ABORTION! Now that I've got your attention: abortion

OK. Fine. Right. Abortion, yeah?

I don't really like writing or talking about abortion, because...well, who does? Anytime you express an opinion on abortion you're likely to get someone calling you a monster or a Nazi or demanding to know how YOU would feel if you'd been aborted, and then you have to give them a lesson about logic and it goes on and on forever.

But look I've been thinking about abortion, and much like a mushroom sprouting from soil, an opinion has burst out on top of my head, so feel free to pick it.

The reason I'm thinking about it is because it's in the news a bit lately. Tasmania has introduced a bill to finally decriminalise abortion, and there is a bit of speculation swirling regarding the fact that in Victoria, the Liberals rely on the vote of rabid pro-lifer and perks-enjoyer Geoff Shaw, and that if Tony Abbott becomes prime minister he may have to rely in the Senate on the DLP's pro-life, pro-insanity Senator John Madigan.

So it's a bit topical. And really, it's always topical, because there are always people who won't let go, and keep trying to wind the clock back.

But here is the thing: I feel like a lot of the arguments go in the wrong direction, and they tend to go in the wrong direction because the anti-abortion lobby knows just which buttons to push. I think there is a line of thought which is not used often enough, and this is important because to me the real battle to defend abortion rights isn't in trying to convince pro-lifers to change their stance, but in the big middle ground of "don't-knows", the people who maybe haven't put much thought into it, but are ripe for the convincing by a pious-looking politician with a sincere-sounding speech.

First, we have to recognise that "pro-lifers" fall into two broad categories: real pro-lifers and fake pro-lifers.

The real pro-lifers are a minority - most "pro-lifers" are faking it. Real pro-lifers are the people who genuinely believe conception is the beginning of, not just life, but personhood. They sincerely believe that a foetus is a person with all the concomitant human rights that you or I have, and that aborting a foetus is the same as killing an actual child. They really believe the rubbish they spout about "the rights of the unborn child", and they won't listen at all when you point out that this is an oxymoron and there is actually no such thing as an "unborn child", given a "child" is someone who has been born. They also won't listen if you tell them that abortion can't be "murder" because murder is by definition illegal. Basically they won't listen to anything, so it's pointless to even try with these people.

And that pointlessness is, in fact, the point. The REAL pro-lifers are batshit insane. These are the ones who end up bombing abortion clinics and shooting doctors, and why wouldn't they? If you heard that down the road there was a government-sanctioned facility where doctors were shooting five-year-olds in the head, wouldn't you say some pretty extreme measures were needed to stop this? Wouldn't you, even if you lacked the courage to directly attack the child-killers yourself, heartily applaud those who did? How could you look negatively upon someone who stepped in to prevent children being slaughtered?

Well, that's how real pro-lifers see it. They are insane, and therefore their insane actions seem perfectly reasonable. And so naturally, there's no point trying to reason with them. They're fringe lunatics: we don't need to argue with them, we need to ignore them.

But then there are the fake pro-lifers. These are the ones who claim to be concerned about "the rights of the unborn child", but when faced with what is purportedly a nightmarish holocaust of kid-slaughter, say things like "safe, legal and rare", or demand that Medicare funding be removed.

I mean, imagine! Imagine believing that children are being murdered, but wanting it to be "safe, legal and rare"! Imagine saying, "Child murder is OK, but don't use taxpayer's money on it"! Come on.

Look at the debate that flares sometimes over instances of rape or incest. If you genuinely believed that foetuses were people, how could you make exceptions for rape or incest victims? "I don't think we should kill children except when their father's a rapist - babies need to be punished for that!" Please.

But a rape-incest exception, in fact, betrays a fake pro-lifer for what they are: a woman-punisher. The reason many "pro-lifers" are willing to entertain exceptions is because those exceptions deal with women whose pregnancy is not their fault.

And there is the key. The vast majority of "pro-lifers" are frauds who are simply out to punish women for having sex. They don't care about the "unborn children", or else they'd be marching with burning torches in the streets, storming abortion clinics daily. They will say their concern is for the poor dead babies, but then they'll go ahead and push for measures that allow abortion, but make it more expensive and difficult for a woman to access. Or they'll push to make it illegal, but exempt those women who came by their condition through "no fault of their own".

It is quite clear what these people are about. They are about ensuring that women don't "get away with it". They are about ensuring that if a woman DOES have the irrepressible audacity to have sex, she damn well better suffer for it. Either through a pregnancy or making abortions so difficult, expensive or dangerous that it turns her life upside down. The important thing is that women are made aware that their sin will not go unpunished. The important thing is that women NEVER feel free to enjoy sex without the threat of dire consequences.

And so what I say is, let's call these fake pro-lifers out. Every time a politician or a commentator or an activist claims they want to stop the killing of unborn babies, let's point out just how hypocritical they're being. Let's point out that if all they're willing to do is talk about it, call for cuts to funding or reductions in the numbers, they surely cannot be serious about considering these to be actual children.

And let's make sure those in-betweeners who haven't made their minds up and are just now looking curiously at the issue realise that the "pro-lifers" they see in the papers and on TV are full of disingenuous and malicious cant, and that if you want to be a pro-lifer, you can either join the lunatics or the liars.

Call 'em out, guys. The only way to make sure women retain control over their own bodies, is to make sure the other side doesn't get away with pretending that's not the field we're fighting on.

It's Time To Put On A Show!

And to tantalise your comedy-buds, check out this exclusive PROMO VIDEO, starring me and SPECIAL GUEST STARS Jonah, Kaia and Layla Pobjie! It demonstrates just how many hats I wear as a comedian.



Now go and buy some goddamn tickets!

This Is Me

I like to count my blessings. I don't do it often enough, but I've been doing it more lately because I know what a good thing it is to do, to remind myself of what's fantastic about life.

And I have many blessings. My marvellous wife, my spectacular children, my adorable friends, the opportunity to get paid to write, and to have large numbers of people see my work. An absence of famine, war or violence from my life. The privilege of living as a thirtyish white man in a first world country. I am safe, well, and loved. Hell, my cup overfloweth.

I have a good life. I have a great life.

In fact, the only parts of my life that aren't good are the parts that are absolutely awful.

But those parts don't really count because they're not real. They're all in my head. They're my own weakness and stupidity overwhelming the logic centres of my brain. They're bullshit.

However, they do provide a fascinating (not really) insight into how a person can know their life is brilliant at the same time as they feel their life is unbearable.

But it's not real. Let me stress that. Let me stress in particular that I know it's not real. I already know.

Let me stress also that, as I mentioned above, I know how good my life is. I count my blessings.

This is relevant because when you talk about what's awful in your life, people tend to try to remind you of all the good things and try to scold you for not appreciating them, so it's useful to make it absolutely clear: yeah, I got that.

I got it. I got the good stuff. I got the blessings. I got what I need to be grateful for.

But there'll always be times when life remains awful, for one simple reason: I hate myself.

I've often heard it said that you can't love others until you love yourself. That sounds to me like crap, and I hope I'm right, because I like to think I love a great many people, but I could hardly hate myself more.

It may be that my overwhelming self-loathing is part of the bullshit I mentioned earlier. It may be it's all in my head. But I nevertheless know it to be true.

I know that I'm a failure. I know that I let my friends and family down every day. I know that I have wasted my time and my talent all my life. I know I'm ignorant, and lazy. I don't do enough, and I couldn't do enough if I wanted to because I lack the ability. I know I'll always have delusions that I can achieve beyond my grasp, and I know I'll be constantly disappointed when they're smashed time and again, and I know it won't stop me forming new ones and chasing after success like a pathetic dog running after a car.

I know I'm neglectful and callous. I know I treat people badly and that they deserve more from me, and I deserve less than I get from them. I know I disappoint people I love like it's going out of style and I know I have no idea how to maintain decent human relationships. I'm terrible in company and I'm useless alone. I unsettle people with my obnoxiousness and I disgust people with my desperation to be loved. I'll never have the love I want and I'll always have more than I deserve, if only out of pity, because if there's one thing I am worthy of, it's pity. No more so than the poor bastards caught up in my orbit though. Because I know I'm annoying, and insufferable, and destructive.

