Patch things up the Simone Warne way!

Well, here's a little internet gem for a Thursday afternoon. The inexplicably popular Simone Warne has released a bunch of helpful renovation hints, giving a wonderful history of her and Shane's successes in fixing up a number of homes. If only they'd had more luck in papering over the cracks in their relationship. Then again, if they hadn't split, no-one would be bothering to ask for Simone's thoughts on renovation.

It's the little details I really appreciate, though. Simone's just put so much thought into coming up with tips that can be applied to our houses. Like these:
His mum came across this great little cream brick place in Brighton East, Melbourne... It had probably never actually had any work done before and even had the original 1950s “Happy Days” style kitchen. We completely gutted it and added a family room, kitchen and a garage. We redid the bathroom, painted it on the inside and rendered it on the outside, then fitted it out with furnishings.
So helpful. If you are looking to fit out your bathroom, I, like Simone, recommend the use of "furnishings" as well.
But that's just the first house. Soon, the young couple started to get rich. So it was time to move upmarket.
Then when I got pregnant with our first child we decided it was time to move – we were after something a bit bigger... We completely gutted downstairs, putting in a billiards room, new kitchen and family room... We added an ensuite upstairs for us and a couple of extra bathrooms for the kids. This time we decided to move out while the renovations were taking place – we lived for a while in the Crown Casino...
All you need is Kerry Packer for a mate so you can shack up at Crown, and it's easy!
But now "they've" got a really palatial third house. (Or, to be more specific, she does). But this famously cheated-on lady isn't sitting back passively. No, she's quite the feminist warrior, challenging gender stereotypes about the traditional role of women:
My favourite room in this house is the kitchen though. I love the way it’s so open and light – it brings light into the rest of the home as well. Every time someone comes over we’re always in the kitchen.
But all is not perfect chez Simone. All that money ("We’ve got six bedrooms, a tennis court, a beautiful garden and a pool...") and yet things still aren't quite right:
The only thing that doesn’t really work about this house is the driveway. We have a three car garage but it’s only a single driveway. So if you park your car behind someone else it can be a pain if they want to get out.
Lucky Shane's left, really, isn't it?
Simone's column continues next month, and I for one can't wait to see what additional secrets she reveals. Perhaps a column that wasn't evidently tossed off with a ghostwriter in about five minutes. And perhaps one that might contain some actual tips, or that might be applicable to those of her readers who aren't fabulously wealthy.
But that's not what's important. Isn't she just great for going out there and doing all this stuff after Shane humiliated her? Well, I would too if someone waved fat cheques in my face for putting out half-assed guff like this.

Go easy on Russ

What a strange decade the South Sydney Rabbitohs have had. First, the club with the richest tradition in the game was expelled from the NRL. Then there was the exhilaration of re-admission, followed by the disappointment of wooden spoons and the strange realisation that no one who'd marched for the Rabbitohs' readmission actually wanted to watch them play.

Now, the takeover by Russell Crowe and Peter Holmes a Court means the least glamorous club in Australia's least glamorous sport - a club from Redfern, named after door-to-door rabbit carcass salesmen - is owned by one of Australia's great business families and an Oscar-winning movie star.
No wonder George Piggins no longer feels at home.
Crowe is one of the tallest poppies in the country and, by definition, one of the most frequently felled. Even an opponent at the meeting heckled him with "What are you going to do, throw a phone at me?". Honestly, you wouldn't blame the guy for locking himself up in his luxury Woolloomooloo apartment.
But Crowe doesn't - instead, he ventures out to drink at unpretentious pubs like the East Sydney Hotel. And I've ultimately come to admire his tireless commitment to being an ordinary Aussie bloke.
Sure, we can, and do, laugh at disasters such as his arrest and his singing, but it's tough in the Hollywood limelight - and forming a band with your mates is a better way of coping than, say, joining the Church of Scientology.
Most of all I admire his support of hopeless causes. He single-handedly rescued the most recent AFI Awards, and now he's rescuing Souths as well. He's put his neck on the line for a club he loves, with little chance of a return on the millions he and Holmes a Court are investing. It's so much more admirable than the usual ostentatious Hollywood habit of turning up to a trendy fund-raiser
and spouting platitudes about AIDS or world peace.
So it's time we were more appreciative of a man who'd rather have a beer and watch boofy blokes run around a paddock than swan around Rodeo Drive with supermodels. A man who turned down Meg Ryan to marry an Aussie. A man who, it seems, aspires to little more than to be like the rest of us.
As the man himself might put it: "Go easy on Russ; go easy on Russ."


PHOTO: Crowing up ... Russell celebrates a Rabbitohs win with fans. Photo by Simon Alekna

Who's checking the web check-ins?

I caught a Virgin Blue flight to Melbourne today, and I used their new web check-in service. It's very clever. You just log onto their website, choose a seat and then print out a boarding pass. Then, at the airport, you simply ignore the massive queue and waltz straight onto the plane.
But what I can't fathom is the lack of security. If you check in at the counter, you have to show a photo ID. But if you use the web option – or for that matter the machines they have that print out your boarding pass – there's no need to show ID at any point. You can just use someone else' boarding pass. Gee, I wonder if the terrorists have figured out that loophole?

One of the main findings of the 9/11 Commisson – other than that George Bush was so incompetent that he shouldn't have been elected President of the slow learner's class in high school, let alone the United States – was that there was a deficiency in the watch-list process. Mohammed Atta and his bomber buddies simply should not have been allowed on those planes, given the suspicions some law enforcement agencies had about them.
What's our equivalent of the watch-list system? A button on the website saying “Are you carrying dangerous goods”, where you have to select yes or no. Sure, terrorists are willing to blow up hundreds of other people, but there's no way they'd do something illegal like lie to a website.
Nor, for that matter, would they dare to just take a boarding pass from a buddy who should have pressed a button marked “I'm not carrying dangerous goods, but the Al Qaeda operative I'm giving this boarding pass to sure as hell will.”
The solution couldn't be more obvious – instead of being required to show our ID at the check-in counter, they should make us show it at the gate itself. That's what you have to do at airports in Europe, not to mention many international flights everywhere. Not exactly rocket science.
Contrast this with the ridiculous lengths gone to to ensure that you don't take even the most innocuous metal object - even a screwdriver - onto a flight. What could be more straightforward - or important - than ensuring that the passengers boarding a plane aren't known bad guys?
Sure, there may be some brilliant high-tech retina-scanning gear going on that we're not even aware of. I'm happy to be corrected, and told that ASIO really does have everything under control. But I doubt it.
Virgin Blue has lots of signs up saying that security is no laughing matter, and once detained a friend of mine for some time after he made an ill-advised crack about a bomb. But the reality is that their automated system, while convenient, makes security a joke.

Green with envy on St Patrick’s Day

When St Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday night, as it did this year, you know it’s going to get messy at some of Sydney’s dodgier watering holes. And there’s nowhere where the rivers of Guinness flow more freely that at Sydney’s Irish pubs.
I had the misfortune to walk past Paddy Maguire’s and Scruffy Murphy’s late on Friday night, and let me say that if Dante was updating his circles of hell for 2006, there would be an Irish-themed pub named after a fictional alcoholic leprechaun somewhere right near the bottom.

