Also, is Townsville Enterprise on the move, shifting offices down to the CBD? If so, ratepayers had better be on their toes.
Astonisher Iditor Pinocchio Heywood gets this year’s Baldrick Cunning Plan Trophy for forward thinking, and the ABC has a couple ‘I didn’t mean to say that ‘ moments.
But while the weeks momentous events have been swirling around us, Bentley has been strolling around, humming Sadie the Cleaning Lady, preoccupied with an item he recently spied in the Curious Snail. It was reported that the wallopers in Ipswich have been forced to do their own cleaning and prisoners’ laundry because of what they said was ‘government penny pinching’. (This government!?! Nah, get outta here.) They were particularly off-side about having to make breakfast for their guests, which they refused to do. So when they weren’t mopping up crime, they were mopping out the station. But rather than Sadie, Bentley used another famous Lady of the Cleaning Cloth to highlight why a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
Possibly Doubtfire is an unfortunate choice of analogy, given the coppers predilection down south to fire on the odd scoundrel with admirable certainty … and accuracy.
ABC reporter Martin Cuddihy
The quote of the week goes to the ABC reporter Martin Cuddihy, covering the Oscar Pistorius trial and sentencing. Reflecting on this spectacular fall from grace, Martin told us ‘Just a year or two ago, with Olympic gold medals, the man they called the Blade Runner had the world at his feet’. Err, Marty, there’s a reason they called him the blade runner. In fact, the ABC is having a bit of run with things like this. The ‘Pie was plunged into deep contemplation (actually, he nearly ran off the road cackling) when a few months back, an ABC radio news bulletin started with ‘The immortal Reg Gasnier has died.’ Seems immortality ain’t what it used to be. (The reference was of course to Reg having been inducted into the Rugby League Immortals list.)
In passing, this gormless-looking galoot …
UK MP Mark Reckless
… gets the week’s award for the Most Apt Name for a Politician. A pommy Tory backbencher, Mark Reckless suddenly made the decision to defect across to UKIP, the right-wing, anti-Europe mob making some headway in British politics. He will stand for UKIP in a by-election next month, where he hopes voters will also throw caution to the winds.
The good news and the bad news out of Canada grabbed our attention this week (the bad news: a soldier on ceremonial guard duty was murdered, the good news: the murdering deranged mongrel got his, courtesy of a Sergeant-At-Arms who proved he wasn’t just a fancy dress dude). This has understandably amped up the volume about Islam and radicalisation of easily conned young dimwits with repressed tendencies towards animal violence. While the finger-pointing and theorising will remain a circular argument, the redoubtable Larry Pickering has no doubts about the root cause of the problem, with his one drawing worth the proverbial thousand words.
The events in Ottawa have also ramped up the smouldering gun ownership debate, especially in the USA. But it seems one of the gun lobby’s key bits of fridge magnet philosophy is all arse about. This bit of vacuous smart-arsery recently appeared in an American paper.
Yes, well, Mr Martin, it seems to The ‘Pie that you’re right, but your arguing against yourself, saying in another way that old trope guns don’t kill people, people kill people. That being the case THEN DON’T GIVE PEOPLE SUCH RIDICULOUSLY EASY ACCESS TO GUNS. You twerp.
The passing of Gough Whitlam during the week, sent back to the pavilion in the sky two short of his ton, evinced mixed emotions as the debate about the Whitlam legacy gathered momentum. Larry Pickering was on a roll with the events of the week, and wasn’t mucking around or joining the two-bob each-way ‘he had his good points’ crowd. His eloquent penmanship made it clear where he stood about the greatest ‘flawed’ politician of our time.
Moving to the local scene, Astonisher iditor Pinocchi Heywood also continues to lose his way. Just back from a heady NY trip brown-nosing Rupert, our boy was back in charge of the Astonisher when they rolled out this newsagents poster on Friday.
Clr Parsnip called for a review of TEL’s structure and role, and most importantly, the funding model which in the last financial year saw the council (read: ratepayers) stump up $734,000 to TEL for virtually no discernible return. A story of major importance so you’d think. But suddenly, there loomed a problem, a big problem. No such story existed, although Tony Parsnip had indeed been interviewed by an Astonisher reporter for the story. This contemporaneous comment tells the story.
