Duck Friday

It will get even quieter

Can it possibly get any quieter around this place?

Well yes, it can. Thank you for asking.

If not for having such a probing, inquiring mind, the lack of transmissions while I step out for a bit might have come as a deep shock to you. So, all in all, it's an excellent thing that you dropped by and asked what the heck is going on.

Nothing. Pretty much nothing. Mostly sans a PC, things will be as quiet as a mouse around here.

I'm packing. I'm stepping away from the keyboard.

I won't be gone long, so you'll barely notice.

Heading to the coast. As one does when one is a little Aussie.

Bliss.

Bliss to you and yours too.

Remembering and forgetting.

xxxxoooo

Wednesday Wisdom

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

B. F. Skinner

Best quote from Copenhagen

"Because of weather constraints in Washington I am leaving before a final vote"

Barack Obama, on the chilly Washington weather, which prevented him for staying in Copenhagen right to the bitter and meaningless end.

Only the beginning?

By proclamation of the Pope, or something like that, Australia is about to get its first saint.

Which begs the question how many we plan on having and how many we require.

We're not an especially saintly nation.

We should leave it at one.

Best not to lift the bar, lest our failure to purloin a hitherto unrecognized degree of saintliness fails, dismally. Then we'd just look all-Copenhagen.

46,000 and nothing got done

Bad food, bad organization and bad attitudes aplenty.

Any wonder that nothing good came out of Copenhagen?

46,000 people gathered to achieve nothing. That's an awful lot of superfluous carbon emissions. Not that I'm counting.

It would seem that consensus science isn't as popular and compelling as the gullible youth of today, the pollies and the journo's keep pummeling into us.

It works, it works!

Finally you can rush out and buy your "Protons ' r ' Us" t-shirt. The Large Hadron Collider works. No bread-crumbs. No shit.

The LHC accelerated protons to energies of 1.2 trillion electron volts apiece and then crashed them together, eclipsing a record for collisions held by an American machine, the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

Yes. Machines hold records and have competitions.

Collider sets record

Duck Friday

Wednesday Wisdom

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

John Adams

Nike gives in to public pressure

Duck Friday

Santa Clause parade, Toronto, 1931

Darwin Road Sign

Wednesday Wisdom

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Paul Valery

Motivation

Mal & Mail

Malcolm Turnbull already has form when it comes to emails and leaks. You'd think he'd have learned a thing or two.

Not so.

Almost like - but not at all - Shane Warne and SMS, Mal can't keep his hands off the keyboard.

Seems that Julie 'she can't be rolled' Bishop is yeh typical two-faced pollie who thinks speaking with fork-tongue is part of her job description.

In leaked emails, written with rather too much deliberation, after Bishop and Turnbull had a "blazing row" over the Liberal leadership ballot, Turnbull ensures there are no ambiguities.

Naturally, Mal trots Lucy out in his newly acquired and annoyingly persistent two-for-one persona:

"He writes that he and his wife, Lucy Turnbull, were unable to reconcile Ms Bishop's public declarations of admiration for and loyalty to Mr Abbott with "what you were saying to us last night in our apartment ... your scathing attacks on him and his character".

"You would have been far better advised not to accept that role," Mr Turnbull concludes."

A new speed record for leaking of private emails?

Coinky-dink, I'm sure.

Turnbull & Bishop in blazing row

Mal & Lucy

Mal & Lucy Turnbull have been everywhere together this week.

Wherever Mal went, there was Lucy.

Whatever Mal said, he included Lucy. As in: "Lucy and I will decide ..." or "Lucy and I will consider ...".

Not many men would bring their wife to the office day in and day out for the sake of having her clutter up the place. Not many men would keep announcing that they can't make job decisions without their wife. Not many men need to tell a gaggle of journalists to naff off because they want to have some quiet time with their wife. But, how much peace and quiet does a man expect when he takes his wife to a busy building where a few thousand other people go each day, and that's not counting the tourists?

Perhaps Mal is setting an example for younger men, and in twenty years time wives won't need to earn a living, so they'll all hang out at their husband's place of work.

It could happen.