And I know I'm fat and I'm ugly and I'm flat-out disgusting. I feel sick every time I look in the mirror, and I know that's only fair because I'm repellent. And I know that this is mainly my own fault and I have brought my own revulsion upon myself through greed and laziness and lack of self-respect. And I know I won't change because I know I haven't got it in me. I know no matter how much I swear to improve myself, I'll fail. It's in my blood. I know I'll keep looking at the mirror, at that fat repulsive utterly unloveable creature, and feeling my stomach turn, till I go to the grave. I know every time I venture out I'm inflicting myself on the world, taking up too much room, getting in the way, turning off all I meet with my hideous size and unspeakable visage.

And I know most of all I deserve everything I get and more. I know when I look at myself I want to punch my face, hard and repeatedly, until I bleed, until I fall. I know when I think about myself I want to smash my head into a wall. I know every time I make a mistake, every time I let someone down, every time I make an unsuccessful pitch, every time I make a joke that doesn't get a laugh, every time I make a mess, every time I miss a day of work, every time I spill a drink, every time I forget to buy milk, every time I don't reply to an email...every single time I want to beat myself into unconsciousness.

And that's just what I want to do now, for my unmitigated narcissism in writing this. Because if there's anything worse than how much I hate myself, it's the burden I place on the world by insisting on sharing it with others. I'm very sorry.

I am, as Whitman said, large. I contain multitudes. I am smart and funny and dull and wise and foolish and arrogant and shy and loud and quiet and loving and kind and vicious and cold and sad and happy. But of all my shining facets, the biggest, the one that outshines all others, is self-loathing.

This is what it's like. Knowing you have a great life, and knowing it feels terrible. This is what it's like. Knowing you're a good person, and knowing you're a dreadful person.

This is what it's like.

When you say these things people tell you you're wrong, or that you need to snap out of it, or that you should adopt a more positive attitude. They tell you to count your blessings.

All of it's useless. I know I'm wrong, but I know I'm right. I don't want to be told anything. I just want to tell you - whoever "you" might be - that this is what it's like. Hating yourself.

Depression claimed me years ago, and it's made sure that my worst enemy is myself.

And I just want him gone.

LET'S GET THIS COUNTRY BACK ON TRACK

A Giggle of Googs

"What are you doing, Ben?" I hear you whine nasally.

LET ME TELL YOU!

For TWO NIGHTS at the Adelaide Fringe this weekend, I'll be hosting Our Little Stories, a collection of masterful comics telling tales of various heights. Friday and Saturday, 10.45pm at Gluttony. That's right! I'm taking it ON THE ROAD. Interstate. Get into it, South Australian people, with all your eccentric half-hour time differencey ways. Tickets here.




THEN...Tuesday, February 26, I'm popping up at PUGGS IN SPACE, at Pugg Mahones, 106 Hardware St, Melbourne. The estimable Anne Edmonds is MCing, and besides me you'll see the legendary Geraldine Hickey, the radiant Adam Knox, and MORE. Kicks off at 8.30pm

And guys it's FREE! Say hello!




And oh my God it KEEPS ON COMING! March 5 I'll be getting distinctly wordy at BAR STANZA, at the Owl and the Pussycat, 34 Swan St, Richmond. I'll be getting back to my spoken-word roots as part of a killer line-up including Sean M. Whelan, Steve Smart, and host divine Anthony WP O' Sullivan! Can you even believe that? Doors open at 7.30pm, it's only $5, how can you lose?





You won't believe this, but there's STILL MORE. March 13! Comedy at 59! Station 59, at 59 Church St, Richmond! That's a lot of 59s! Stone-cold stand-up guys! It starts at 8! It's free! That means NO MONEY. Look it up, that's what it means!




And oh wow, the VERY NEXT NIGHT I am becoming extremely LITERARY and also CONVERSATIONAL, talking to the genius philosopher and author Damon Young about his book Philosophy in the Garden. This is ESSENTIAL for fans of THINKING and READING. It's at Readings Hawthorn - book here!



Oh no, we're not stopping yet you guys. Gonna be throwing some MORE POETRY at you, on April 6. Come down to the Dan O'Connell in Carlton at 2pm for an afternoon of words and raucous guffaws. Poetry at the Dan is a Melbourne institution, and I'll be your featured poet, leading you through the windmills of my mind. Get in there, sons and daughters!




But of course ALL of the above is a mere aperitif, for some VERY serious business - the business of the MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL. It's a festival full of brilliant people doing brilliant stuff, and I promise you some of that brilliant stuff will be happening in darkest Fitzroy, in the sweet, warm surrounds of Gertrude's Brown Couch, where I shall be reprising my splendid little Fringe show, Let's Put On A Show. FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY, it's bigger, it's better, it changes EVERY SINGLE NIGHT as I take my cue from what YOU want me to talk about, and we create an award-winning show together! If you missed it at the Fringe, don't miss it again! If you saw it at the Fringe, no two nights are the same, so come see it once more! In fact, why not see it SIX times more? That's right - come along to every show and win a fabulous prize probably! Information and tickets HERE, I would sincerely love to see you all there. Even you, Anonymous.

That's a LOT of gigs, guys, and a LOT of chance to see me, hear my mellifluous tones, and pry into the deeper recesses of my psyche. It's gonna be fun, my friends, I will see you there. And there. And there. And...

None Like It Hot

Climate change is a serious issue, and it needs serious people to solve it. Is Bob Rumsden interested in solving it? No, Bob Rumsden is interested in only two things: making you afraid of it, and hot-air ballooning. Well I say the Australian people deserve more in a prime minister than a fictional American in a balloon. Australian people deserve a PRO-ACTIVE prime minister who will FIX climate change through the magic of community togetherness.

In my latest video I demonstrate, thus:

MR BEN'S SEX QUIZ!!!!!

Hey there readers! Are you feeling loved up? Or are you wondering whether you're as spicy a fajita as you always thought you are?

Thank goodness there's an easily accessible Web 2.0 solution for anyone looking to ascertain whether they're an Enrique Iglesias or an Olive from On The Buses. And that solution is right below, in the form of my scientifically formulate SEX QUIZ for Lovers and Swingers. Just answer these simple multiple choice questions, and you'll quickly know whether you're HOT, or just sweaty.

1. On average, I have sex:
    a) Once a week
    b) Eight times a week
    c) Less than three times a decade
    d) Every few minutes

2. I believe the secret to great sex is:
    a) A strong emotional connection
    b) A powerful erotic odour emanating from the armpits
    c) A willingness to experiment with borderline racist roleplaying
    d) A stuffed marlin

3. I lost my virginity:
    a) Before I was 18
    b) After I was 40
    c) In a refrigerated truck
    d) To a Blakeney twin

4. The sexiest animal is:
    a) The tiger
    b) The wolf
    c) The mosquito
    d) The sea cucumber

5. Foreplay is:
    a) Absolutely crucial
    b) A complete waste of time
    c) A kind of fish
    d) An offence against God

6. How long should a penis be?
    a) More than fifteen metres
    b) Less than half an inch
    c) Two and a half hours
    d) It depends what kind of wood you're making it from

7. What is the most erotic dream you've ever had?
    a) The one about Graham Kennedy and the ride-on mower
    b) I'm being chased by angry ballerinas but their knees have faces
    c) Will.i.am hiding under my bed softly reading Dr Seuss while I'm trying to sleep
    d) The one where I find out my gynaecologist is an elk

8. How long does it usually take you to have an orgasm?
    a) Less than a second
    b) More than a second
    c) At least until my sixteenth birthday
    d) Between one and three Pirates of the Caribbean movies

9. What part should pornography play in a healthy relationship?
    a) It should be banned
    b) It can really bring people closer together and also you can have a wank
    c) It can be useful, but better as a supplementary source of income rather than a full-time job
    d) Ideally it should overwhelm every aspect of your life until you know nothing else

10. How many times have you had sex while doing this quiz?
     a) Four
     b) Five
     c) Twelve
     d) The sea cucumber


HOW TO INTERPRET YOUR RESULTS:

Mostly As: You are a sexually normal, healthy person, but you smell a bit and need to shower more.