They were crammed wall to wall with tubby, sweaty backpackers in football jerseys, regaling one another with tales of potato famines, or whatever it is that the itinerant Irish talk about. And the most amazing this was that both pubs had queues as long as Ulysses snaking down the road, to toss in another gratuitous Irish cliché. Twas a depressing sight, to be sure.
And all this to celebrate a saint whose only claim to fame was expelling snakes from a country that never had any. Which is tantamount to giving someone a sainthood because they expelled all the homeless people from Point Piper.
That said, I’d certainly be willing to venerate St Clover if our Lord Mayor expelled all the intoxicated Irish backpackers from the CBD next St Patrick’s Day.
On Sunday afternoon, the city pubs were full of thick Irish brogues once again, as the St Patrick’s Day parade wended its somewhat wobbly way down Park St. And judging by the look of them, some of the patrons were still kicking on from Friday night.
But perhaps the real reason I don’t tend to enjoy St Patrick’s Day is that I’ve have always been extremely jealous of the Irish. They always seem to be having more fun than me. Especially as I’m not really much of a drinker – and really, St Patrick's is not a day you can enjoy Guinness-free. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so intoxicated that I developed an interest in Gaelic football.
My background is a blend of Welsh, Scottish and English, but I haven’t a drop of blood from the British Isles’ most fun race, who come from the land with the most beautiful countryside and the best beer. Perhaps this jealousy is why the England were so keen to conquer the Emerald Isle?
No other national day, and no other patron saint, is as popular in Australia as St Patrick. We don’t all get together to down haggis and shortbread on St Andrew’s Day, or have yum cha on Chinese New Year. And no other nation has quite as many theme pubs all over the world as the Irish. Every corner of the world has a dubious Irish pub like this one , which has seven branches in Tokyo alone.
And perhaps this is why few peoples are as popular around the world as the Irish. Look at Jimeoin, for example. You can’t tell me his jokes would go down half as well if they were delivered in an Australian accent.
But fortunately, there are some exceptions to the stereotypes in the Irish community, of course. I was amused to discover that there is a real Bridie O’Reilly (the original name of the Paddy Maguire’s outlets, and still in existence in Melbourne).
She works at Charles Darwin university in the NT. And her area of academic expertise? The negative effects of alcohol. Seriously. Now there’s a funny yarn to tell the lads over a quiet Kilkenny next St Paddy’s. If they’ll have me.

Catching a flying tram to Melbourne 2006?

Well, we're into the eleven days that shook the world, or at least the obscure fraction of it that calls itself the Commonwealth. (A strange name for an organisation presided over by someone whose wealth is tied to the fact that she's not a commoner, but I've already been on about that enough this week.) Melbourne 2006 has kicked off with a celebration involving fireworks and flying trams, with the added bonus of Jana Pittman pulling out of the Queen's Baton relay. So enough sniping from Sydneysiders – let's allow our Southern neighbours to enjoy their moment in the spotlight until after the Games, when we can make the obvious inferior comparison with Sydney 2000.

But it's time to ask the big question that really measures the level of interest in the nation's de facto capital (sorry, I called a moratorium on gloating, didn't I? I'll remember next time). How many Sydneysiders are going down to watch?
Let me begin by confessing that I'm going to be in Melbourne for a couple of days next week, and will try to catch an event or two. Really, though, it was an accident. A month ago, I booked to go down because my brother's got a show on down there. I, along with most of Melbourne probably, was going about our daily business, blissfully ignorant that the Games were even on. Sure, I knew we'd have to endure them at some point in the first half of the year, but there wasn't exactly an avalanche of hype.

Booking online with Virgin Blue should have given me the first hint. Not because it was hard to get a ticket – on the contrary. They'd put on a heap of extra flights on in anticipation, and of course no-one from Sydney had booked them. So I could book any flight I wanted for the minimum price of around $80. I was stoked.
The penny only dropped when it came time to book accommodation. I used wotif.com, the disorganised cheapskate's friend, but noticed to my dismay that the prices doubled during the time we were down there. "Must be some big event on," I said to myself. But then I realised it was only because of the Commonwealth Games. Whoops, sorry – I was upset at having to pay top dollar to stay in Melbourne.

To be fair, ticket sales are finally picking up. Why, they even had a queue yesterday! After releasing some more swimming tickets, which still haven't sold out.

But I, however, am paying a high price for all this hubris. I assumed there'd be heaps of cheap $15 tickets during the Games itself, and that I could go and see the sport I most enjoyed during Sydney – the table tennis. Sitting in a stadium watching professionals play a sport I thought was confined to police boys' clubs and disused garages was fantastic fun. The level of skill was amazing – they hit the ball so fast you could hardly see it, and regularly pulled off the kind of spectacular dives you'd be more likely to see at a soccer match.

Sure, most of the world ping-pong powers like China, Taiwan and Germany won't be there this time. I wasn't expecting much in Melbourne – just some people who might hit it over the net occasionally. So imagine my shock when I discovered that the event's now actually sold out. I'm appalled. Who's bought these tickets? Have any of you? I may even have to resort to eBay. Yes, that's right; you heard me – to get tickets to the Commonwealth Games. The indignity.

Looking at the website, there are still lots of great events on – as well as the swimming, you can still catch some of the track and field, badminton and squash. And it's still cheap to fly down – it's just a question of accommodation. So I want to know: is anyone going? Am I going to be the only NSW resident in town other than Eddie McGuire, who doesn't count? And is anyone at all tempted to go? If not, why not; and what would it take to get you down there? (If you're Ian Thorpe, the nation's particularly keen to know. There's still time.)

If you're going to be there, let me know – maybe we can get together in the middle of Swanston St and loudly reminisce about how much better Sydney 2000 was; possibly with the aid of a megaphone. Actually, forget any of the actual events – to a true-blue Sydneysider, that in itself is worth the airfare.

Photo: Dallas Kilponen

The empire slides back

Once, Queen Elizabeth II's visits to Australia sparked such embarrassing fawning as Sir Robert Menzies' "I did but see her passing by and yet I love her till I die". Now her presence sparks intense debate about whether we need her at all.
I'm a republican but I think it's appropriate for the Queen to be here opening the Commonwealth Games to the strains of God Save the Queen. It seems fitting that an anachronism such as the Games should be opened by one.

Australia is a de facto republic. Brilliantly, John Howard made the 1999 referendum about the constitutional model, on the assumption the change was so inevitable we could afford to dither about the details. Some Australians like the Queen, so support for a republic will probably become universal once Charles is crowned. We know too much about him and what we know, we don't like. It's impossible to respect and admire your sovereign when you've heard him expressing a wish to be a tampon.
The tabloid media's intrusiveness will bring down an ancient monarchy and about time too. If only they could do the same for the Commonwealth Games. The sun has well and truly set on the British Empire, rendering the association irrelevant, and Commonwealth gold medals are so cheap they should be made of plastic.
The only interest in Melbourne was whether Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett would break their own world records; but now they won't be there. We'd be better off doing what the rest of the world will be doing: ignoring the Commonwealth Games and looking forward to the World Cup. The Socceroos' qualification alone created more excitement than the whole 12 days in Melbourne will.
Even the Queen will watch only two days of competition - and her tolerance for boredom is so high she's spending most of her visit with John Howard.
It's time we pulled out of the one-sided debacle that is the Commonwealth Games and let minnows such as Samoa, Namibia and England fight it out. As for the infrequent visitor who's our head of state ... we did but see her passing by. So we should dump her once she dies.


