Breaking news… according to the entirely credible and not at all tit-fixated UK Sun, ’Wacko Jacko’ is now one of them evil Jihadists:

Jackson, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, has become a Muslim and changed his name to Mikaeel, according to UK reports. The singer wore traditional Islamic dress as he pledged his allegiance to the Koran at a friend’s home in Los Angeles, The Sun reports. Jackson… reportedly decided to convert after discussing religion with a music producer and songwriter on his new album - both of whom were converts to Islam.

Let’s all get in touch with Karl Marx in the spirit world and ask him to predict the tempered and well-reasoned responses that’ll eminate from the AWH ‘famous five’ (Touchstone, KG, Eugene, TingTong and MK the dog):

“Well he’s already a paedo, the two go together hand in hand… what about Mohammed and…”

“Radical Islam now has three allies in the West: The Left, political correctness and Blame it on the Boogie…”

“I onced wrote several academic journal articles about the pathology of black men who opt for plastic surgery. Why, here’s a link. And I’ve also got a nudie pic of Michael Jackson’s mother that I, erm, ‘found’…”

“This is not surprising. Jackson’s brother is named Tito, after the socialist dictator of Yugoslavia - conclusive proof that he is a leftist and insane…”

What Rupe says:

In this new world, Australia has many advantages… We have great resources as a civil society with a tradition of generosity and support. To compete well and use our human capital to the best, we will have to draw on these advantages and make our country stronger. That means being… more trusting in our creativity and our competence.

What Rupe does:

Mr Murdoch flagged job cuts at News Corp operations in Australia and Britain… “You will see even leaner operations in both those places (Australia and Britain),” he said during the group’s first-quarter results briefing. “I’m not prepared to say how many people. I know, but I don’t want the headlines about it … but expect across-the-board cuts.”

Read the transcript of the first of the Boyer Lectures, if you have time, it’s a masterly concoction of cloying nationalistic cliches and paternalistic bullshit. Watch Rupert jump from gloating about the Russell Drysdale painting he has on his office in New York - to saying “what you make of yourself is more important than where you came from”.  Hear him reminisce about the heady days at Geelong Grammar (which he chooses not to mention by name) then slam public education as being “19th century” - because we’re spending too much. And listen to his pledge to make News ‘carbon-neutral’ by 2010 with “the talents and creativity of all our employees to meet that goal” (Timmeh and Bolta, are you boys listening?)

Super-blogger and legal whizz, Leon ‘Plastic’ Bertrand’, on Tuesday morning:

Whilst a McCain victory would be extraordinary, I’m sure leftists would blame it on the dubious “Bradley factor” [whites naming Obama in polling but bawking at voting for him on the day].

Political pundit and confused anthropomorphist, Leon ‘Splastic’ Bertrand, on Tuesday evening:

Many in the left and most blacks voted for Obama because of his race, and a minority of folks would have voted against him because he is black.

In other words, if Obama had lost then it wouldn’t have been down to racialist voting by whites. But Obama won because of - wait for it - racialist voting by teh Left and his fellow blacks. And “most blacks” vote according to race - but only a “minority of [white] folks” do.

And my question is this: “where’s your evidence, Q-Bert, you racist little sphincter?”

In the first few hours of this new Obama-world, the Rightards have emerged from their hovels in various ways. MK, apoplectic with shock and disbelief, rants incessantly and incomprehensibly about “King Barack” (poor kid - still, he’s got his porn to fall back on). KG puts his hand over his ears and chants “La-la-la-la-la-la-la!”, then posts some drivel about nail-guns. Doctor ‘Ting-Tong’ Ray takes KG’s avoid-the-issue route, proclaiming that Queensland marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is “talking through his anus” about sea temperatures, then producing some text as flimsy evidence:

Ting-Tong then proclaims that:

Hoagy [Hoegh-Guldberg] is a crook.