It would still be weird.

Everyone's got Woods

Is there anyone who hasn't had sex with Tiger Woods?

Please form an orderly queue in the phone booth over there.

Thank you.

Too regular

Researchers at the University of Montreal wanted to study men in their 20s and porn.

The usual scientific standard would be to recruit a group of men in the target demographic who have regularly watched porn, and a group men in the target demographic who haven't watched porn, and then expose the two groups to whatever tests the researchers had carefully designed.

And that's where the whole idea fell apart.

They couldn't find any men in their 20s who hadn't regularly watched porn.

In deep shit

Not for the first time, David Truscott, resident of England, has been jailed over his obsessive visits to a Cornwall farm, where he likes - a little too much - to submerge himself in manure.

In addition to more jail time - this time 20 weeks, last time 16 weeks - Truscott has been banned from visiting the farm where he has, apparently, been pleasuring himself for years.

In a 2004 case, the court was told that Truscott liked to plunge waist deep in manure for "sexual reasons".

During the episode in which police most recently caught him, he was wearing "shiny red shorts and rubber gloves". No mention of where about his person those garments were located. Perhaps in the normal places.

Rubber gloves and tissues left behind on other occasions, and bottom marks in manure, alerted the farmer that something was up.

Duck Friday

Wednesday Wisdom

Beauty fades – dumb is forever.

Judge Judy

Enough with the humble already!

Would someone get everyone a dictionary - please!

As the newly and hilariously anointed leader of the federal liberal party, Tony Abbott, as so many have before him, promptly announced that he was awfully, awfully humbled by the whole thing.

For ƒυςќ sake - get the man a dictionary!

Shocked? Not this little black duck

Way back when, all the way back at the beginning of August, on this little blog:

"Notably, two articles in The Weekend Australia caught up, days late, with my thinking - woot! How nice to see that our top journo's are avidly reading and appropriating from this little blog, albeit, it takes them some time to get with the program.

For what it's worth, senior Labor strategists reckon they'll be fighting Abbott at the next election.

Well, yeah. Said that already, and one hardly needs to talk to a Labor strategist to come up with a bleedin' obvious outcome. The Monk will lead, one way or another. All he has to do is wait until the others fall over and skate to gold. Bit of a no brainer."

The only shock is that Julie Bishop still has a job. An ineffectual and invisible deputy leader isn't doing much to galvanism or inspire the Liberals or Liberal supporters.

Disinfected form queue here

Much like the Catholic church offering speedy passage for Anglicans, Family First Senator Steve Fielding is contemplating an appropriate manner in which to open his arms and offer safety to the disaffected members of other political parties.

Although, that's not quite how he put it:

"We're going to discuss accepting disinfected (sic) members from Labor and Liberal whether they want to join Family First."

Learning difficulties aside, I will always prefer to believe that Fielding did mean "disinfected".

Wouldn't you feel more relaxed and comfortable if they were thoroughly disinfected before you let them into your party?

Grech innocent of everything

Godwin Grech, having quietly retired from the public service a few months ago, has now been quietly exonerated of anything and everything under the sun by a federal senate committee.

We will always be left wondering what role Grech saw for himself in siding with any party; where he believed it would lead his quiet, and quietly obsessive, public servant's life.

"In November last year - many months before the Utegate allegations came to light - in another email to an undisclosed recipient Mr Grech says: ''My immediate motivation is to place myself where I think I could be of most value to MT and the Party. At this stage I am probably more valuable here in Treasury.''

In May 2009, Mr Grech emailed John Howard's former chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos, to ask if he will act as a go-between between himself and the Liberal Senator Eric Abetz.

''I will explain later - but I need him to know from a highly credible source that I am Lib.''

One also wonders, with no small amount of sarcasm, at the at-a-boy encouragement offered by Grech to Malcolm.

"After a critical meeting in Sydney before the OzCar hearings, Mr Grech reflects: ''You looked really good.'' He urges Mr Turnbull to ''be true to yourself as much as you can.''

Huh ha.

Strangegate.

Mystifyinggate.


Godwin cleared of contempt charge