She's back ... the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh arrive in Australia on Sunday. Photo: REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

Oh my god, they've offended Isaac Hayes...

It's tough being a celebrity Scientologist, and not only on the bank balance. First John Travolta had to deal with the critical reaction to his dream project, Battlefield Earth. Then Tom Cruise had to contend with all the horrible rumours about kidnapping, brainwashing and possible bogus alien impregnation that stemmed from his innocent and pure love with Katie Holmes. Now Isaac Hayes is so appalled by South Park's attacks on religion that he's quit in a Hubbardian huff.

He's been accused of hypocrisy by the show's creators, and it's certainly true that the show has slammed religion ever since the short on which the series was based, in which Jesus gets into a smackdown with Santa. But I've seen the episode, and I can imagine why a Scientologist would head for the hills pretty quickly.
So how offensive was it? You can judge for yourself – there's a clip from it at YouTube. Particularly harsh – or from another perspective, words, funny – is the extended clip telling the story of Xenu, the evil alien overlord allegedly responsible for all the problems we face in our everyday lives, which can be overcome through Scientology 'auditing'. This fairly implausible story is acted out with a caption saying "This is what Scientologists actually believe". I think it's called being hoisted by your own petard.
Subsequently in the episode, the church's leader reveals that it's all an elaborate scam, a position with which I've some sympathy. I've been fascinated by Scientology ever since the church's representatives used to regularly stop me on the way home from school to offer me a free personality test (perhaps that's how Tom recruited Katie?). This has now been turned into a "stress test", which I saw them conducting opposite the Town Hall only on Saturday – click here for a dodgy phone picture.
In all that time I've never heard whether the Church of Scientology acknowledges whether the reports about Xenu are correct, but I'm willing to bet Comedy Central's lawyers looked into it pretty closely before allowing the episode to go to air.
Not all of the episode's brilliantly satirical, though. There's an extended sequence where Tom Cruise gets sulky and locks himself in Stan's closet. Giving every single character the opportunity to yell "Tom Cruise is in the closet and won't come out!" You know, like a literal illustration of all those gay rumours. Brilliant. And by the time John Travolta joins him, it's gotten very dull.
This goes with the territory – taboo-breaking shows like South Park sometimes get carried away with their own daring and forget to make it funny. The other controversial religion episode, 'Bloody Mary' – which screened only two weeks after the Scientology one – doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs either.
But the attacks on Scientology, as opposed to Cruise, are right on target, and my first reaction to the story about Hayes quitting was to mock him. As you may have deduced, I haven't enormous respect for the religion of L. Ron Hubbard.
But then I somewhat guiltily remembered my position on those infamous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, which was that it was just too much trouble, and that they weren't good enough to be worth publishing. Is this a double standard? Is it OK to offend Scientologists and not Muslims? Does the violence of the reaction to the cartoons mean that my opinion is based on fear? I suspect ultimately I'd argue that there's a difference between South Park and the cartoons in terms of the accuracy of Parker and Stone's satire, which far exceeds the infamous bomb-turban.
South Park was much braver, unsurprisingly. Depicting the Prophet is old hat for them – they did it in a 2001 episode called 'Super Best Friends' (it's from the same series as their post-9/11 effort 'Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants'), which was an earlier, slightly subtler attack on Scientology. It got no reaction whatsoever from Muslim clerics at the time, in the UK at least.
We shouldn't be afraid to make value judgements about religions. They themselves certainly aren't when they say that all other religions are wrong. And in a free society, anyone should be allowed to critique them, even with the unfortunate byproduct of offending some of their adherents. (John Howard and Peter Costello certainly haven't been dissuaded lately.) Religions are big enough and powerful enough to look after themselves. And Scientology certainly is, even if it chooses to do so via peculiar statements from Tom Cruise, who seems increasingly unfortunate that the church bans psychiatry.
To use a Scientologist term, I reckon their religion is "fair game", for South Park and for anybody. And that Hayes felt he had to leave ultimately just shows how on-target South Park's lampooning was.
Dominic Knight

Sometimes I could just stream...

There are times when not having Foxtel sucks. The greatest one-dayer in history went to air last night, and I only got to watch five overs of it, after I rushed down to the pub as Australia were on the verge of smashing the world record.

But I didn't stick around into the wee hours as Australia set a few more world records – for the most runs conceded in one-day history by hapless Mick Lewis, and then for the shortest time a world batting record had ever been held as the South Africans somehow hauled in Australia’s massive total with a ball to spare.
I absolutely loved watching those five overs – especially the one with four no balls that went for 28! And when I was back home during South Africa's innings, pressing ‘refresh’ every five seconds on Cricinfo.com somehow wasn’t quite the same.
My apartment building doesn’t have Foxtel cabling, so there’s no way I can fulfil my obsession with cricket even if I want to shell out a hefty sum for a subscription. And while SBS spared us the misery of missing the Ashes last year, other great matches overseas go unwatched by most Australians because they aren’t on free-to-air. I only watched a few balls of our historic series win in India, for example.
But I’ve got a fast internet connection, and I’d be willing to pay to watch an ODI streaming down, so the question is – why can’t I?
It turns out I can, according to a friend overseas who I was complaining to via instant messenger during the innings. Not from South Africa, but most other matches from around the world can be legally watched over the internet at willow.tv. It's associated with Rupert Murdoch's DirecTV broadcaster.
The only catch is that it’s extremely expensive. Watching the whole of the current English tour of India, for example, costs US $84.95. But presumably these costs will come down over time.
This is clearly going to be the way of the future. I tried signing up to 3’s much-advertised mobile TV cricket service during the ICC tournament, when I was away from the TV like Darren Lehmann at the beach during those ads. But what they don’t tell you is that when Darren’s lying back watching his phone by the water in the ad, the quality’s so poor that he can’t even see the ball unless there’s a close-up replay. (The image is tiny.) In fact, he can’t even see the scores. Maybe we should wait for 4G mobiles?
Similarly, Telstra’s broadcasting some of the Commonwealth Games to its 3G mobiles. But I wouldn’t sign up if I were you. Not because the quality is poor, but because then you’ll be watching the Commonwealth Games.
It’s only a matter of time before we can watch TV over the internet, though. Another arm of Telstra, Bigpond, has already started streaming movies, and Foxtel are working on delivering pay TV over broadband connections, it turns out.
But as usual, the pirates are already there. While I was frantically refreshing the cricket score last night and reading about willow.tv, I discovered that my favourite sport, the English Premier League, is already being transmitted around the world using a number of dubious programs such as PPLive, the Napster of internet TV.
And I regret to admit that I couldn’t resist tuning in to watch Arsenal beat Liverpool on Chinese TV. Just to see how evil this really was. The quality was incredible - a large image that was very smooth almost all of the time. And the frenzied Mandarin commentary added a degree of hilariousness often missing from dour soccer broadcasts.
This is probably illegal, but like an English tabloid reporter sneaking weapons onto a plane to expose airport security, I did it just so I could draw everyone’s attention to the outrageous copyright violations going on. Really, it’s shocking that I can watch my favourite team for free, without having to go to a smoky backpacker-filled pub at 3am. Just shocking.
Because I refuse to be part of this blatant violation of intellectual property rights, I won’t include links that show you how to sign up. So if you Google “pplive” and “football”, don’t hold me responsible for any immorality that may follow.
As for Foxtel – well, I’m going to sign up just as soon as they've finished cabling my building, promise. Well, at least until Chinese TV starts broadcasting the cricket.