Mostly Bs: You are probably gay, but refuse to admit it, even to yourself, but your wife suspects, because when you talk in your sleep you keep mentioning someone called "Declan", and it's tearing your marriage apart, but neither of you are willing to discuss it. It's pathetic.

Mostly Cs: You are a wanted fugitive. You mostly only have sex with wild grasses.

Mostly Ds: Your relationship is passionate and loving, but prone to outbursts of irrational rage and inexplicable itches at inconvenient times. You and your partner are both happy to experiment and be open about your fantasies and fetishes, but it will turn out shortly that your partner is imaginary. Sorry.

Let's Have It All

Remember when Freddie Mercury sang "I want it all"? It wasn't very good, was it? Killer Queen was a much better song. Luckily, though, Freddie Mercury wasn't a woman, or else he might have been "tying himself in knots" over the question of having it all, apparently, according to the Daily Telegraph which opened its interview piece with Julie Bishop with the assertion that this is what women do when considering the matter of all, re: having it.

OK, so first of all I am going to question the truth of this knot-tying claim. I know quite a few woman - in fact some of my best sisters are women - and I've never seen them tie themselves in knots. In fact I've never seen them tie anything in knots: is that weird? I wonder if they know how to tie knots. But I digress.

First of all, I want to see some cold hard figures on how much time women spend worrying about whether they can "have it all". In my experience, if there's one area in which women are a lot like men, it's in the area of not spending vast swathes of their lives fretting over what percentage of all they can have, instead choosing to get the fuck on with life. And if there's another area in which women are a lot like men, it's in almost every other area there is, so maybe we, as a species, can ease back the throttle on this wacky battle-of-the-sexes bullshit we've been punching ourselves in the face with for the last ten thousand years.

Secondly, tell me what "it all" means. Some have told me it means having a great career and a nice family and a good place to live and a bunch of nice stuff; in other words, "it all" just means "being happy". In which case, yeah I guess women CAN have it all. I think there are happy women out there.

But no, I don't think that's what it DOES mean, when someone in the so-called media refers to "having it all". Let's not spend too much time interrogating ourselves over the exact meaning of our idiom when we all have a basic shared understanding of what we're talking about.

Essentially, when we talk about women having it all, we're asking whether the mum who's waiting after school every day with a tray of cookies can be Julia Gillard, and whether Julia Gillard can be the cookie-mum. We're asking whether Gail Kelly can run a multi-billion dollar financial behemoth and still never miss her kids' soccer games. We're asking whether Nicole Kidman can win Oscars and be back from the ceremony in time for school drop-off.

We are asking, in essence, can a woman scale professional peaks without giving up their natural, Jesus-assigned roles as primary caregiver and lactating nurture-queen?

Or to put it perhaps more cynically, can a woman avoid our disapproval for abandoning her traditional role, while simultaneously absolving us of any blame for stopping us from living the life she wants to?

Can, in the end, a woman, so to speak, have, when you get right down to it, it all?

No.

Look I don't want to make you pull out your hair and throw yourselves into bonfires, but Julie Bishop is right. Women can't have it all.

Know why?

Because nobody can.

You know men? You've probably met some. They're those women who sweat more than usual, and for some reason never ask whether they can have it all. People often think men don't ask that because they already know they CAN have it all.

No.

Men don't ask whether they can have it all, because they already know they can't. Or at least they should. They probably don't because they're morons, but if they thought for a second they'd know I'm right. So, guys - think, OK?

Nicola Roxon recently announced she was quitting politics, because she didn't want to sacrifice time with her children for the sake of her career. She found it impossible to "have it all", so she had to make a choice: miss out on some of the benefits of parenting, or miss out on some of the benefits of politicking.

She didn't have to make that choice because she's a woman, she had to make that choice because she's a human being. Every man in politics makes that choice too. Yes, indeed - when a man decides to head to Canberra, he's deciding to absent himself from his family for big chunks of time, just as a woman is.

When a man decides to put in 16-hour working days to make his business grow, he's slicing those hours off the time he has to be with his kids, or off the time he has to HAVE kids, or a decent relationship, or any other trappings of domesticity he might want.

When I decide to write article after article and book after book, and go out to tell jokes to strangers, I'm choosing to pursue my career instead of play with my kids. And when I decide to turn down those opportunities because I want to play with my kids, I'm handicapping my career for the sake of my family. And when I decide to work three or more jobs at once, I'm desperately trying to strike the right balance so I can have a little bit of both worlds, instead of throwing in the towel on one front and storming full-bore at the other.

What I'm NOT doing is committing myself 100% to my career AND committing myself 100% to my family, because that would involve a denial of basic mathematics, and I would consider that a gesture of unforgivable rudeness towards the numerical community.

I can't have it all. You can't have it all. None of us can have it all. Our lives are about chasing happiness, not some insane regretless Shangri-La of personal fulfilment.

And that's why "can women have it all?" is a dumb question, based on a moronic premise and infused with the half-witted artificial gender divisions that have been making us miserable throughout history. And I object strongly to the question's existence in our public discourse, let alone the myriad attempts, both by those propping up their own vested interest in keeping the question current, and by those gullible enough to be fooled into believing it's in their own interests to keep trying to answer it. And here's why.

Firstly, as I briefly alluded to above, it's a question with an ulterior motive. The question is asked in order to position "having it all" as a desirable goal for a woman, and it positions it thusly to achieve the twin goals of making women feel ashamed if they don't behave the way a nice girl should, and to make society feel better about standing in the way of women with ambition. We're talling you that you SHOULD be trying to have it all, and so if you're a less-than-perfect mother, you've let us all down, lady; and at the same time if you're finding you can't make your way up the greasy pole, it was nothing to with us - we WANTED you to have it all.

So Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop are unnatural for not having kids, and Nicola Roxon just couldn't hack the pressure.

But here's the other side of that: as I said, nobody is asking whether men can have it all. It's assumed that a failure to achieve total contentment in every facet of life is a uniquely female problem. But as I also said, that is patently not true. Yet every time the subject comes up, it's only women who are apparently struggling with this.

And why is that? It's because it's assumed that it's easy for men to have it all, because it's assumed that men don't care about the things they have to give up. It's assumed there's no tension between family and career for a man, because family is something men don't care about. You're working non-stop and your kids are in bed by the time you get home every night? You're always away from home on business and only see your family a few days every month? Your wife is practically a single parent because you just can't afford to stop? As a MAN, that must be exactly what you want!

And so, we are told, men breezily go about having it all to their heart's content, because whatever bit of "all" they don't have won't matter to them. They'll leave the domestic guff to the ladies, because that's what "having it all" is to a man. The ladies, of course, won't be able to have it all, and shame on them.

If this situation is reversed, of course, the woman jetsetting off to a high-flying career while the man keeps the home fires burning, nobody's having it all. The woman was supposed to be able to do both, because of her magic vagina, and the man might as well have a vagina of his own if he's going to go about acting like a woman.

And there you have it. Women can't have it all because they're not good enough: men can have it all because they don't give a shit about their families.

And so know this, social commentators and cultural pundits, armchair philosophers and tabloid sexperts: every time you push the question "Can women have it all" out into the public consciousness, you're being sexist in two directions at once and letting us all, men and women, know that our hunch was right: we should all be hating ourselves as hard as possible all the time.

So for fuck's sake, you guys, stop doing it.

DEAR BERNARD

An open letter in response to Bernard Gaynor's open letter in response to Mia Freedman's open letter in response to Bernard Gaynor's tweet in response to the indoctrination of our children by homosexualists.

