You've found Father McKenzie. But are you really looking for Eleanor Rigby?

Monday, June 04, 2012

Maintain your, er, mad-as-hell-ness

Okay, I've officially seen everything. Katto The Elder - former Queensland National Party State Cabinet Minister, who sat at same Cabinet table as former Premier Johannes “Sir Joh” Bjelke-Petersen in the 1980s - is supporting striking mine workers at Mt Isa. This has got to be the first strike that right-wingers have supported since the Orangemen killed off Northern Ireland power-sharing in 1974, or the truck drivers helped topple Allende in 1973.

This is not your father’s National Party. (Well, in your father’s day it would have been the Country Party, which is more ideologically accurate but also vulnerable to unfortunate puns by the likes of Gough Whitlam. Welcome to Australia, where we have a conservative Liberal Party, a National Party that only exists in three out of six States, a Labor Party whose only rusted-on voters are the unemployed, and Greens who, as Tim Blair noted, rarely live in places with any greenery. Queensland is governed by a Liberal National Party that's really a conservative regional party). Only a few months ago, the Party Formerly Led By John Anderson recruited Gary "Angry" Anderson, former lead singer of the hard rock band Rose Tattoo, as a member, possibly even as a future candidate.

So the party once led by "Sir" Joh - who won numerous Queensland elections by promising to crack down on street marchers and whale-loving greenies - could end up preselecting a candidate who sang "We can't be beaten/ We can rule the streets!" in 1982, "Calling" in 1989 and "I wish I were a tribesman/ in the hills of Afghanistan" in 1984.

Too sweet.

Myself, I think Azza should stand in Kingsford-Smith so the Nats could tell Labor "We see your shaven-headed pub-rocker from 1982, and raise you one”…

Monday, April 30, 2012

"I, Nedward, Ward-diddly-arden of the Northaroonies, hereby sentence ye..."


It had to happen… eventually. One has a rainier wolf castle, while the other…


Personally I had always thought The Big Bang Theory would beat The Simpsons to it. (But then a lot of TBBT’s unearned geek-cred comes from throwing in passing  interchangeable "[INSERT NAME OF SF/ FANTASY FRANCHISE HERE - Battlestar, Firefly, Caprica, etc]" references. Whereas Simpsons tends to actually engage with the content of what they’re parodying/ homaging… Or maybe it is GoT that is doing the homaging. Compare C Montgomery Burns with the Mad King Aerys Targaryen, for example… And has anyone ever seen the two Ms Van Houtens together in the same room?

And while on the topic of googlewhacking the words “Homer” and “Sean Bean”… GoT’s screenwriters David Benioff and DB Weiss also scripted Troy. Which means that it’s nearly a decade that they’ve been staring at their keyboards and screaming “Curse you, Paris!”…

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Next: "Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella"

UPDATE: Whitney Houston has just passed away so I am removing this post.