Would the last viewer to leave Channel Nine please turn out the lights?

Dating back to at least the time of the Pharoahs, powerful people have been buried alongside their most prized possessions. In light of this tradition, it may perhaps have been kindest to bury the Nine Network alongside Kerry Packer. It would have avoided the slow, painful death it's undergoing at the moment.

The once vaunted galaxy of stars has lost its lustre. Seven's monopoly on the best American shows thanks to its deal with ABC has seen it shoot ahead in primetime, and its recruitment of Ian Ross combined with the departure of Brian Henderson has led to the "who's who of news" being replaced the "who?" of news. Still, better the somewhat unknown Mark Ferguson than the known but disliked Jim Waley.
Things are so bad that their own website has misspelt the name of a show they broadcast every single year – twice. Although there isn't much point in spelling "Academy Awards" correctly when all the viewers just tune into Desperate Housewives anyway.
(And while we're speaking of desperation, Nine's now so desperate that the only way they can get viewers is by getting people to watch themselves.)
Nine's crisis is neatly summarised by the change to universally unpopular new logo. It's trying desperately hard to reinvent itself, but still looks too much like the boring old Channel Nine of old. And its efforts to get fresh'n'funky are ultimately just embarrassing.
The bizarre solution to these woes chosen by James Packer has been to take his network's most popular personality off the air, and make him the CEO. It's a uniquely lose-lose notion, where Nine loses its biggest drawcard and gains a CEO with no experience of running television stations. At least when Kerry used to gamble, there was a chance he'd win.
The problem Eddie faces becomes horribly apparent when you look at tonight's programming. In short, Nine's got nothing.
Antiques Roadshow at 5pm says it all – especially as there's an even bigger antique at 5.30. Not Bert – though long in the tooth, he's still brilliant in the right format. Family Feud is an awful show, and not just because it still brings back unpleasant memories of Rob Brough. There's no entertainment in watching people essentially guess survey results. Well, unless they launched Packer Family Feud, where Nine execs guess the results of their latest lacklustre ratings surveys, and are executed with the pistol Kerry Packer used to keep in his office when their shows don't perform. That'd be "must see TV".
Why you'd hire Bert amid all that fanfare only to waste him on Family Feud is beyond me. Give the man a talk show immediately. I don't care whether it's a cheesy midday one like GMA or something in the evening. It'd be better than almost anything else Nine's got to offer.
Continuing through the schedule... News at 6.00 – watch Seven. ACA – well, if you've had a lobotomy of sufficient scale to allow you to enjoy tabloid current affairs, Naomi Robson does it so much worse than Tracy Grimshaw, who still has a shred of credibility. Robson's one of the most awful personalities on TV. So it's no wonder Today Tonight wins hands down in the cesspool of miracle diets and pedophiles that infest the 6.30 slot.
At 7.00, up against Home and Away and The Biggest Loser, it's actually Temptation that will finish last. There's a wishfully-named show if ever there was one. 7.30 puts tired Getaway up against two classy imports, Smallville and Las Vegas. The only chance a travel show would have here is it if featured Jennifer Hawkins in a bikini, and she's signed with Seven. And third place again for Nine at 8.30, with Lost blowing everything else way in this timeslot and Medium a far higher-profile contender than Waking The Dead on Nine. You'd probably have had to actually died on your sofa to still be tuned to Nine at this point.
9.30 would be a bright spot for Nine with The Footy Show, but there's nothing bright about that show. Especially when up against Law And Order and Seven's cult reality show The Amazing Race. You never know, the ABC might even beat Nine in this spot with The West Wing. Yeah okay, so that's wishful thinking.
Couple this with the double whammy of losing the AFL and gaining the Commonwealth Games and you can see why rumours abound that James Packer will sell Nine. But even Alan Bond wouldn't be dumb enough to pay big this time.
If Eddie really wants to save this basket case, he'll do three hours of Millionaire live in prime-time every single night. It couldn't rate worse than this sorry line-up. Because Nine's cupboard is bare. In fact, it's worse than bare, because it contains Magda's Funny Bits.
Still the One? At this rate they'll be lucky if they've still got one viewer.
Dominic Knight

A league of their own

The A-League was launched to bring the "world game" in this country up to global standards. And in true European style, Australian football is already dominated by the richest club.
Sydney FC, winner of both the pre-season and season trophies, is universally referred to as the game's "glamour club". To me, this is akin to nominating Sydney City RSL as the glamour club of the state's pokie dens.

But Sydney FC is miles ahead. The team boasts the league's highest-paid coach (Pierre Littbarski) and player (Dwight Yorke) - and the only two who have succeeded at the game's top levels. As a player, Littbarski won the World Cup with Germany, while Yorke was Manchester United's top scorer six years ago when it won the European Champions League.
Of course, both fell on hard times afterwards - Littbarski was coaching in Japan and Yorke couldn't get a game at lowly Birmingham City. Why else would they now be slumming it in Australia?
Above all, Sydney's success should be attributed to the magic touch of Frank Lowy, the club's backer and the Football Federation of Australia chairman. After creating the A-League and guiding the Socceroos to an unlikely World Cup qualification, Lowy has proved so adept at rectifying disasters that he should be sent to fix up Iraq.
The A-League will be a victim of its own success. All the stars will leave whenever they accomplish anything. Yorke and Littbarski have already received offers after their success at the World Club Championship and will probably choose more prestige in Europe or more cash in Dubai. Sydney must pray that "All Night" Dwight's love for the nightlife keeps him in his apartment, a stone's throw from Hugo's Lounge.
Sydney FC and the A-League should be congratulated on an excellent first effort. Despite all the hype, though, the sport can't truly be considered a success until it's on free-to-air television. Until that happens, it must not be forgotten that the "world game" gets less coverage here than netball, lawn bowls and Bert's Family Feud.

A Crashing bore on Oscar night

Why do Oscar-nominated films have to be so serious nowadays? This year's slate of nominees is one of the most dreadfully earnest in a long time. Good Night and Good Luck, Munich and Capote are all dead-serious historical dramas, while Brokeback Mountain was a political statement that reimagined the great American cowboy stereotype in light of the controversial observation that some men happen to be homosexual.

