I just saw this headline on The Age website:

SHOCK AS OBAMA LOSES KENNEDY SEAT
I'm in shock. Everyone's in shock. We didn't even know Obama was running! Why didn't someone tell us? Or perhaps the voters did know and, sensing that were Obama to win 'Kennedy seat' the US Supreme Court would have to declare the result unconstitutional, felt they had ( Read more... )

I'm just going to quote this wire story and leave it at that:

Australia experienced its hottest decade on record from 2000 to 2009 due to global warming, the nation's bureau of meteorology said today ( Read more... )

One of my favourite lines in literature, from the early Ian McEwan short story 'Solid Geometry' about the deterioration of the narrator's marriage:

'Since the time we exchanged physical blows, lying in wait to hit each other with the same shoe outside the bathroom, I had had little sympathy for her.'

Local political journos find it really hilarious to pun on 'Watergate' when reporting minor scandals, chortling at their Wildean powers of invention. I've never understood why. Watergate was forty years ago and the newly 'gate'-ed words have no obvious lexical relation to it ('Iguanagate'? 'Utegate'?). At last, though, I've come across a passably ( Read more... )

I was reading Robert's post yesterday on Barack Obama's rare show of disdain for his political opponents. I wondered why he had to say anything at all. Surely they're completely discredited in the eyes of the American public? But no, it seems, they're not*:

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having ( Read more... )

Tony Abbott has been saying a lot since he became Leader of the Opposition, particularly this sort of thing:

New Opposition Leader Tony Abbott signalled yesterday that rising interest rates would be at the centre of his attack on the government ( Read more... )

Early last year a friend of my brother added something to the Wikipedia entry for the Golden Gaytime:

Golden Gaytime (Cookie Crumble in New Zealand) is an iconic ice-cream created by Nick Marland from Streets confectionery company in Australia. It is a toffee and vanilla ice-cream dipped in chocolate and wrapped in honeycomb biscuits, on a wooden ( Read more... )

Tony Martin long ago proved himself the best radio comedian in Australia. Nowadays he is busy proving himself an adept at the tricky art of the comic essay. (If you want an idea of how tricky, check out anything by anyone bearing the appellation 'humorist'.) Often when comedians write something for the page and are actually funny - which is, alas, ( Read more... )

I'm a statistical anomaly. Surely there weren't many other Labor voters in the country who preferred Malcolm Turnbull to Kevin Rudd. Anyway, I now hope to see the 'total f...wits' who have supplanted Turnbull put to rout next year. Even Rudd is endearing compared to them.

For the politically minded, here is the ABC election analyst Antony Green ( Read more... )

Last Thursday the Herald-Sun columnist and blogger Andrew Bolt had the scoop on yet more falsified global warming data. This time it was a graph from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research on the warming trend there:

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, which created the last two graphics and includes an IPCC ( Read more... )