Which itself is quite ironic, since the not-so-good doctor stole that double-page scan from here at Google Books (you can even see his search terms still highlighted). The terms of reference at Google Books state that users may preview text, not copy, save or print it. Maybe Ting-Tong PhD didn’t notice that, much like he accidentally cropped this out of his original scan:

Careful Doc - when Teh Left brings in Sharia law, you’ll have your hands scythed off for that.

So there I am today, huddled over a terminal, stomach rumbling, thinking impatiently of lunch. Last night I’d taken some corn-fed chicken breast, cut into large chunks, then stirred it lovingly through a marinade of yoghurt, mint and tandoori spices. I let this mixture sit for an hour or so then baked it to tenderness in the oven, before putting it on the griddle to give it those blackened stripes across its moist pink-orange flesh. I parcelled this repast up into three plastic tubs and tucked it away: my lunches for the rest of the week. Now, as the clock ticked towards noon, my thoughts turned to this delight, waiting for me in the fridge, cool and tender with lashings of minty yoghurt raita.

Mmmm…. tandoori chicken.

Ding ding! Noon strikes. I log off, get up, bid a temporary farewell to Tim the page-sub who looks like William H. Macy. Down the corridor, around the corner, into the staffroom anticipation building. Open the fridge and…

Gone.

I hope you fucking choked on it, you cowardly, inconsiderate, thieving sack of horse shit!

P.S. Some black guy won the presidency.

California governor and ex-moofie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, thinks Barack Obama is an ideological 92-pound weakling who should get thee to the gym:

Schwarzenegger hit the campaign trail today, criticising … Obama as a weak candidate unable to build up “meat on his ideas”.

“He needs to do something about those skinny legs,” Schwarzenegger said at rally with McCain in Columbus, Ohio.

The former bodybuilder and action movie hero said he would like to see Obama get on a program of “bicep curls to beef up those scrawny little arms”.

I guess Arnie thinks Obama should be someone in his own image:

No thanks.

Don’t the wankers in the mass media love it when someone slags off ‘Australian icons’ (TM) like Don Bradman, Steve Irwin or Gallipoli. Today it’s Paul Keating, who in his latest book points out quite correctly that the Gallipoli campaign was a disaster from whoa-to-go, and that building a national identity on it is tenuous at best. You could just sense the populists, the blind patriots and the blue-rinsed bigots queueing up 3AW talkback or tapping away madly on the Herald Sun’s comment pages. Keating: the ‘lizard of Oz’; the lover of froggy antiques and Italian suits; the man who groped Her Maj; the scumbag who gave us ‘the recession we had to have’ (as opposed to the one we’re about to) - now he’s slagging our brave Diggers.

But we all know Keating’s not slagging anyone off - save perhaps Churchill, the drunken imperialistic old toad - and that factually, he’s quite right about Gallipoli. It was a tragedy for our troops but its elevation above other battles and campaigns is illogical. It wasn’t our first war as a nation: we had close to 20,000 men serve in the Boer War, another British military fuck-up. We didn’t suffer the worst there (France lost a much higher proportion of its troops) nor is it our costliest defeat (six times as many Australians died on the Western Front - and three-quarters as many died in one day’s fighting at Fromelles as did in the entire seven months at Gallipoli). But let’s face it, the rocky beach, the high cliffs, the Muzzies with machine-guns - it all makes for a great yarn, the stuff from which national myths are woven.

None of that will matter to the Gallipophiles, however, who have spent their lives marching to the nationalist drum and getting drunk on CEW Bean or Les Carlyon. The facts of history mean little to those who just want to use it as a euphoric drug.

So there I am, frantically searching the Interpipes for a job because this one is starting to shit me no end lately, what with all the extra crap dumped on my desk because someone pisses off without giving due notice. And I’m doubly pissed off because finding a job now is bloody hard since Teh Age sacked most of its hacks and replaced them with redundant ballboys from the Australian Open, so now the job market for journos is flooded with jobseekers who have been Fair-fucked. Anyway I find a vacancy for something called an ‘Online Journalist’, which reads OK and pays slightly more than a week’s shift work at McDonald’s (always a bonus in the lucrative field of journalism). And then I see this line:

Familiarity with C#, Linux, Apache, Perl and Python

And I’m thinking “…unless this is a gig reporting on music performance, Snoopy characters, native Americans and the herpetology scene, I may be under-qualified”. Apparently to be an ‘online journalist’ these days you’ve got to be able to hack into the NASA mainframe and re-task the Hubble telescope to read over Bolta’s shoulder through the window of his suite at Docklands. Being able to research, interview, write, spell, proof, edit and format are optional skillz.