In hindsight, though, Crash sounds like the most earnest of the lot, which is probably why it took the Best Picture Oscar. In fact, the only thing amusing about last year's supposedly-finest picture is that its writer-director's name is Paul Haggis. (I'm sure his wacky name has made Trevor Marmalade very jealous.) And that's probably why he had to make such an desperately unwacky film. Check out the plot outline from IMDB:
Several characters of different racial backgrounds collide in one incident, The different stereotypes society has created for those backgrounds affect their judgment, beliefs and actions, This in turn causes problems for each of them.
If I want to see racial tensions explode on my night off, there's no need to shell out 15 bucks on a ticket. I'll just catch a train down to Cronulla, thanks very much.
Now, I haven't seen Crash. (It takes a lot these days for me to bother seeing a movie without Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson or Will Ferrell in it – which covers about 50% of releases.) But I checked out the trailer to see if I missed something, and oh boy. Listen to these overblown attempts at profundity:

• "It's the sense of touch. In real cities you walk, you know. You brush past people, people bump into you. In LA nobody touches you. We're always behind that metal and glass."
• "I'm angry all the time, and I don't know why"
• "Why do you keep everybody a certain distance, huh?"
• "I just had a gun pointed in my face, and this is my fault because I knew it was going to happen"
• "You think you know who you are. You have no idea."
• You had a conversation with God, huh? What did God say?"
• "It's the sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something."

Really, this film looks so desperately serious that it's almost hilarious, like an earnest student play groping desperately to be meaningful. I'm sure it's all terribly impressive, and important. But really, who wants to spend a pleasant Saturday night enduring a pompous parable like that? Someone would have to point a gun to my face before I'd sit through this pompous slab of navel-gazing.
All of the pundits were tipping a sweep by the serious movie about homosexuality, but we should have picked America's broader, enduring obsession – race. Americans have been fixated on ethnicity for much longer than John Howard and Peter Costello. I've been to stand-up clubs in NYC where literally around 80% of the routine was about racial differences and stereotypes. And while it's very uncomfortable for an Anglo-Saxon to say – please, America's entertainment industry, get over it already.
Or if you aren't going to, please at least make it funny as well. Annie Hall swept the Oscars in 1977, winning Best Picture, Director, Actress and Screenplay. Allen's greatest film was partly about Jewish identity, via his neurotic character's relationship with a free-spirited non-Jew, but it managed to be insigntful while also being amusing. But it seems Hollywood's forgotten how to do this. It's been decades since a genuine comedy cleaned up on Oscar night.
Even Allen's films have become unrelentingly depressing. This year's effort, Match Point was Allen's twelfth screenwriting nomination (he also won for Hannah and her Sisters). And while it's an extremely polished film, with some great, wry observation of the British upper classes at play, the final third is one of the most unremittingly bleak passages I've ever seen on film, not even offering the mandatory Hollywood redemptive ending as a sop to middle America's Christian beliefs.
Probably thanks to the Farrelly Brothers, comedies have become primarily a 'low' artform, about as subtle as a hit over the head with a rubber sledgehammer. Hollywood's auteurs aren't interested in displaying a light touch any more. Cast your eye over the other prominent Oscar nominees – Transamerica, Syriana, Walk The Line, and the most unsubtle of the lot, A History of Violence. You have to go down to Animated Feature before there are any laughs on offer, from the reliable Wallace and Gromit.
I don't know whether it's all a long bout of depression caused by 9/11, Iraq and George W. Bush, but Hollywood's best and brightest need to lighten up. If this trend continues, the Oscars are going to need a Best Comedy category like the Golden Globes. Cinema audiences want to leave the cinema with a smile on their faces, not an appointment with a therapist.

Labor's highlights from a low decade

While we're paying tribute to John Howard, we mustn't forget to give credit to the group who did more than anything to give the PM ten years in office - the Labor party. So to go with my list of John Howard's ten greatest achievements of the last decade, here are the Opposition's.

1. Winning the 1998 election. It seems hard to imagine given his more recent performances, but Kim Beazley actually performed very well initially, winning the majority of the votes in the GST poll. But unfortunately they were in the wrong places, leaving the Coalition with the majority of seats.
2. Affirmative action. Labor has vowed to improve women's position in Australian politics via a quota system. And their electoral performance has brought more women in politics than ever before – in the Liberal Party, as female candidates like Jackie Kelly won surprise victories in former safe Labor seats.
3. Kim Beazley's 'small target' strategy. Copied for the 2001 election from Howard's successful approach in 1996, a man of Beazley's proportions – not to mention one who uses words that are even bigger – was brave to try this on. But he ultimately succeeded brilliantly, being completely invisible throughout the campaign.
4. Latham's 'troops home by Christmas' pledge. He didn't manage to achieve this pledge, made on the run to the great consternation of his party. But he did manage to get himself sent home by New Year.
5. Stance on refugees. Labor has been heavily criticised for mimicking the Liberals' hardline mandatory detention policy. But in fairness, they did accept one refugee. Unfortunately, it was Cheryl Kernot.
6. Crean's attempt to break union dominance. While he couldn't break the unions' influence in the party, he did succeed in destroying the influence of one former ACTU leader – himself. He would have been better off adopting the Howard method, and just breaking the unions.
7. Barry Jones' Knowledge Nation diagram. You needed a Ph.D just to be able to understand why it was ridiculous.
8. Bomber Beazley standing 'shoulder to shoulder' with the PM against terrorism. So closely, in fact, that there was no reason whatsoever to vote for him instead.
9. Latham's tsunami silence. The greatest catastrophe in living memory hits – no, not his leadership, the Boxing Day tsunami – and Latham can't be bothered making any kind of comment whatsoever. Even a quick mumbled statement from his sickbed would have sufficed, if necessary. It quickly became clear that his political career would also perish in the disaster.
10. Reappointing Kim Beazley. After the Latham disaster, they needed a new leader to turn around the party's losing record. But instead they brought back Kim Beazley, and the only record he has in his sights is equalling Arthur Calwell and Doc Evatt's achievement of losing three elections. John Howard couldn't have become a latter-day Menzies without Opposition as lacklustre as the great man had.

John Howard's Perfect Ten

Everyone's reminiscing about John Howard's ten glorious years of dominating Australian politics. Well, everyone except unions, students, refugees, Muslims, inner-city intellectuals, non-home owners, the National Party and other fringe groups that no-one cares about. So get yourself relaxed and comfortable as we look back at ten of the Man of Steel's greatest achievements.

Add your own below.
1) In the wake of Port Arthur, removing some of the nation's most dangerous guns, and then giving them to Trevor Flugge
2) Introducing the toughest code of ministerial conduct in Australian political history, and then ensuring none of his ministers actually had to keep to it
3) Providing hundreds of millions of dollars to boost the economy via trickledown from the dodgy government advertising sector
4) Achieving his vision of 'practical reconciliation', where the Aborigines have had to reconcile themselves to their disadvantaged position in Australian society
5) Ensuring that unfairly dismissed workers received help from union employees, who were in the dole queues
6) Creating educational opportunities for disadvantaged students who society had previously deemed too dumb to buy a degree
7) Fighting the war in Iraq – on both sides
8) Liberating East Timor from genocide, and then most of its oil
9) Finishing the bigoted Pauline Hanson as a political force by adopting her policies
10) Defending Australia from the threat of Peter Costello becoming PM
Dominic Knight

Hollywood: home of homophobia

Two trends define the Oscars - a burning desire to make superficial, hypocritical political statements (for which Halle Berry should be truly thankful) and the rewarding of actors who pull off an obvious transformation. This year, these two will combine, leading to a Brokeback Mountain sweep.