Another day, another cock-up.
The Astonisher distributed to newsagents today’s poster blaring
PARSONS PUSHES FOR TEL REVIEW helpfully adding underneath
Friday, October 24, 2014.
Interesting story, and likely to pull in a few one time punters for sure.
One tweensy weensy problem – not a single word of any such story in the paper. Not a dickybird.The Phantom isn’t just in the comics now, it’s in the news stories.
And it wasn’t until they were told about the poster that the story belatedly made it into the on-line edition at 10.23 this morning.
Parsnip told an inquiring ‘Pie that he was puzzled enough to ask the paper what was going on, and he (not his words, he was much more equivocal) got some cock and bull story about the yarn being pulled at the last moment because of the Lancini CBD Development going on the front page, and it WAS TOO LATE to change the poster.
WHAT? So it was a better choice to have a poster displayed across the city that makes the paper’s decision-makers look like prize chumps who couldn’t find their own bums with a mirror and two hands. Even if you threw in a torch. And arrogant to boot. Surely no poster at all and no one would’ve been any wiser.
But Pinocchio Heywood knowingly let a totally misleading poster to go out, thus reinforcing the burgeoning opinion that the paper hasn’t got a bloody clue. Or any idea of its responsibility to those few left who pay money for it.
So on Saturday what had previously been a front pager bound to create community debate became a buried item on page 17. It was a timely call from Parsnip, because TEL held its AGM on Monday, where chairman Kevin Gill and acting CEO Patricia Callaghan did a belated mea culpa for allowing the organisation to lose focus and direction, and promised to do better. Many honeyed words were spoken but they appear to have been empty words in light of Chairman Kevin’s subsequent comments.
Sweating it out – TEL chairman Kevin Gill at the AGM.
The council-owned Enterprise House
An article in that racy little tittilator New Scientist magazine tells us that some pointy heads over at an Adelaide Uni have discovered the oldest genitalia in the world (Bob Hawke and Hugh Hefner are both claiming them back).
Just why the boffins went looking for old scrotums can only be put down to a slow rainy afternoon in the lab (it can be like that in Adelaide ‘Hey, fellas, I know what we can do, how about we ….’) but you’d guess the home town of Alexander Downer was a reasonable place to start looking.
The blokes have somehow worked out that this …
… is not just a fish several million years old, but those two hooky thingos at the bottom of the pic is its penis. Yup, its dicky bird, John Thomas, its Mr Wiggley, the toyshop under the balcony, mum’s best friend. You don’t want to think too much about how our chaps came to this conclusion, and even less about their subsequent theory that all those millions of years ago, these and other creatures had sex side-by-side, holding hands ‘just like a square dance’, they said, although The ‘Pie, a veteran of many a B&S ball, never got that sort of excitement from a square dance. So just in case we weren’t keeping up with these revelations about piscine porn, the acadils and boofademics made a video to, shall we say, ram home the message.
To set the scene, it is a Saturday night on Flinders Reef East, and Mary Mullet is sashaying along, minding her own business humming the theme song from Happy Days when a cruising Gary Groper starts stalking her. As you will see here, the end is inevitable. Feminists are advised to look away.
Talk about wham, bam, thank you, maam!
Of course this unlocks another historical scientific mystery. It would appear that those who enjoy – ahem – an ‘alternative lifestyle’ (none of whom live in North Queensland according to Professor Bob Katter) came by their special preference when they somehow missed out on the square dance method and accidentally fell into a conga line … one, two OOMPH, one, two …
The New Scientist report is here.
Finally, a little snippet that could start giving priests a good name.
Two men of the cloth – the Rev David Rider (unfortunate) and the Rev John Gibson – staged a tap-dancing duel in front of a crowd at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. The dance-off was filmed by journalist Joan Lewis in April but has since gained hundreds of thousands of views on social media. It’s kinda fun in a week of doom and gloom – enjoy.
Enough now, it is away to Poseurs’ Bar, no doubt to hear the latest woes of Mongrel the Barrister, whose love life is apparently lacking that square dance oomph. Last week, he was lamenting that his latest gal only has sex with him for other purposes. He reckons last time, she used him to time an egg. Presumably not one of hers.