I must be a Luddite.

I’ve been given the unenviable task of finding a solo musician to perform at a wedding (not my own, before you ask) so I spent an hour this afternoon trawling through online ads and musiciany bulletin boards. And I found this guy, who I think really deserves some public exposure.

Rock on.

This will sound controversial, callous and unsympathetic but I kinda wish that Dale Lapthorne - father of missing Australian backpacker Britt Lapthorne - would pull his head in.

Don’t mistake me, I’m sympathetic to his plight, I’m concerned for his daughter and I genuinely hope they find her alive and well. But I can’t help but wonder whether making the media your first port-of-call instead of your last, acting like a loose cannon and criticising everyone and anyone involved is doing the  search for Britt more harm than good. Take for instance this exchange in today’s Age:

In the cruellest twist of a farcical investigation, a sea search - with tip-offs to local media who were taken on board the vessel - was sparked after a fisherman called to say he had sighted a body in the coastal inlet directly between the town’s two, newest and best-known five star resorts.

A tearful Dale Lapthorne last night described the event as a “terrible body blow, extraordinary, just extraordinary” and lashed out at the AFP liaison officer who not only failed to inform him of the find but also made the comment “damn the media”.

He said the only information he received was two messages from Australian journalists, one who asked him to “call the police immediately”, the other to tell him it was “likely to be Britt”.

Mr Lapthorne said that when he did call the Dubrovnik police, he was told there was nothing to report, something he described as “horrible, really weird”.

It should be clear to all and sundry that the police run missing persons investigations, not the media. And particularly not Australian journalists in an eastern European country. It is likely that the Croatian police knew exactly what they were doing by not informing Lapthorne of their find, since bodies wash up along their coastline frequently and this particular one had been dead for weeks, if not months. Why panic family members and drag them to a grisly scene when the chances of it being his daughter were remote? The Croatian police were probably acting cautiously; the Australian journalist who told Dale Lapthorne it was “likely to be her” was acting like a presumptuous tool.

Then again, Mr Lapthorne has shown a greater trust in the media than all the other parties he has slammed as uninterested, lazy or incompetent: the local police, the Australian Federal Police, his AFP liaison officer, the Australian consul in Zagreb, the Croatian government, DFAT, Kevin Rudd. I can’t help but think if I was in the same situation, I’d want these people on my side. Meanwhile the media - in the words of my crass work colleague “a  fickle sodomite who gives no reach-arounds” - has rewarded Mr Lapthorne’s confidence by circulating a baseless and sensationalist claim that Britt was “promiscuous”.

Let’s hope Britt is found soon and her family can have either reunion or closure.

Broken Left Leg, in comments, has reminded me of something I intended blogging about last week before I was cruelly sidetracked by work. On Q&A last week, the odious Tom Switzer attempted to launch a defence of Sarah Palin with this curious analogy:

Switzer: “It’s easy to knock Sarah Palin, and I can understand why a lot of people do (laughter) … but it’s also worth bearing in mind a bit of history. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was president, in 1944, fighting the good fight against Nazism and Japanese militarism, he appointed as his running mate a simpleton, an unknown guy from a backwater state in Missouri (?) who had no foreign policy experience. And his name? (Pause for effect) Harry Truman. And history, I think it’s fair to say, has vindicated Harry Truman as one of the great foreign policy presidents of the modern era, having presided over the end of World War Two and the onset of the Cold War. I’m not suggesting that Sarah Palin’s gonna be the next Harry Truman (laughter) but the point is that so long as she’s surrounded by the smart people and makes sound judgements, she shouldn’t be written off.”