Why? Hollywood is seizing the chance to show how cool it is about homosexuality.
Of course, it's not so cool that it would actually hire gay actors, preferring instead to reward Tom Hanks and Charlize Theron for their "bravery" in playing against their sexuality. So the question in the best actor category is which straight actor playing gay will win - Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain, or Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote. Most tip Hoffman.
Brokeback Mountain has no best actress nominee so it's fortunate that Felicity Huffman put in such a strong gender-bending performance in Transamerica, where she transforms herself into a man who transforms himself into a woman - an even bigger gender-bending stretch than Michael Jackson donning a burqa for a day out in Bahrain.
She'll take home the Oscar ahead of Reese Witherspoon, who pretended she could sing, and Keira Knightley, who pretended she could act.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams for the supporting categories; best director will also probably go to Ang Lee as part of the sweep. George Clooney has a good chance because Hollywood loves actors who transform themselves into directors, but he's so often seen in the company of beautiful starlets that this surely won't be his year.
And best picture will go to Brokeback Mountain, which out gay-creds Capote because it's about cowboys rather than writers, who everyone expects to be gay.
So will Oscar night herald a new era of acceptance? Of course not. Gay actors won't be cast because they're seen as box office poison - the same brutal reason for using famous Chinese actresses ahead of unknown Japanese in Memoirs of a Geisha.
Oscar night is about slapping straight, attractive actors on the back for risking their reputations, not actually being inclusive. Genuinely gay actors will be left playing the same part they've always played in Tinseltown - in the closet.

Misery guts

Wow. 62% of Australian men are overweight or obese, and 45% of women. Of course, if breakfast radio-style gender stereotypes hold, the true figure is significantly higher for men and significantly lower for women.
But overall, this depressing figure seems about right. And it is depressing, which is why I take issue with the SMH article's suggestion that we're also getting "merrier". I'm sorry, who exactly is happy about being a lardarse? What the survey found is that we're drinking more – drinking to excess is 18%. But that doesn't mean we're "merry". It probably means we're getting pissed to numb the pain.

This equation of "fat" and "jolly" is one of the biggest lies in our culture, one that probably dates back to a time when most people were starving and jealous of the fatsoes who weren't. A better characterisation of the fat man came in one of my favourite comedies of all time, Planes Trains and Automobiles.
John Candy plays Del Griffith, the most annoying man in the world – an obnoxiously jolly shower curtain ring salesman. But in an ending of absolute pathos, long-suffering Steve Martin realises that for all his bonhomie, Griffith actually has nowhere to go for Thanksgiving. He returns to the train station where he finally got rid of Candy to find him just sitting there. And of course he invites him home. That scene always brings a tear to my eye. Fat people aren't jolly, they're just wallpapering over their self-loathing with humour.
I'm an unproud member of that 62%, which I attribute to a lifelong love of food and lifelong aversion to most forms of exercise. (I haven't even earned my chubbiness the Aussie way, by drinking, as embarrassing as that is to admit as a male in these parts.) And I even exercise a couple of times a week, playing soccer – and although I don't profess to have any skill, I do run a fair bit. I reckon I'm doing my bit, but my darn body doesn't agree. I put it down to a crap metabolism.
But enough of my own personal demons. We have a national problem on our hands. We're a nation of fatasses. It's costing us $11 billion a year in lost productivity – not to mention probably more than that in Big Macs. And worst of all, we're increasingly looking like Americans.
Something needs to be done. Kids have a lame chair to get them to exercise, but there's nothing for us grownups. So here are a few ideas.

• New warning labels. Cigarettes now have graphic warning labels showing the ill-effects of smoking, like mouth cancer. Similarly, meat pies should come packaged in a box that shows a picture of Shane Warne.
• Human-powered televisions. It should be illegal to power televisions from the wall socket. Instead, we should have to ride an exercise bike while watching TV. Note that an exception could be granted for watching shows such as Jessica Rowe or Bert's Family Feud, where the body already expends energy through shuddering.
• National Biggest Loser. Forget Nine's National IQ Test. What we need is a nationwide reality TV show to see who can lose the most weight. A galaxy of prizes could be funded by the Federal and State Governments using the savings they'd make through reduced health costs. Because as the likes of this show and Celebrity Overhaul have proven, Australians only lose weight when there's a TV camera pointed at them.
• More fun sports. It's more enjoyable exercising in a group of friends than at the gym. That's why I like playing soccer – because it doesn't feel like exercise. But what if this was taken to the next level, and we started playing really fun sports? If we all competed in regular games of It's A Knockout! down at the park, we'd lose weight and be royally entertained at the same time.
• Refuse to vote for Kim Beazley. He's obviously a terrible role model for all of us. We're much better off with the hyper-fit, obsessively-exercising John Howard. Fortunately, Australia's on top of this one already.
• Magical diet pills. With no side effects, unlike these ones. So much easier than exercising!
• Better sugar substitutes. The choice of Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Coke with Vanilla or Coke Zero is almost overwhelming. But unfortunately none of them taste anything like Coca-Cola, as opposed to Chemical-Cola. (Which is not to say I'm not still addicted to them.)
• Mandatory personal trainers. Our society is addicted to choice and liberty. These concepts are overrated, and even dangerous. In primary school, they used to constantly make us all do exercise in the playground. (Sometimes it was bush dancing, which was really harsh. But it's better than nothing.) Supposedly, when we become adults, we don't need to be ordered around like this anymore. But this obviously hasn't worked. So we need to go back to the days of people shouting at us to exercise.
• Make it illegal to sell burgers to people. McDonald's gets us in through the door now with its Healthy Choices menu, which promises low-fat sandwiches and the like. But when you get to the front counter, with the delicious smell of processed cheese and pre-toasted bread wafting through the air, no-one actually orders it. So it should be illegal to order the fatty option. It's illegal to serve alcohol to people who are drunk, so why isn't it illegal to sell fat to people who are overweight?

By this stage of the article, I've realised that what I actually need – what we actually all need, is someone to force us to be fitter. And I know just the person. Tony Abbott. He's ultra-fit, sickeningly so in fact, and we all hate him already. So it should be compulsory to attend half-hour daily sessions of Aerobics Abbott-Style each morning. I know that may seem a little reminiscent of the scene in 1984 where they all have to exercise. But let's face it – freedom and liberty are all very well when it comes to thoughts, speech and so on. But they clearly don't work when it comes to exercise. Even elite sportsmen have trouble with it.
Now, you'll notice that in keeping with my status as an overweight person, I have chosen to veil my genuine distress about this in a layer of humour. And in fact have nothing sensible to suggest. Now, time to go and have a cry in private, and perhaps eat some kind of chocolate bar.
Dominic Knight

Sex lives on videotape

I would have thought this would be obvious, but here's a cautionary tale for you all. Do not film yourself having sex. And do not allow anyone else to film you having sex. The rule applies particularly strongly if you're a celebrity. But if you aren't, the discovery of the tape could lead to you becoming the next Paris Hilton overnight.