Dear Bernard,

I am writing this open letter because, as I am sure you know, open letters are how we get things done in this country. I myself am currently running for prime minister, and I can assure you that when elected I will be pursuing a very open-letter-heavy agenda.

As I was reading your letter to Mia Freedman, I couldn't help but notice that you are extremely stupid, and so I wondered if you had any advice for me as a parent. My children are still too young for any definitive conclusions to be made, but early testing indicates they are at risk of being stupid as well, so I was wondering whether you have any tips about how to live a fulfilling life as a stupid person: what sort of obstacles and prejudices have you faced, and what kind of strategies do you put in place to overcome your stupidity? I hear that meditation is good - do you meditate? Probably not because meditation is a bit gay, but maybe if we meditate about karate movies it would be all right.

Your views on homosexual teachers are quite interesting and merit further examination. Like you, I once went to a school and was shocked by the amount of penetrative sex that goes on in the average classroom. While I understand that there will always be times when curriculum requirements necessitate sexual intercourse between teachers and students, I, like you, am worried that if homosexuality is normalised, this sexual intercourse may cease being strictly heterosexual, as is traditional in Australian schools, and begin to be homosexual, which is a bit gross, isn't it? I read a book once about homosexual intercourse and I was shocked at the things those people do to each other. As Catholics, you and I know that some things should not be put inside other things. You wouldn't stuff a turkey with a ferret, would you? No.

But likewise, as a good Catholic I am sure you will agree there is no need to actually ban penetrative sex in classroom environments: we must be careful that the cure does not become worse than the disease, causing our children to grow up having no idea what sex with teachers feels like at all. We just need to find a way to stop our kids becoming "gay". By the way, did you know your name has "gay" in it? That's pretty funny isn't it? Did kids make fun of you at school and call you Gay Bernard? Or did they mainly make fun of you for being stupid? At my school we made fun of stupid kids mostly, but if we'd had a boy with "gay" in his name things might have been different.

Why does "gay" mean "homosexual" anyway? Wouldn't it better if we went back to "gay" meaning "happy", and came up with a new word for homosexuals, like "Demoncocks"? I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Maybe you could come over to my house and watch karate movies with me and we could talk about it. I promise not to let the evening progress beyond some light kissing.

Most of all I want to throw my support behind your desire to allow parents the right to decide who teaches their children. Personally I would like my children to be taught by boxing legend "Aussie Joe" Bugner, but as yet the Department of Education has been stypically stiff-necked and refuses to allow even an hour a week of Bugner lessons, let alone the full-time Aussie Joe curriculum that I would prefer. Bureaucracy, huh? It is very gay.

I'm not saying that you should also let your kids be taught by Aussie Joe, of course. I think that you should be allowed to select whichever former boxing great you like to teach your children. I hope you choose wisely, as I'd hate to see your children be hindered in their development any more than they already have been by the unfortunate circumstances of their birth.

I guess what I'm saying, Bernard, is keep up the good work. If you would like to get in touch with me, I have disconnected my telephone and deleted all my email accounts, as from now on I will be communicating only via open letters, but feel free to drop me an open letter any time, whether on your own site, on Mamamia, on The Punch, or on Aussie Joe Bugner's official fan club Facebook page. Explicit photos of yourself can, as always, be dropped in my home mailbox.

Yours in Christ,

Ben Pobjie (future prime minister)

THE TIME IS NOW

My fellow Australians,

An election has now been set down for September, and it is never more than at those moments when an election is set down for September that good-hearted patriots must turn their thoughts lightly to what they might DO for their country. A true patriot doesn't just THINK, he DOES, and today I can honestly say that I am ready to DO what it takes. The Australian people deserve ACTION, and that's what I deliver here now.

That is correct, today I announce my candidacy for the post of Australian Prime Minister.

As a patriot, I believe in this country. I believe in mateship, and outbacks, and the flag.

That's the Australian flag, and if a lifetime of Australian has taught me one thing, it's that a flag is not just a flag, it's a way of life. And it's my way of life, and if living the flag lifestyle is against the law these days then I guess just lock me up and call me Mr Jail.

Running for prime minister is not a decision I take lightly: every prime minister should take these decisions heavily, and if elected I promise my decisions will be twenty percent heavier than my opponents' at all times. The Australian people deserve heavy decisions, and as a politician I consider myself a slave to the Australian people. Chain me up Australian people, I am ready to work your plantations.

It's not just hollow rhetoric that causes me to say that mateship is my religion. The Australian people deserve more than hollow rhetoric, and I promise that if elected, I will give them more more-than-hollow rhetorics per day than any other politician in history. That's what mateship means to me, and the Australian people deserve mateship more than ever in today's modern world.

A great Australia doesn't just happen overnight. I promise not to make a great Australia happen overnight with the last breath in my body, and that's a promise you can take to the bank. But what you can't take to the bank is a bad economy, and that is why I promise to give the Australian people the economy they deserve which is not a bad one.

Under my prime ministership, the economy will be not only robust, but expansionary. The Australian people deserve economic security, and I promise that their security will be more economic than ever. The Australian people are sick of governments spending like drunken sailors, and that's why I am making a solid, rolled-gold, rigor mortis commitment to spending like sailors who have not drunk very much at all. The sailors I spend like will practise moderation, while enjoying a glass or two of red wine to unwind at the end of the day. The Australian people deserve heart-smart sailors, and there's no doubt that when the budget is in balance we'll enjoy our economy all the more. A strong economy is the foundation of a strong country, and I believe in a strong country which is this one.



That country is strong, and it's from our strength that we draw our power. The Australian people deserve strength, which is why as prime minister I will work out every day almost with weights and everything.

Part of being strong is industrial relations, and as an industrial relationist I promise that my prime ministership will be full of fairness. The Australian people deserve fairness, and fairness is more than anything the thing I will be fair about.

The environment is also important and I support it. The Australian people deserve an environment.

Why am I running now? I am running because I love my country. I love its men and its women and its animals and its grass and its trees. The Australian people deserve a prime minister who loves Australia. I promise to love Australia more than my opponents and I promise to show this love in several ways.



I am committed to loving Australia even more than I love other countries. I love things like kangaroos and Tasmanian tigers and vegemite jandals, and I have made a full and firm commitment to keep loving everything about Australia until I die and even afterwards if my brain is intact and can be put into a machine that breathes and things. The Australian people deserve my love now more than ever, especially with the internet transforming our modern world into a terrifying wasteland. The Australian people deserve a world-class terrifying wasteland and it is that wasteland that I promise to love more and more every day.

Australia is about families, and as prime minister I promise to have a family more than any prime minister before myself. The Australian people deserve families, and I have the power to grant that through my grace and commitment. The Australian people deserve my grace and commitment and to hell with anyone who says otherwise. As prime minister I will never say otherwise.

My fellow Australians, it is time to get this country moving forward again. As a freedom-loving plutocratist, I believe in forward movement, and I believe that the Australian people deserve a country that moves forward. Never again will our country have to move backward due to a weak economy or rabbit plagues. The Australian people deserve sustainable rabbit populations, and on my first day in office I will sustainabilise every rabbit in this great sunburnt country. The Australian people deserve sustainable sunburns.

Over the coming months and weeks I look forward to sharing with you more of the vision for our future that we deserve as we move forward and not sideways or up. The Australian people deserve a country that moves only on one axis. My fellow Australians, the fightback starts HERE.

Thanks, you all.

Guerrilla Halal!

Some bigots refuse to eat meat that has been turned towards Mecca and blessed. Ben Pobjie has some bad news for them: you never know where or when the Halal Guerillas will strike.

Check out all our other stuff at http://www.gatheraround.me

Have you ever wondered...

...what breastfeeding is all about?

WONDER NO MORE, as Gather Around Me expands its empire into the world of VIDEO!

