There’s Homer, there’s Sappho … there’s even ΠO if you prefer your great mono-monikered poets to be, you know, alive.

And now, thanks to the literary editors at Coles, there’s Amelia:

The best part was when she rhymed “nice” with “nice”.

Anyway, time for a GrodsChallenge. Whoever writes the best poem about the most unspectacular grocery item gets to lick the cake-mix off my beater.*

Have at it!

* Not a euphemism, you depraved Leftists.

Right, so everyone’s flapping their gums about MasterChef Australia at the minute. I thought the show was pants, but that’s beside the point. What really worries me is that amid all the chatter about judges, culinary techniques, TV ratings, Hainanese chicken rice, comfort food, cookbook-publishing deals and dumbfuck newspapers that can’t even correctly report the winner of a TWO-HORSE RACE, people may be losing sight of what’s really important:

Oh, and bugger me with a fish-fork if the woman who won isn’t a dead ringer for a certain Pamela Allen children’s book character:

Baby Rogenous is now almost 19 months old, so this week I figured it was high time I started indoctrinating him. You can’t afford to waste any time with this sort of thing.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking … but no, I don’t mean politically. I might be a pernicious Leftist, but I’m not that pernicious — he’ll need to be at least two years old before I read him The Communist Manifesto, and I’ll wait until he’s mastered Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before bothering with The Internationale.

Instead, I’ve started him on an area second only in importance to politics — sport. Lesson no.1 was football codes, and I’m delighted to say he passed with flying colours:

(Transcript here if you can’t understand babytalk)

Next week, I think I’ll introduce him to Club Wah’s superb Ashes for the Ignorant series.

Ant Rogenous: Do you want to have sex?

E Rogenous: No.

Pwned.

What is it with Teh Left and making treasonous wog shit on this most sacred and patriotic of days?

In what was surely the most shocking upset in world sport since Leon Bertrand Spinks beat Mohammad Ali in 1978, GroupThinkFC was bundled out of the finals tonight, scoring a meagre two goals against the opposition’s 10.

Still, it wasn’t a total loss. We were beaten by a team named Dirka Dirka, which can only mean they’re Islamist terrorists — which, as we all know, means Teh Left still wins.

Peace be upon them, Mohammed jihad.

A Western Heart idiot-in-chief MK doesn’t make much sense at the best of times, so there’s every chance that in this instance he’s talking straight out of his pimply arse — or, as Mr Creighton points out, is just plain confused.

But after having been alerted to the fact AWH had been deblogrolled by Tim Blair, MK tonight alleged — get this — that AWH had actually paid Tim for the privelege of being included in such illustrious company as J.F. Dreck, Andrea Harris and Andrew Bolt!

My own feeling is that, even though Tim once famously rattled a tin at his readers so he could buy himself a shiny new laptop, it’s got bullshit written all over it.

But it’s an explosive allegation nonetheless, and it raises several questions … the most important of which is this: how much would GrodsCorp have to shell out to get a guernsey?

I was flicking through a book named Mongrel punts and hard ball gets: an A–Z of footy speak just now and found what is undoubtedly the greatest description of Aussie Rules I’ve ever read.

Apparently it was written at the beginning of the 20th century by one Hway Ung, a Chinese scholar in Melbourne:

I went … to see the game they call Foo-pah … It is played in winter heaven, for it requires top endurance and activity … Men on one side try to kick goose-egg pattern ball between two poles that represent a gate or entrance. They run like hares, charge each other like bulls, knock each other down rushing in pursuit of the ball to send it through the enemy’s pole… 

I defy anyone to do better than that.

UPDATE: Oh, dear. Just out of curiosity, I plugged a line from the above quote into Google and came up with this:

The following excerpts were written in 1899 by a Chinese visitor, describing his experience in America (Hwuy-yung, A Chinaman’s Opinion of Us and of His Own Country, London: Chatto and Windus, 1927).  He was writing for Chinese readers who were eager to know what Americans were really like.

Authors Paula Hunt and Glenn “the Bolt” Manton: research FAIL.

UPDATE II: Do click on that link, though. There’s some very funny stuff, including this earth-shattering observation about Americans:

Their arms and ears do not reach to the ground, as we depict them.

“Hey, Aunt Gladys — make sure you pick up the paper on Thursday. I think you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise!”

When I was travelling around India a few years back, I picked up a beautifully bound and illustrated “gift edition” of the Kama Sutra. Every tourist does it. Seriously. Shut up.

Anyway, if you’re not too familiar with the ancient work, it’s probably not quite what you’d expect. Forget about the infamous 64 sexual positions — that part occupies only 10 of Vatsyayana’s original 36 chapters and, frankly, is about as useful a guide for lovers as Weekend at Bernie’s is for apprentice morticians.