…which the agitated David Marr rebutted with seven words:

Marr: “Tom… she’s as thick as a brick”.

(You can watch Switzer’s performance here - flick forward to 39:00 to see it. Take note of his intentional well-aren’t-I-just-the-friggin’-guru pause after mentioning Truman’s name. Git. It’s also worth looking at the comic exchange between Marr and Peter Costello at 41:30-42:20 … another example of why politics would be more interesting if Costello was fronting the Coalition.)

I’m not closely familiar with Tommy Switzer’s work. He ran the op-ed pages for The Oz for several years before taking on the role of senior advisor to Brendan Nelson, and being highly successful at it. The Q&A episode page says that Switzer has an Honours degree in History from Sydney University, so he should really have known that Harry Truman, who at the time of his nomination, had ten years’ experience in the Senate and another ten before that as a county commissioner and bureaucrat. As for having “no foreign policy experience”, Truman sat in the Senate for the duration of World War Two and headed a committee that investigated military wastefulness - not much, but a lot when compared to Palin’s vacant verandah-gazing across to Siberia.

I have been copping it from all angles of late from neo-con bloggers, probably because a few days back I dared point out how inept and unqualified GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin looks. And haven’t the piercing rebuttals been coming thick and fast. A ’stoopid conservative’ rushed to reveal the grammar error that never was. JF Beck, unhappy that I’d taken shots at his VPILF, was merciless in his deconstruction of my joke about John F. Kennedy reading Sweet Valley High (a chronological impossibility, says JF, so I must be dumber than Palin herself). He also pointed out the fallacy of my claim that one can have “empathy for the environment” - a fair criticism, one I hope JF extends to the “war on terror”, a phrase that appears in his blog numerous times.

The ever-boring Currency Lad picked up on JF’s final retort: my mention, in the context of Palin’s naivete, of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. A paraphrasing of CL’s febrile historical revisionism runs something like this:

Kennedy didn’t solve the crisis you know and anyway he actually caused it and also did you know that he endangered the United States by putting Jupiter missiles into Turkey and hey, hey, hey he also tried to kill Castro with a poison milkshake and that’s, like, really bad, and did you also know that he took drugs, slept with lots of girls and his daddy got him into power and that his book Profiles of Courage was plagiarised and was only a best-seller because Joe Snr. bought all the copies and and and… <snip>

CL, who claims a PhD in ecclesiastical history, seems to have more problems with the secular stuff. In any case, my initial comment was about how Kennedy - himself a graduate of real History - handled having pointy Soviet nuclear thingies in his backyard, as compared to how a future President Palin might deal with such a problem. All eyes were on the VP debate earlier today for some insight into such a proposition.

Palin’s performance was jittery and sporadic but, on the whole, better than her woeful output from the Katie Couric fireside chat. She sounded stronger, if a little hackneyed and a lot rehearsed, when she described herself as a “Washington outsider”, a down-home type who knows the pains and perils of ordinary voters. On matters of foreign policy - Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel - she was helplessly outpointed against Biden, who has 35 years of experience in the Senate. The whole thing was at best a draw, at worst a win on points to Biden - but given Palin’s recent efforts, that’s probably better than many conservatives were expecting.

Still, the debate telecast will give JF Beck some good entertainment tonight. If only he had a cat to watch it with…

UPDATE

A kind reader has kindly directed me to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, kinda.

Breaking news from the trenches in the war against illiteracy:

Monash University will teach its first-year students grammar and punctuation after discovering that most lack basic English skills.

Baden Eunson, lecturer at the university’s School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, and convenor of the new course, said about 90 per cent of his first-year students could not identify a noun. “If you ask them to identify adjectives and other parts of a sentence, only about 1 per cent can manage,” he said.

His comments come after Monash colleague Caron Dann said the majority of her 500 students in communication were strangers to English grammar.

“Marking essays, I discovered the majority had no idea how to use apostrophes, or any other punctuation for that matter; That random spelling was in and sentence construction out. About half thought plurals were formed by adding an apostrophe-s, as in apple’s and banana’s.