Kid Rock's never struck me as the sharpest tool in the shed, but being taped with another dude and four girls on a tour bus is just asking for internet immortality. Apparently the lawyers are arguing his trademark was violated by the very classy adult entertainment company World Wide Red Light District. I can understand concerns about violation, sure – but of his trademark?
Then there's Pamela Anderson, an ex-girlfriend of Rock's, of course. Who I learned from the article was also in a sex tape with Bret Anderson of glam-rock band Poison, who released the somewhat unfortunately-named album Open Up And Say... Aah. She successfully stopped that video from getting published, unlike the Tommy Lee tape that was everywhere on the internet.
But really, two videos? As Oscar Wilde would have said, losing one home-made sex video is understandable, but losing two just seems careless.
It's a pity Rock and Anderson aren't still together – clearly, it was a match made in home-video heaven.
But Kid Rock's isn't the only sex video scandal unfolding at the moment. Some far more distressing footage is currently exploding all over the internet. Logging onto a blog-tracking website today, I discovered that the most popular search terms on the net at the moment – in fact, the first 4 of the top 5 – relate to a young Singaporean woman who videotaped herself having sex with her boyfriend. The story goes that a jealous rival found the phone and downloaded the video to the internet. Which, as far as getting revenge goes, is pretty much the nuclear option.
As amusing as someone else's embarrassment may seem, the consequences could be extraordinarily serious. (I'm not providing links or more information because I don't want to help destroy the lives of two people who are apparently teenagers.) And you can imagine that as the participants' faces are identified, the repercussions could be very dramatic, particularly in the context of quite a conservative culture. Pornography is illegal in Singapore for starters. And we know from bitter recent experience how draconian that justice system can be.
The internet can so casually destroy people's lives. We've seen this with all the embarrassing emails forwarded out of law firms – such as the Allens sandwich incident, which led to the women involved being sacked, and the infamous Claire Swires incident. It should probably illegal to distribute someone else's private video footage. In fact, given copyright law, it is – but when the internet's involved, copyright law goes out the window, and content can be everywhere within 24 hours.
Harsher penalties are needed. And there's only one way they'll happen – if a politician is busted in a raunchy sex tape. Obviously most of us would rather superglue our eyelids closed than watch a pollie getting it on. But you watch – distributing a sex tape would become illegal faster than you'd throw up if you spotted a tape of John and Janette in action. With harsher laws on violating other people's privacy, victims like this poor couple would at least get some measure of protection from instant internet infamy.

Winter Games of our discontent

I don't know what figure Seven paid for the Winter Olympics, but it was definitely too much. The IOC cleverly bundles the winter and summer rights, but if screening ice dancing in prime time is the price of broadcasting Beijing 2008, I'd have let Foxtel snap up the lot.

Skiing and skating are fun to do but tedious to watch. And snowboarding is so dull that even the competitors listen to their iPods throughout.
Winter sports are only exciting when competitors put their bodies on the line. The ski jump and aerials are essentially fancy ways to put yourself in hospital, while hurtling down an ice track with virtually no protection would be considered an imaginative means of committing suicide if there wasn't a luge or skeleton medal up for grabs.
If only all events involved the potential for death or serious injury - even figure skating should be a contact sport. Tonya Harding should have been able to vent her frustrations with Nancy Kerrigan on the ice, instead of hiring someone else to attack her.
Then there's the biathlon, where cross-country skiers shoot at targets. As we've seen in so many Bond films, a blend of guns and skis can be tremendously exciting. Imagine if competitors shot at one another instead.
The skiers would hurtle down the mountain ­pursued by a hail of bullets, like James Bond escaping from the KGB. It would be ­fantastically entertaining, especially if the US was represented by Dick Cheney.
But the biggest beneficiary would be curling. It has to be a very dull day in the alpine village before sliding a rock along ice becomes entertaining. What if the granite block was released from the top of the mountain instead and the curling teams were forced to skate in front of it, with only brooms to defend themselves against the resulting avalanche?

Even though we've won gold, Australians will never really warm to the Winter Olympics. But if the sports were made more entertaining, we'd love them almost much as we love those clips from Thredbo where idiots in ridiculous gorilla costumes ski-jump into pools of water.
Come to think of it, why isn't that an Olympic sport? It's more deserving than curling.

PHOTO: White out ... sliding down the killer ice.

Trial by daytime TV

I'm not sure whether hell exists. But if it does, I know exactly what Satan and his dark minions make you do: watch daytime television.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that "hell is other people". But if he'd wanted to be specific, he would surely have named the two nobodies who front Ten's dull-as-dishwater new morning show, 9am.

When I was a kid, I used to think that bad daytime TV was punishment for chucking a sickie and staying at home. I'm only watching it today because I'm doing my reluctant civic duty, having so far failed to talk my way out of the latest in a series of jury summons. And apparently what the State of NSW requires me to do in order to fulfil my essential role in the criminal justice system is to suffer through Channel Ten's excruciating replacement for Bert.
So in other words, even though I'm not the one on trial, I'm still being punished.
I've never seen these two hosts before, and if you're curious, now's the time to check them out - there's no way they'll last. Their banter's forced and awkward - I haven't seen chemistry this poor since Gigli. It's remarkable in hindsight how much Bert added to the programme – taking the piss out of the tacky infomercials and using his charm to wallpaper over the rot in the format. Well, it's painfully visible now.
(Note – subsequent research has shown that the hosts are David Reyne and Kim Watkins. Ten's website informs me that "9AM with David & Kim is "all about you"". Hell no. I want no part in this televisual train wreck.)
Unfortunately the show was so boring that even though it was blaring out at high volume in the airport-lounge where prospective jurors hang out, I can't remember much about it. They briefly discussed the alleged nursing home rape of a 98-year-old woman, agreeing that it was "awful, just awful". They had some diver on for a tiresome preview of the Commonwealth Games, and rudely talked about how much better another up-and-coming diver who beat her was. And there was the usual crappy Moira-style cross-promotion.
But if you want a snapshot of just how depressing the show truly is, all you need to do is look at the ads. They were cheap as – one gem amongst the usual low-rent ads for crappy metal shutters and carpet cleaning services was for 'Cartridge World', and featured the kindly proprietor in a duet with a singing toner cartridge. Another ad begged people to come and be in the studio audience for Ready, Steady, Cook. Presumably even bored-out-of-their-minds daytime audiences Ready, Steady, Refuse.
Best of all was a company called Amazing Loans, which seemed to have an ad in every single break. (Watch it to appreciate its true crappiness here!) They provide short term loans of up to $4000 to the desperate – Centrelink 'customers' and pensioners welcome, they say. Just call 1300 AMAZED! I suspect the most amazing thing about is actually the interest rate.
They were engaged when I rang up to check what it was. Of course they were.
I eventually realised that the likes of 9am is perfect to screen for prospective jurors. It makes the idea of spending days on end listenign to tedious legal argument seem a fascinating prospect by comparison. Anything to avoid Kim and David's stumbling awkwardness.
Fortunately, the trial I was down for got rescheduled, and I was released shortly after the show finished at 11. Which was a blissful relief, because there seemed to be a clear and present danger posed by an upcoming Iain Hewitson show.
If I'm ever called up again, I am going to bring a book and headphones to block the TV out completely. There are many things I'm willing to do in the name of civic duty. But please, NSW justice system, don't make me suffer through 9am with David and Kim again.
 