25 MORE SIGNS YOU ARE A WRITER

One of the things I worry about the most while writing is the question of whether I actually am a writer. "Am I?" I ask myself, frettingly biting my nails. "If only I knew the signs to look out for!"

So what a piece of luck that I found this helpful article to let me know the little signs that indicate whether someone is a writer or not. For example:

6. When you hear the words “I’m on deadline,” you immediately burst into action, a Pavlovian response to a) always having something due and b) always being behind on it. You’re certain that if they were able to make your procrastination into an energy source, it will solve our nation’s fuel crisis. Or at least make gas cheaper.

Ha! Isn't that priceless. "Fuel crisis"! Oh my yes, we writers certainly do like to procrastinate, don't we?

Or this classic:

11. You have really weird dreams about writing or your favorite writers — like that you suddenly have a great idea for a story but then your computer eats you or that you’re best friends with Emily Dickinson — which, truth be told, is a little boring. Agoraphobes aren’t great partiers. You also dreamt that you were the manager of a Bronte sisters girl group. Charlotte was the Beyonce, Emily was the Kelly and Anne was the Michelle, the one everyone forgets about. 

Oh mercy! Pop culture, eh?

Or how about this:

23. You never stop writing something after you’re done with it, which makes publishing difficult. Eventually you just put a gun to your head and say, “Screw it, I’m done with this.” (Which is how Obama must feel every day.) You’ll later come up with the perfect ending for that piece — a month after publishing it. 

Now this is just adorable. And so true, too - every writer knows that it is impossible to finish writing something, until you do. Life is hard, for writers. Yet also cute and whimsical.

But those 25 signs, as irresistibly truthful and hilarious as they are, just aren't enough, you know? There are so many other ways to decide whether you're a writer or not, even if you don't have an erotic fixation with typewriters or waste all your money on awful tattoos. And so to provide further help to my brothers and sisters in words, and to pay tribute to "Nico Lang", I've come up with my

25 MORE SIGNS YOU'RE A WRITER

1. You are, essentially, better than other people.

2. Not only do you carry a pen everywhere, but you constantly hallucinate that there are pens that aren't actually there, and frequently startle passersby with your loud cries of "Ho! Pens!"

3. You are an alcoholic.

4. You write inspirational-yet-incomprehensible slogans on pieces of cardboard like "failure is the first step towards the second step" or "all writing is rewriting" and stick them up on your walls so you can look at them and get a warm glow while you read a magazine profile on Nikki Gemmell.

5. You tell people that you just let the characters take you where they want you to go and don't notice that this makes you sound insane.

6. You literally eat ink.

7. You dress up as your favourite characters from literary history and appear uninvited at strangers' parties bellowing their most memorable lines (see point 3).

8. You slowly begin to metamorphose into a book.

9. You kidnap your editor's children and threaten to slaughter them if they delete a single word from your piece. You do this every week and everyone is used to it by now.

10. You eventually find your typewriter too modern and begin carving all your work into massive stone tablets, which you hurl out your window in a fit of despair after realising you'll never be as great a writer as Kathy Lette.

11. Your name is JK Rowling.

12. When you hear the words "I'm on deadline", you immediately bite whoever said it on the leg, a Pavlovian response to the fact that you used to bite people on the leg pretty often.

13. You have a tattoo of the face of your favourite writer covering your entire face, so you can impersonate them.

14. You often sit in cafes holding a pen against your cheek with a thoughtful-yet-cute expression on your darling little face.

15. You occasionally write something.

16. You are morbidly obese and unable to leave your bed, communicating by hurling Doritos in meaningful patterns on the carpet.

17. You have become firmly convinced that you are a Canadian goose and accuse everyone you meet of stealing your eggs, and I don't know you write a story about this or something maybe.

18. You have an almost insatiable desire to commit acts of violence upon members of your immediate family.

19. You have lost control of your bowels.

20. You keep complaining that sport gets more funding than the arts and so you have no friends.

21. You plan to make everyone pay someday.

22. You own more than fifty high-powered assault weapons.

23. Your muscles have atrophied from lack of use and there is a spider living in your mouth.

24. You can't stop writing lists of signs that you are a writer to reassure yourself that your entire life is not a futile sham concocted by your self-delusive brain in order to avoid facing reality in any way whatsoever.

25. You have just been arrested for molesting a horse.

A True Larrykin

If there is one thing I love, it's a larrikin. Know what I mean? A good old-fashioned, mischievous, good-humoured, larrikinish larrikin, the kind of larrikin that made Australia what it is today: i.e. a country full of larrikins.

The trouble, of course, is that although this country is full of larrikins, we are ruled over by a bunch of decided non-larrikins. Our politicians are all so soft and wishy-washy and feminised they wouldn't know larrikinism if it jumped up and shoved a sugar glider down their pants.

Our media is decidedly non-larrikinish too. Michelle Grattan is a poor excuse for a larrikin. And with the best will in the world, I think you'd have to concede that Ross Gittins is very far from being the intellectual heir of famed SCG wag "Yabba" Gascoigne. In fact, the entire press gallery is not the intellectual heir of famed SCG wag "Yabba" Gascoigne, and it seems a bit of a shame that the media watchdog is so obsessed with so-called "cash for comment", and never gives the slightest thought to redressing the lack of "Yabba"-resemblers in our media landscape.

However, we need not immerse ourselves entirely in gloom, because there is one man willing to stand up for tradition and patriotism and not-climate change left in our great nation, and that man is Larry Pickering.

Pickering has been one of our greatest larrikins for decades, of course, his larrikinish cartoons bringing joy to millions and keeping alive the larrikin flame that has been burning bright since Gallipoli, when the Anzacs staved off the horrors of war with cheeky japes and drawings of Billy Hughes's cock.

It is in that tradition that Pickering continues to hold the "stuffed shirts" to account on his website, and in particular in brave, truthful-yet-larrikiny pieces like this one, in which he exposes the monstrous threat to our democracy that is Anne Summers and her radical femo-socialist agenda, finally pricking that balloon of man-hating, excessive body hair and mandatory lesbianism that has been hovering over the great southern land ever since Paul Keating rammed through legislation that allowed women to exit buildings.

In the best larrikin tradition, of course, Pickering is not a vindictive man. He is slow to anger, but sharp as a tack and full of boisterous and wittily logical argumentation when roused, and this was no exception. As he writes:

I had never heard of a person called Ann Summers (not sure Ann is with or without an "e" and I couldn't care less really) until she said somewhere that my scribblings were responsible for Jill Meagher's murder.

See how he first demonstrates how he is the bigger man - he had not even heard of Summers, because he has better things to do, like defending our democracy. He emphasises how far above the pettiness of the world by indicating that he doesn't even care how Summers's name is spelt. This is a good sign of a lofty mind.

But then we get to the nub: the reason why any man of good conscience would speak up at this point: Summers accused Larry Pickering of being responsible for Jill Meagher's death.

What's worse, she did it "somewhere": if there is anything worse than a woman who calls an innocent man a murderer, it is a woman who calls an innocent man a murderer in an indeterminate and ill-defined location. Luckily, I've sleuthed a tad and found out exactly what Summers said in this disgraceful smear. Her words are as follows (be warned it is fairly strong stuff):

I just saw television footage of thousands of people walking in a peace march along Sydney Road past Hope Street to honour the memory of Jill Meagher. It was a beautiful sight and a powerful reminder that for all the Alan Joneses of this world, most Australians are decent honourable people who are disgusted by this culture of vilification and violence.

I'm sorry I had to put that on the blog, but you had to know how depraved "radical womanhood" (god Pickering has a way with words) can get. Look at that paragraph. "It was a beautiful sight" she writes. "Most Australians are decent honourable people". "I just saw television footage".

VOMIT.

We know what you're saying. You can couch in separatist anarchist neo-Greerist psychobabble all you like, Ann(e), but when you write "disgusted", we can read between the lines: you are saying that Larry Pickering murdered Jill Meagher. We're onto you. What a revolting accusation.

