Congrats to our resident gun-toting loony KG, who today entered the blogging record books for the world’s shortest retirement. Yesterday at 7.33pm the world was a burden on KG’s mighty shoulders as he solemnly announced that Crusader Ratbag would be ‘closing down’:

There are other things to do, other ways to spend my free time. A man’s days are limited and precious and a beloved wife deserves more than the time left over from blogging and cruising the net.

As predicted, the forces of restorative stupidity (ie. MK and his tender touch) went to work, assuaging KG’s petulant temper and/or massaging his bruised ego, and by 8.15am the next day normal transmission had resumed as he declared:

I’ve been talking to MK and to Gecko and the upshot is that I’ll keep going with CR and make more of an effort to stop moaning and get working harder. The knight is not yet unhorsed!

Total downtime: 12 hours and 42 minutes. We’ll all sleep more peacefully tonight, knowing he’s back on watch.

Meet the Liberal candidate for my own electorate, Pastor Peter Curtis:

If Pastor Peter’s jolly photoshoot persona isn’t enough to scare you, check out his views on homosexuality:

“As a Christian, I do not agree with the idea of homosexuality. That’s the reality. I can’t put it any other way,” Mr Curtis told The Sunday Age yesterday. “I certainly could never change my views that homosexuality is a perversion, because it is a perversion.”

Mr Curtis said his view that gay men were many more times likely to die from disease than heterosexuals was supported by several passages of scripture, and that he was simply stating the truth. “Homosexuality certainly does open up the door to things that are not helpful,” he said.

He’s also up to date with trends in education and science, and if elected may move to supplant Julie Bishop on the front bench:

He said that, if elected, he would be urging the Liberal Party to introduce intelligent design to state school science classes. Intelligent design is an assertion that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by natural selection.

“I would be very much in favour of intelligent design being taught in public schools,” Mr Curtis said. “Just as the theory of evolution is taught as well — in my view regrettably taught in science classes, because I think it’s a theory and not a science.”

Pastor Pete is running against Julia Gillard in Lalor. The Herald Sun told us earlier this month that Gillard is a baby-eating Maoist who wants to nationalise oxygen and force us all into gulags where the elderly will be pitchforked to death with rolled-up copies of Das Kapital. It neglected to mention that her direct opposition for the seat of Lalor is a bigoted homophobic creationist nutjob with a stark resemblence to the clown on the cover of Stephen King’s It. Purely an oversight, I’m sure.

Following on from Ed’s Gloria Jeans revelation, fundamentalist nutjobs certainly seem to be thick on the ground at the moment. One called Brita Stream (is it just me or does that sound like a water filtration product?) is doing the rounds as a guest speaker, peddling the claim that abortion causes breast cancer. Just like evolutionary science causes brain tumours and not donating to Hillsong causes leprosy. Brita is eminently qualified on matters scientific: she was Miss Oregon 2002, after all.

A loosely-connected bit of weirdness… News Limited reports that Queensland is the UFO-sighting hub of Australia, with more than 100 of last year’s 128 sightings coming from there. The Glasshouse Mountains is listed as an alien ‘hotspot’ so I’m curious about whether authorities have received information about any “U;F;O;s”. Good to see also from the online story that News is recruiting its picture subs from the Chaser.