Leave in comments your prediction for the date on which Malcy will resign or be forced out of the Liberal leadership. The winner, being the person with the closest prediction, will win the Liberal leadership.

I first saw this clip back in the late ’90s when Les Claypool was guest programming Rage. If memory serves he said he was flipping through the book of clips to choose his playlist and simply couldn’t not select a song called Beer Sandwich by The Fuck Fucks. Enjoy!

Absolute corker of a post by Tony Abbott at his Daily Telegraph blog this week. It seems that the Mad Monk and Piers Akerman are the only two sentient beings in Australia who believe the following:

Press Gallery opinion is that this has not been Malcolm Turnbull’s week but I suspect they should revise their judgment. This week, the government threw everything it could at Turnbull and he never flinched.

Of course, Tony! The almost unanimous opinion of the nation’s journalists is certainly less likely to be correct than a hopelessly biased member of the disgraced political party in question. A hopelessly biased member of the disgraced political party in question who can presumably say something like this without feeling a hint of shame:

This week, the government threw everything it could at Turnbull and he never flinched.

I watched the House of Representatives broadcast for four hours on Monday (the things you do while you’re crippled with flu) and not only did Malcolm Turnbull flinch, the entire opposition side of the chamber collectively flinched. You could see it in Malcy’s body language and hear it in his voice on that day and in the days following, during which he contradicted and embarrassed himself across the news media. The man was in shock.

Abbott then accuses Rudd of acting un-Prime Ministerly by calling for Turnbull’s resignation. His benchmark? John Howard, of course.

John Howard never lost his dignity …

If you say it often enough it must be true.

A GrodsReader took this photo of a truck outside the Sydney offices of News Limited yesterday, noting that it had been shredding documents for over an hour.

Then again, maybe it was just taking care of Piers Akerman’s expense account receipts from 2007/08.

A unique verb in Melbourne’s vernacular is “Connexed”. Just say the Queen was in town and you’d been invited to formal tea at her hotel but you’re running terribly late due to an inevitable combination of cancelled and late trains, you’d be able to apologise to a frustrated monarch with the line, “I’m sorry, your Maj, but I was Connexed.” You see, everyone understands how the train system (dis)functions in this city and they’re very understanding when you have been fucked over by the system’s private operator, Connex.

Now the Brumby Government, itself largely responsible for the dog’s breakfast that is the train system, has gone and ruined the entire city’s ability to efficiently and succinctly sum up its frustration with the trains by awarding the contract to a new operator.

The Government, reeling from a public backlash over the rail network’s failings, yesterday dumped the French-owned operator Connex and replaced it with a consortium backed by Hong Kong’s metro operator … But Premier John Brumby insisted commuters would get a better deal from new rail operator Metro Trains Melbourne …

What will it be now? Metro’d? Metro Trainsoed? How will we possible cope? Brumby says we will be compensated appropriately.

More staff on stations, fewer cancelled trains and improved punctuality have been promised by the Brumby Government and the new consortium appointed to operate Melbourne’s train network for the next eight years.

Just after they finish spending millions and millions on new station and train signage, new uniforms, new stationary, new audio recordings, and an advertising blitz to promote the brand to the pissed off and cynical Melbourne population who have see it all before each of the several other times the operator has changed.

Family First Senator Steve Fielding (did you know he trained as an engineer?) has carefully studied both sides of the anthropogenic climate change argument and taken a side.

Family First Senator Steve Fielding has made up his mind on global warming - there’s not enough evidence that it’s real.

If only the AGW model was proposed in a collection of 2000-year-old texts of dubious authorship. That way there would be enough evidence.

In other news, Steve recently started taking the anti-swine flu medication Tamiflu because his sister-in-law contracted the virus. Poor old Steve copped a hard time from cynics who declared it was a stunt, detractors who thought it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, and even his own son who loves a good practical joke.

Steve was forced to write a post on his blog, defending the precautionary use of Tamiflu.

There have been plenty of reports on swine flu coming to Parliament House as though I am some form of carrier pigeon from Victoria. First of all I have no symptoms.

Like everyone else I have been told I am no more likely of contracting swine flu than the average Joe from Melbourne.

The truth of the matter is my sister in law was in quarantine at my family home over the weekend as she was quite ill and had no where else to go.

I have been told by doctors and the parliamentary nurse that I am of little risk of contracting or carrying swine flu.

This whole issue has been blown out of proportion and wasn’t a stunt like was reported in The Australian online.

Reporters at a press conference earlier today suggested I was being selfish by being in Canberra this week.

But given the advice I have received by doctors, telling me I am at no more risk than the average Victorian, I thought it best I go to work given the important climate change legalisation before the Parliament.

I’m currently taking a precautionary course of Tamiflu.

But this is only a precaution.

Commenter Gaz was relieved.

Well, Senator, I hope you manage to avoid swine flu and that if you are infected that the Tamiflu works properly.

Fingers crossed on that one, of course. After all, it was designed by scientists using computer models.

But I do hope you don’t succumb to the virus, otherwise you won’t be able to apologise to the Australian people when the temperature sets new records and you realise how gullible you have been.
Comment by Gaz on 24 June 2009 at 02:59:02 PM

Fielding: pwned.