But all good larrikins know how to make freedom-lemonade out of feminazi lemons, and Pickering does so by taking the opportunity to expose the misandry and harridanism at the heart of public life. Having gone to notorious communo-hotbed "The Drum", a website run by the ABC Politburo, Pickering found more of Summers's "work". Like any red-blooded larrikin, Pickering "couldn't bring myself to read it closely", and who could blame him? But reading things is unnecessary to identify radical agendas - indeed it can be counterproductive. The important thing is that in his article he draws, with uncanny plausibility, a direct line between Summers, her big fans Christine Milne and Lee "Uncle Joe" Rhiannon, the plummeting value of Whitehaven Coal shares, Tanya Plibersek's husband-fronted drug operation, child sex, drink-driving, fraud, and prunes. It's a vast conspiracy and it takes a journalistic mind of remarkable acuity to pull it all together so neatly, but that's what Pickering has done, and it's a relief to us all I'm sure that he's manning the parapets as Castle Australia is assaulted by this army of green red pink warmenist homosexual vagina-owning orcs.

And it's those aforementioned prunes, the ones clogging up Summers's reproductive tract, that as Pickering notes, are the whole problem, as they have led to this she-beast breathing fire all over our constitutional rights and causing us to not only have to stand an "elected" prime minister with ill-fitting jackets, but also enabled the violent, financial and sexual crimes of the modern Australian Labor Party. Thanks a lot Anne, you armpit-hair-encouraging, child-molester-enabling, economy-destroying, lipstick-flaunting "writer". You have wrecked Australia and now we may as well live in Afghanistan, if it's not already infested by all the feminists which Larry Pickering's blog commenters wish to send there.

So all power to you, Larry Pickering. You are not only a savvy journalist and a masterful artist, you are a patriot, a freedom fighter, and most improtantly, a larrikin of rare note. Don't listen to those who wish to silence you, who wish to repress the truth. Don't listen when they tag you "sexist" or "misogynist" or "racist" or "insane" or "a bankrupt serial conman" or "a sad old derelict sniggering at his own dick-pictures" or "a rambling maniac who can't even concentrate on one thing for the five minutes it would take to compose a coherent blog post".

Don't listen to any of them, Larry. We TRUE Aussies know what you are, and we salute you for it. As your loyal reader "gungit" notes:

"Why is it all the ugly woman are so prejudiced?"

Exactly. EXACTLY.

A low down dirty shame

OK so I need to talk about this comic, which I found through the @EverydaySexism twitter account. Have a look, we'll continue below.





So, this roused great emotions within me, not because the behaviour depicted in the comic is horrible, awful, heinous behaviour. I mean, it IS, but that fact isn't what gets me going.

What gets me going is that apparently this actually happens.

Seriously - it doesn't just happen in comics. I know women, and I hear women tell stories, and situations like the one in the comic happen. In real life.

Isn't that insane? I mean, I know that stuff like this happens, but most of the time I don't think about it, and whenever I do think about it, I feel like I've just found out that Die Hard is based on a true story.

Because that...that is just not the way human beings behave. Is it? Obviously it is. Obviously there are a bunch of actual, human, grown adult male people who go around shouting obscenities at women they don't even know.

And I can't fathom that. My mind's gears loudly grind when it tries to process this thought.

Because here's the thing: I'm not a very good guy. On any objective scale, I am a weak-willed, cowardly, thoughtless, selfish, greedy, lazy, uninteresting, socially inept man. This I know. This, I think, is not a secret.

But there is one thing I can say in my favour: it has never occurred to me to shout "show us your tits" at a woman in public. It has never occurred to me to call a woman I don't know a slut because she doesn't enjoy the experience of being sexually harassed. It has never occurred to me to make sexual advances to a stranger at all, let alone one who is simply passing by exhibiting no signs of wishing to be subjected to loud, braying comments upon her physical appearance. Whatever such signs may look like: I don't really know.

And when I say it has never occurred to me, I don't mean that I look at women in the street and make a considered decision not to yell at them. I mean the thought that this might actually be a course of action open to me has never even entered my head. I've never had to make this decision, because I have never, in my entire life, found myself in a situation where I've thought, hmm, maybe I could shout "Nice boobs!" at that lady.

Never. Not once has this happened. Never have I had to weigh the advisability of acting like the men in that comic, because never has my mind even entertained the possibility that I could. Thinking about whether I should harass women on the street is basically in the same category, for me, as thinking about whether I should travel across the Pacific standing upright on the wing of a 737: it's just not an option. The reason I've never had to make a decision about shouting "Show us your tits" is the same reason I've never had to make a decision about eating a live rhinoceros.

And that's why I don't get it: how can these men actually be behaving this way? How can human minds actually not only contain the outright ludicrous concept of publicly bellowing sexually aggressive inanities at someone you've never met, but go on to decide that acting on the thought would be a good expenditure of time and breath?

How? How can this happen in real life?

And yet it does happen in real life, and it's a disgrace. A disgrace for many reasons, but most of all, for this: these men make me look good.

As mentioned before, I'm not much of a man. I am, essentially, lame. But compared to these guys - who seem to be quite numerous - I appear to be some kind of patron saint of sensitive modern masculinity. They are making me look fantastic in contrast to themselves. It therefore becomes possible for me to give myself big ups, to portray myself as a really sensationally nice guy, simply by behaving at a sort of base level of civilised human decency. I'm not really being nice, I'm just being barely ordinary and maintaining a fairly unexceptional belief that the people around me are human beings irrespective of what kind of fleshy lumps their body might be sporting. But when I see other men behaving in the manner detailed above, I feel like I'm actually a pretty nice guy.

The fact is, these guys are giving me a good name. And that is just plain wrong.

Problematic

Look,  there are a lot of problems in the world, and I recognise that some of them are pretty big, but are any of the world's problems really as big as the problem of annoying details in movies? Really?

REALLY?

See, that second "REALLY" got you, didn't it? You were all ready to rebut me until I cracked open a can of all caps on you mothers.

Anyway I was watching a movie, and I noticed some stuff that bugged me, and I thought it worthwhile to document the bits in movies that are really annoying.

This is not a list of BAD movies - it's a list of GOOD movies, or at least enjoyable movies, that have little bits that grate on you and make the good movie less good than it should be. I'm sure you have your own - let me know.

THE BREAKFAST CLUB

- At one point, sexy long-haired rebel John Bender says to wealthy prom queen Claire "Bein' bad feels pretty good, doesn't it?" This is a problem, because not only would John Bender not say this, nobody on earth would say it. It's an irredeemably stupid thing to say. To say this sentence you would have to be lame beyond all reckoning. And Bender IS NOT LAME. Apart from this line, he's not, really he's not. So we're watching a badass rebel, and then we're watching a 50s greaser in a Roger Corman film about motorcycling nogoodniks, and then it's a badass rebel again for the rest of the movie. BUT we can't erase the memory. When someone says "Bein' bad feels pretty good" it CANNOT BE UNSAID.

- Also, Ally Sheedy is totally hot, but then Molly Ringwald gives her a makeover and makes her totally not hot, and for some reason Emilio Estevez is all like "whoa you're hot!" even though she looks like a four-year-old halfway through getting ready for Sunday School. It is a major plothole that this character does not find Ally Sheedy hot when she actually IS hot, but only finds her hot after the world's worst makeover, which causes her to become attractive only to men who like humping Rainbow Brite dolls. It's a lot like The Truth About Cats and Dogs, where they based the whole movie around the premise that Janeane Garofalo is ugly, which is like basing a movie around the premise that the Incredible Hulk is an English professor.

THE GOONIES

- I didn't see The Goonies until last year, so maybe I'd feel differently if I were a wide-eyed child, but even though there were lots of wacky fun times in this movie, there is also a lot of children shouting incoherently at each other. Basically, every page of the script must have read, "The Goonies all shout their lines at once". Couldn't ONE person, just ONCE, say, "Hey, how about we all take it in turns to speak?"