The bulk of the Kama Sutra concerns itself with how one should live one’s life — not just in lurve, but also in general. Practical advice covers a diverse range of topics, from pseudo feng shui right through to convoluted schemes for seducing your mate’s missus.

Now, I can’t vouch for the quality or authenticity of the translation of the book I rediscovered on my bookshelf the other day, inspiring this post — it was published by Roli Books and now appears to be out of print, and my own Sanskrit has been rusty since I stopped speaking it in the 16th century — but if it’s in any way representative of the genuine article, the Kama Sutra is a work of comic genius.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here are three of the book’s best passages, quoted verbatim.

1) On general hygiene:

You should bathe daily, rub yourself with oil every other day, use soap every third day and shave every fourth day. You should do all this without fail and rub the sweat of the armpits every now and then.

2) For the laydeez:

The rules for a courtesan to make a quick fortune are simple:

• First check your man out carefully.
• Secondly, make him fall desperately in love with you.
• Then fleece him well.
• When he’s broke, throw him out without remorse.

3) For mah homies (on which women are the easiest to seduce):

Those who stand at the doorways of their houses; who peer out on to the street; one who steals glances at men; one who is jealous, covetous, immoral or barren. Also those who are lazy, cowardly, vulgar, foul smelling, sick or old.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and be the best damn lovers you can be.

Anyone who believes Wikipedia has a liberal bias is an idiot. In 2006, one such idiot — lawyer, home-schooling enthusiast and conservative Christian Andrew Schlafly — decided the world needed an alternative to the pernicious, Leftist Wikipedia … a place where other idiots could gather to read about a variety of topics without the terrible inconvenience of truth getting in the way of their backward-arsed ideology.

And so Conservapedia was born.

Nothing — and I mean nothing — demonstrates the rank imbecility of this website more than its entry on Barack Hussein (!!1!) Obama. The whole article is worth reading, just to marvel at how desperate and deranged its authors are — but for your convenience, here are a few highlights:

Obama used his Muslim middle name when sworn in as President,^[7][8] and chose not to use the Bible for his real, private oath. Elected by claiming he’s a Christian, Obama has since avoided attending church on Christmas and Sundays.^[9]

Obama refers to America in the third person, as a foreigner would.

To announce his trip to Berlin in July 2008, Obama used posters which show a marked similarity to posters of Lenin.^[14]

Obama uses the Muslim Pakistani pronunciation for “Pakistan” rather than the common American one.^[36]

Obama has consistently shown himself to be an elitist who looks down on “ordinary” Americans.

Obama’s smears usually fall into two categories: race-baiting and distortions.

Seriously, go and have a look — there’s plenty more gold where the above nuggets came from. And if you have time while you’re there, do yourself a favour and check out the references for the entry’s most outlandish claims (the Lenin poster one is particularly laughable). They make Leon Bertrand QC’s spectacularly inept fumbling for evidence to support his claims seem like the work of a perfectly persuasive genius.

But the last word goes to Wikipedia itself, whose Conservapedia entry lays bare the kind of attitudes that led to its creation:

Conservapedia is an English-language wiki-based web encyclopedia project written from a young Earth creationist, Americentric, right-wing^[2] and Conservative Christian point of view.

[...]

Several articles on the site have had reputations for bias and inaccuracy.^[9][10][11] Conservapedia has also been seen as part of a trend of conservative and Christian-themed Web sites imitating the format of mainstream sites to provide a right-wing antidote or Christian alternative.^[3][12]

Fair dinkum — even if I’d been stupid enough to hitch my wagon to the ideology of the Right all those years ago, I would still be mortally embarrassed by the abortion (pun intended) that is Conservapedia. I wonder how many “conservatives” are.

Remember Magna Doodles? They’re awesome. A friend of ours gave Baby Rogenous a similar magnetic drawing board the other day, and I couldn’t resist having a crack at it.

Fifteen-month-old Baby is really beginning to talk now, and he’s able to name a handful of animals and make their noises. So I decided I’d make a game of drawing a few creatures for him to identify.

Now, I’m well aware that drawing isn’t a strength of mine … but there are worse people to get stuck playing Pictionary with, I reckon.

Turns out Baby begged to differ when I drew this dog:

He looked at the board; looked up at me; looked back at the board; looked up at me …

“Meow?” he said.

Off I ran to tell E Rogenous my latest hilarious “kids say the darndest things” story. She looked at the board; looked up at me; looked back at the board; looked up at me …

“Is that a nose or a penis?” she said. “And why does its tongue have testicles?”

PWNED. By every member of the family.

Mis dedos! Mis dedos! Por el amor de Dios, ¿DÓNDE ESTÁN MIS DEDOS!!1!

Oh, está bien … aquí están.