Another day, another dog whistle

Nice work with those comments about Muslims, Prime Minister. Just the thing we need to hear from our Prime Minister after Cronulla, the cartoons, and everything else. (Sure, the comments were old, but the refusal to dilute them isn't.)
The man who feared Australia being “swamped by Asians” in the 1980s has decided to pick on another ethnic group as part of his tireless campaign to appeal to middle Australia’s uglier side – the bedrock of his support for ten years. Although it does seem fitting that the comments were made in a book celebrating his highly successful decade of minority-bashing.

It also seems fitting that the comments have come to light the same day as a survey saying that Australia has become meaner during his decade in the Lodge.
Like anything explicitly criminal, it’s hard to argue against the proposition that Muslims who want to conduct jihad on Australian soil are a bit of a problem. Nor am I going to stand up for Taliban-style attitudes to women. But the Prime Minister has a responsibility to heal divisions, not exacerbate them. To be a uniter, not a divider, as George W. Bush laughably termed himself.
Whereas these comments just throw even more fuel on a fire that's already consumed far too much, and desperately needs extinguishing. They were always going to be reported, and always going to cause problems. He should have known better.
But oil on troubled waters is not John Howard’s way. He’d rather throw the Pauline Hanson voters a sly wink, subtly implying that he understands where they’re coming from, and the dastardly Muslims won’t be taking over on his watch. He’s a more effective, less ridiculous version of Danna Vale.
The jihad problem "is not a problem that we have ever faced with other immigrant communities who become easily absorbed by Australia's mainstream," he says. Well, unless you count the white Australian who waged war on the Aborigines with devastating success. But we don’t mention that, because that would be the dreaded “black armband” view of history that means we can’t apologise for, or even acknowledge, our problematic past.
And while most Australians would agree that “where is within some sections of the Islamic community an attitude towards women which is out of line with mainstream Australian society,” it’s also become abundantly clear during the recent abortion debate that some Liberal MPs’ attitudes to women aren’t 100% in line with mainstream opinion either. But I don’t hear the Prime Minister condemning Toby Abbott, or the millions he wants to spend on allowing the churches to lecture distressed women about the evil of abortion via ‘counselling’.
Howard’s defence is that he wasn’t trying to “"make some kind of tawdry political point,” but rather, “it is a view that I have held for some time.” I’m not all that reassured to hear that it wasn’t cynical opportunism but reflective of a deep problem he has with Muslims.
Ten years of this muck is enough. Peter Costello has his flaws, but he’s got far more class on these issues, as his subtle attempts to differentiate himself from the PM on the issue of tolerance have implied.
It's time John Howard’s dog-whistle politics were aborted out of existence. Let's hope he does the decent thing and takes political RU486 on the upcoming tenth anniversity.

If Dick Cheney likes hunting, it must be wrong...

Hunting is barbaric. Pure and simple. It is an ugly relic of a departed empire, and has no place in modern society, like the practice of feeding Christians to the lions. (Although given the Christian right’s actions at the moment over abortion, the lion-feed option is sometimes tempting.) And as for the accident – well, Cheney’s fellow hunter deserves minimal sympathy. Occupational – or perhaps recreational – hazard.
But I do feel enormous sympathy for the poor quail.

What I didn’t realise until reading about the accident is that hunters don’t even use a single bullet. They basically pepper the whole area with lots of tiny bits of shrapnel, making it far easier to take out a moving target. Which makes sense for Cheney – after all, it’s the same carpet-bombing approach his government took to Baghdad.
Harry Whittington was just another in a long list of collateral damage in the War on Quail. No time for any bleeding hearts. Well, except when a piece of Cheney’s shot lodges right next to one.
I can understand something of the pleasure arising from the skill involved in shooting. Having always wanted to slay many of my friends, I've enjoyed playing paintball, and I played LaserZone as a kid while it was briefly trendy, and had a lot of fun at an arcade recently taking out graphical deer with a rifle. I reckon there's also a chance I’d quite enjoy skeet shooting. But what I don’t understand is why the added cruelty of using real animals makes it that much more enjoyable.
Reading the Vice President’s account of the joys of a day’s hunting – given in an exclusive interview with Fox News, naturally – just makes the apparent pleasure involved seem even more perverse. I’ve never heard Cheney more passionate about anything, except perhaps the Government’s right to illegal wiretaps:
Q: Some organizations have said they hoped you would find a less violent pastime.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's brought me great pleasure over the years. I love the people that I've hunted with and do hunt with; love the outdoors, it's part of my heritage, growing up in Wyoming. It's part of who I am.
Cheney? Love? Well, there are guns involved.
Of course, shooting at defenceless birds like an old-fashioned lord of the manor is the only time you’ll actually get a chickenhawk like Cheney to actually point a gun at anything. For all their shameless worshipping of military might, they have a distinct distaste for actually signing up, as per Wikipedia:
Cheney was of military age during the Vietnam War but he did not serve in the war. On May 19, 1965, Cheney was classified as 1-A "available for service" by the Selective Service. On October 26, 1965 the Selective Service lifted the constraints on drafting childless married men. However, after his daughter was born, Cheney applied for and received a reclassification of 3-A, gaining him a fifth draft deferment. Asked about his deferments, the future Defense Secretary said he had "other priorities than military service."
Like, not getting killed, for instance.
That said, his lack of service is probably a good thing – enough soldiers died under friendly fire on his watch as Defense Secretary – 49% of Gulf War casualties! – as it is.
I would have hoped that in 2006, we were sufficiently advanced to have moved past shooting animals for fun, but no. Depressingly, not everyone agrees hunting is barbaric. Many argue, particularly in England, that it's a precious tradition. But as with the Japanese argument on whaling, some traditions deserve to die a painful and immediate death, like one of the Vice-President's quail.
But this incident should prove to everyone that hunting is too dangerous under any circumstances. If this sort of accident can happen to someone who is constantly surrounded by bodyguards, so was presumably operating under the safest circumstances possible, it just goes to show that these accidents happen far too easily. And the owner of the ranch said she's been peppered by shot before as well – and that it's pretty much part of the sport. Well, BASE jumping is illegal because it's too dangerous. It's time hunting was banned on the same grounds.
The last time a Vice-President shot anyone was during a duel. We don't allow those any more, and neither should we allow these utterly one-sided, pointless and cruel duels between man and animal.
Either that, or teach the quail to shoot back at ten paces.