- They're called the Goonies and really that seems a bit weird.

HOME ALONE

- I really think that John Candy shouldn't have tried to comfort Catherine O'Hara. He'd have been pretty well within his rights to call her a monster and make her sit well away from the polka band. Because I mean, she is a terrible mother. A very very terrible mother. What's most annoying is that when the sequel came around, she and her husband had not been jailed or had their children removed, even though clearly they are incapable of caring for minors, because they lose their kid AGAIN. Which brings me to...

HOME ALONE 2

- In Home Alone, Kevin is a scared little boy who's left home alone and doesn't know what to do, and finds the courage to stick it to the evil burglars. In Home Alone 2 he is a sadistic sociopath who finds himself alone once again, but instead of trying to contact his family, lies to hotel staff, steals from his father to fund his lavish lifestyle, and then embarks on a campaign of completely unnecessary ultra-violence against the burglars from the first film, just because he enjoys hurting them. When he learns of their plan, the simplest thing would've been to go to the police, but Kevin doesn't do this, because he gets off on inflicting life-threatening injuries. The only proper response to the events of the first two Home Alone films is to imprison the parents and put Kevin into intensive psychiatric care.

WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

- Charlie DID steal Fizzy Lifting Drink! He DID disobey Wonka's explicit instructions! HE IS JUST AS BAD AS THE OTHER KIDS! Actually he's worse, because he's just a flat-out thief. Mike Teevee is punished just for being curious about science, but Charlie wins the jackpot after STEALING FROM WILLY WONKA AND RISKING SEVERE DAMAGE TO PLANT AND EQUIPMENT!

- Grandpa Joe is bed-ridden for twenty years and "miraculously" can walk, when he finds out he gets to go to a chocolate factory? How does Mrs Bucket not punch him in the mouth here?

- Why does Charlie ask Joe anyway? How about your mother who works late into the night providing for you at the clothes-stirring factory? You ungrateful little prick.

SPIDER-MAN

- Peter Parker's Uncle Ben gives him a lengthy speech on the theme "With great power comes great responsibility", berating him for the awful sin of DEFENDING HIMSELF. A guy tries to beat the shit out of his nephew, and all Ben can do is scold the kid for not just standing there and letting himself be hospitalised. Peter's not even allowed to defend himself from bullies? You'd rather he'd get bashed than have him teach a bully a lesson? Jesus Christ Uncle Ben, you're such a bastard.

- When the Green Goblin asks Spider-Man "Are you in, or are you out?" Spider-Man responds, "You're the one who's out - out of your MIND!" This is one of the worst things to happen in Western civilisation. I can only assume everyone involved in making this movie had enormous tumours pressing on vital parts of their brains, causing them to allow this line to stay in the movie. The fact that Tobey Maguire said this line without vomiting blood does not speak well of him.

DIRTY DANCING

- Why do people go to this place for their holidays when it is clearly the most boring place on earth? Jerry Orbach is smart enough to get a medical degree but not smart enough to see what a shithole his family is staying at?

- Isn't Patrick Swayze a statutory rapist? Didn't they have police in 1962?

- When all the resort staff are singing that song at the end, why isn't anyone in the audience killing themselves?

- Shouldn't people have been a bit more weirded out by the bizarre music that plays during the final dance? Aren't they startled by the fact they're listening to instruments that haven't been invented yet?

- Why doesn't Baby ever tell Patrick Swayze to stop being such a whiny little bitch?

- Why does hardly anything happen in this movie?


Below: Jennifer Grey with her "co-star", a watermelon that stood in for the character of "Johnny Castle", who was added via CGI in post-production

An Educational Resource

What is the Book of Bloke?

Simply, the Book of Bloke is the most comprehensive and painstaking survey of Australian manhood ever undertaken. This socio-anthropological epic examines the vast variety of Blokes in our great country, their origins, characteristics, lifestyles, markings and hobbies. 

How often have you seen a Bloke in the street, and thought to yourself, "If only I knew what KIND of bloke that was, I would know whether to approach and make friends, or keep my distance, or hit him with a stick"? 

The Book of Bloke has made such concerns a thing of the past! As well as an essential reference work for all aspiring and experienced Blokeologists, the BoB acts as a useful spotter's guide for anyone wishing to observe Blokes in their natural habitat. If you wish to be able to tell, at a glance, the difference between a Bogan and a Snag, a Leftite and a Rightoid, a Reticulated Drainpipe and a Crested Kerrang, this is the must-have book for you!

The Book of Bloke is published by Momentum Books, and is delivered in convenient eBook format, thus doing away with the tedious hassle of paper. There are several ways to read the ever-versatile Book of Bloke:

1. On your Kindle, purchased through Amazon.

2. On your iPad, iPod, iPhone, or any other iDevice you might possess What's next - iGlasses? Haha, we have fun.

3. Through something called Book.ish, which is, I guess, some kind of place you get bookishness at.

4. On a Kobo, whatever that is.

5. On your computer screen, if that's the sort of thing you like to do.

6. Print the whole book out, bind it with string and/or glue, and read it as an analogue book.

7. Copy it out longhand with a biro in an exercise book and then read the exercise book. Remember to print clearly and legibly!

The options are, literally, endless, and what's more, it's only THREE DOLLARS! For the entire book! That's no more than the price of a cup of coffee, or of assuaging your guilt when confronted by a homeless person! And the BoB will give you HOURS more entertainment than either of those things!

Basically, what we have here is a brave new world in ebooks, in gender studies, and in jokes about mullets. YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS OUT!

Buy The Book of Bloke TODAY!

Campese: jabbing at a legend

Let's get things straight right away here: David Campese is the greatest rugby player I ever saw. He may be the greatest footballer of any code I ever saw.

He seemed to be in possession of secrets that human beings were not privy to when on the rugby field.

Once I saw him scoop up a bouncing kick to dive over for a try, and I swear to god that when I watched the replay, his fingers weren't even touching the ball as he picked it up - it looked like he'd just drawn the ball to himself with magnets.

I remember his legendary no-look pass to Tim Horan in the 1991 World Cup semi, but I also remember, in the same match, Campo dancing merrily across the field before the fearsome line of All Blacks, mesmerising them like a magician keeping a child's eyes fixed on his right hand while his left plucks a coin from behind their ear, until he found the gap and zipped through the baffled kiwis for the try.

I remember him belting drop goals from the sideline fifty metres out, and scything through the defensive line in a Barbarians match so exquisitely that the beaten defenders stood and clapped as he touched down between the posts.

Alan Jones once called him the Bradman of rugby, and for once Jones may have been right.

Campese didn't have Bradman's remorseless perfectionism, but he did have the magic; the air that he was simply existing on a different plane to other players. He was magnificent, and nothing can ever change that.

But all that does not inoculate him against saying, on the odd occasion, pretty dumb things, and the tweet he tapped out expressing his outrage that the Sydney Morning Herald was letting a "girl" cover rugby fits into the "pretty dumb" category so snugly it might have been made for the purpose.

It was dumb not just because the "girl" in question, Georgina Robinson, is a well-qualified, accomplished and respected journalist (although she is, and that IS dumb): it's dumb because formulating a thought like "girls can't understand rugby like men" is just a dumb thing to do.

I'm pretty sure we've passed the stage in Western civilisation where we all assume that women's brains are defective, so I have no idea what mechanism someone like Campo thinks would prevent a female from reporting effectively on rugby.

Does oestrogen block the brain's ruck receptors? Do women miss vital scrum penalties because they get distracted by their own breasts? Who knows?

So that was dumb. And to his credit, Campese has written on The Roar that he regrets his wording.

He shouldn't have included the "girl" schtick, he says, which is all good. But that article there reveals a deeper issue, and a broader problem with Campo's attitude.

It's clear that the reason he objects to Robinson's work, and wants Greg Growden back, is that Robinson has not been getting "stuck into the real issues" - and for Campese, the "real issues" are that Robbie Deans is a hopeless failure and needs to be sacked, if not actually horse-whipped, with all possible speed.