“Marking the final exam, it emerged that few could write neatly: From bold childlike printing to spidery scribblings in upper case, it is obvious that handwriting is a dying art,” she said.

There’s a million theories why this is but my preferred thesis is the abrogation of responsibility, which usually starts with “It’s not important…” and finishes with “Someone else can fix it”. Unfortunately I cop this all the time because I’m usually the one who’ll send your copy back with a gazillion alert flags and a  comment saying “Fix the spelling and grammar on this steaming pile of moose droppings”.

And doesn’t the indignation come fast from 21-year-olds who think they’re great writers just because they’ve got a BComm and they once scored an A+ for a reflective piece in Year 10 English. And I’ve heard them all too. “Noone worries about grammar anymore, I’m writing for the SMS generation.” “Our system should have spellcheckers…” (it purposely doesn’t).”It’s just my job to report, it’s your job to worry about the quality of writing…” (fucking WHAT?!?) and “I’m only in print media until I score a gig on radio or TV…” (not if your arse gets sacked, bucko). I’ve even heard the “English language is a wonderful dynamic creature…” argument before.

The standards have definitely fallen and they continue to fall. This morning, an e-mail from someone way up the food chain that expressed a desire that certain people should “…get there shit together”. I cried. What hope have us grammarians got in such cruel, unforgiving world?

All you Melburnians will (or should) know that daylight savings starts earlier this year, kicking off this Sunday instead of the last one in October. But New Zealand’s answer to Reinhard Heydrich, well, he sure don’t like it:

How could a man of progress, such a visionary, feel so strongly? Does he have to get up every dawn to jump-down-turn-around-pick-a-bale-of-cotton? Does being another hour ahead of his beloved America strain his emotional umbilical cord? Does the extra hour of sunlight fade his curtains? Was daylight savings invented by Muslims?

Bemused, Commodores.

It was only a matter of time before the genetically disingenuous tried pinning the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US on ‘teh Left’. Today, my first sightings … a hatchet-job by white witch Ann Coulter and a God-awful Youtube mash-up that looks like it was done in a special school. (I should admit that I came to these via the bottom of the Internet biscuit barrell, MK and ;;;; respectively. And yes, I feel so dirty…)

The central premise offered by both is that Clinton and the Democrats are responsible for the whole mess (surprise surprise) because they wanted poor blacks and Hispanics to own homes. Mortgage-underwriting quangos like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “forced” by Evil Bill into relaxing their borrowing criteria. Banks then followed suit, “forced” into approving risky mortgages. For nigh on ten years banks, lending franchises, mortgage brokers, etc. suffered immeasurably, “forced” to approve and dispense billions of dollars’ worth of high-risk home loans, all at the behest of Clinton. And when the economy slumped, the bubble burst and more than a million foreclosures unfolded, investment bankers copped daggers in their sweet and innocent hearts.

There is a grain of truth to Coulter’s nonsense, as there is with most conspiracy theories, but she forgets to mention more than she reveals. Clinton’s programme did contribute to the problem but so did those of the banks, as this op-ed from 1999 shows:

Fannie Mae … has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers.

Coulter either thinks that banks and their financial offshoots are benign entities who do nothing but sit around, waiting to respond to policy - or she is lying by omission. They are as complicit in this whole mess as Clinton is, if not moreso, thanks to their irresponsible pursuit of the fast buck. But what of the Republicans, of whom there is little mention in Ann’s tirade? She neglected to say that it was the Reagan administration that oversaw and facilitated the Savings & Loans debacle of the 1980s (essentially a smaller version of the current crisis). Or that a Republican-dominated Congress in 1999 tore down the regulatory framework for investment banking that was put in place after the Great Depression. These and other neo-con policies, according to Robert Kuttner, have “turned the economy into a casino”. And now it is the US taxpayer who not for the first time is expected to bail out Wall Street’s high rollers.

Last word on Coulter’s deceitful account should go to the two local ignoramuses who are cheering it on:

“I had a feeling that was the case … yet another leftist screw up.”
“I think that the case it puts is rather convincing.”