What he is saying is, if Robinson does not spend her time slamming the Wallabies coach, she's not doing her job. And therein lies the problem.

Because Mr Campese, with all due respect, a rugby journalist's job is to report on rugby. Perhaps it may involve some analysis, and on occasion, even opinion. But one thing a rugby journalist's job does NOT entail is "agreeing with everything David Campese says".

Georgina Robinson may agree with you about Deans, or she may disagree, or she may think it's not the most pressing issue right now. But the main thing to note here is: she is not there to help you pursue your anti-Robbie campaign.

Campo, take this to heart: yours is not the only opinion worth listening to, and other members of the media bear no responsibility to form a chorus to back you up.

This is the problem with sports punditry: there is an assumption that the greater the player, the wiser the head and more worthwhile the opinion.

That's why Channel Nine stacks its commentary team with legends of the game, and keeps them on for decades no matter how stale they're getting.

But you're unlikely to find many viewers who believe Mark Nicholas to be a much worse commentator than Ian Healy, despite the latter's possession of 395 more Test dismissals than the former.

I'd rather read Greg Baum's opinion on cricket than Rodney Hogg's, and I get more enlightened listening to Harsha Bhogle than Sunil Gavaskar.

The point is, great players MAY make great thinkers, but not necessarily. Someone lacking great talent may be brilliant when analysing a sport, and someone with enormous ability can be a complete twit.

In fact, often genius sportspeople end up making fools of themselves when commenting on the game because of their genius: the ease with which the game came to them makes it impossible for them to understand how it can look so difficult for less gifted individuals. That's why the link between footballing ability and AFL coaching credentials is, at best, tenuous.

The point is not that Campese is right or wrong about Deans: the point is that being Campese doesn't make him right, and Georgina Robinson's not toeing his line doesn't make her incompetent.

As you yourself wrote, Mr Campese, "she’s doing her job", and while you may not like the way she's doing it, you don't get to define "being a journalist" as "writing stuff that David Campese wants you to write" or "attacking people who David Campese doesn't like" or "bowing to Campo's vast reservoir of rugby wisdom".

If you disagree with what anyone writes - Georgina Robinson, Ben Pobjie, or Ernest Hemingway - go ahead and make your case.

With any luck the strongest argument will prevail. But don't go around claiming that someone is completely unqualified to comment on the game because their opinions don't align with yours - or worse, because they're a "girl". I think we're better than that, aren't we?

The pinnacle of my rugby career remains playing for the Parramatta Under-17s. And I still recall the thrill of meeting David Campese that same year, and getting his autograph on my copy of his autobiography.

I'm pretty sure that even now he could still outrun me in a 50-metre dash to the tryline.

But being a legend doesn't stop you being wrong, and it doesn't mean you should go around ripping into all us little non-legends who might see things differently to you.

That just isn't how it works, off the rugby field. Out here, our brains count more than our feet, and it can benefit us all to remember to switch them on before addressing the world.

Leave it to the Experts, ladies

I was interested to read the article by well-known alleged woman Clementine Ford in Daily Life today, entitled How To Be A Woman. Interested, and dismayed, and slightly aroused.

I don't doubt Miss Ford's good intentions: like most women, she means well. But, like even more women, she falls down on execution. This is not her fault, necessarily: evolution has designed us for different roles. Men are designed for writing opinion articles, and women are designed for writing articles about leggings. It's science, you can't fight it. Don't get me wrong, I think it's adorable when woman say things about issues, but it's hard to take seriously, what with all the bras and things that they wear.

So I decided, in a spirit of brotherliness and educationalism, to write a gentle riposte to Clementine's article, as a genuine expert who actually KNOWS something about the subject. I mean, no offence, Clementine, but I think I know a little bit more than you about how to be a woman.

"Oh, but how can you?" I hear the chatterers chatter. "For you are a MAN!" Well, gee, thanks for that outburst, Lieutenant Misandry. What's your next trick: castrating stay-at-home dads? Let's leave our bigotry at home, JUST FOR ONCE.

Here, in a simple, easy-to-read, female-friendly format, is where Clementine went wrong in her "article".

First, she used "humour". The article is riddled with "jokes" and "satire" and "sarcasm". This is unbecoming, Clementine. There is nothing ladylike about a woman who fancies herself as some kind of cigar-chewing, wisecrack-flinging, crotch-scratching Bill Cosby-type. Obviously it is a free country, and if you women want to go around giving the impression you have hairy stomachs and secret penises, go ahead and make your "gags". But rest assured, every time you make a testosteroney jape like "women be cray", a little bit of your femininity dies. Painfully. Like, in a fire or something.

Second, she was vulgar. Was it really necessary to use such crude terminology as "bitches" or "periods" or "wombs"? Such a foul mouth on a woman is a real turn-off, and it really does make you wonder what Clementine thought she was doing. I mean, she pursues a career as a writer, in order to attract men, the same reason all women do anything, and yet she then goes and sabotages herself with this profanity that will doubtless send any man of refinement and virility running for the hills. Keep it clean, Clementine - boys don't make passes at girls who say asses.

Third, she made it all about sex. Yes, I know it IS all about sex with today's modern, professional, gin-addled young woman, but do you have to be so blatant about it?

Fourth, she lectured us. To presume to dictate to decent, respectable, hard-working men like myself and others is rude and arrogant. Perhaps Clementine's "opinions" would have carried more weight had she taken a more conciliatory tone, eg. "Dear Men: I love you. Care for a chat?" You catch more flies with honey than with argumentativeness, Clementine. How are we expected to listen to what you have to say when you insist on saying it in such a wilfully patronising and audible manner? Wouldn't it have been a greater contribution to mutual understanding between the sexes if you had first listened to what WE wanted to tell you, and then nodded, and then gone home and written all this stuff in your diary, and locked it, and gone to bed? I think it would have. Women's opinions will never be taken seriously until they take a more mature attitude to keeping quiet about them.

Fifth, in her author photo, she quite clearly has breasts just out of shot. This is distracting.

So there you go: If you want to be a proper woman, take heed, Clementine, or you may never find a husband at all!

Women: Dangerously Insane

How To Do Telephoning

This is a Public Service Announcement.

This is how a phone call proceeds:

Person A dials number of Person B.

Person B answers phone.

Person B: Hello, this is Person B.

Person A: Hello Person B, this is Person A. I am calling you for Reason C, which I shall now elucidate.

Person B: Excellent I am all ears.


You may have noticed something quite significant about the above, namely that Person A is a person, and when Person B answers the phone, Person A speaks to Person B, and tells Person B why they're calling.

This is NOT how a phone call proceeds:

Person A sets computer to automatically dial number of Person B.

Person B answers phone.

Person B: Hell, this is -

Person A's Computer: Hello, this is an important call from Person A. Please hold the line while we play you some music, and wait until Person A is ready to deal with you.


Because you see, if Person A calls Person B, Person A should ALREADY BE READY to talk to Person B. If Person A is NOT ready to talk to Person B, Person A should WAIT until Person A IS ready, before making that call. As opposed to programming a recording to tell Person B to waste Person' B's time listening to hold music UNTIL Person A is ready.

Or in other words, if YOU are calling ME, you better TALK to me as soon as I answer.

Or more pertinently, if YOU are a company, and for the sake of argument let's call this company "GE", because that is its name, and YOU are trying to waste my time by calling me with a recording that tells me to hang on until you have a real person available, then FUCK YOU GE, I am HANGING UP STRAIGHT AWAY.

Do you understand, Person A and/or GE and/or anyone else who does this? I'm NOT listening to your recording. I'm NOT holding the line. You have something to say, call me up and SAY it. Don't call me up and tell me to wait until your saying-things ducks are all in a row.

Because we live in a CIVILISED SOCIETY, and this is how we DO THINGS, and I refuse to participate in your UNCIVILISED telephony practices.

GOT IT?

GOOD.

Who's with me?