I just write stuff for the paper

Bloody tough gig these days, journalism. Papers are closing, the e-nvironment is saturated with news sources and getting anyone to read your stuff is harder, these days, than getting planning permission to build a dog house.

You really need to be able to grab the reader's attention with a spectacular revelation or sensational scandal.

There are two things standing in your way:

Firstly, spectacular revelations require research which, in turn, require time and money. Unless you work for one of those egg-head, low salary boring places that has an interest in the facts, your editor is not going to allow you the luxury of time or money.

Secondly, life is fairly dull. In fact, the universe around is endlessly fascinating but not in ways that interest most readers: it’s not wearing see-through dresses on the red carpet, it doesn't have a hit single that is musically indistinguishable from everything else on the charts, it isn't using plastic surgery to disguise its age (after all, 13 and a bit billion years gives you more fine lines and wrinkles than even the most audacious snake oil anti-ageing cream manufacturer could credibly claim to disguise) and, while sex in nature is abundant, it tends not to be illicit and is generally only of interest to people who are using David Attenborough as their sexologist.

You are going to need a way to dress up the tedium of daily human happenings in such a way that you can attract readers without attracting actions for libel.

Thank God for me and my sarcastic blog.

Start with headlines phrased as questions. "J-Lo is having an affair" needs proof. "Is J Lo having an affair?" needs an answer, which you can invite the reader to provide for themselves by supplying a judiciously edited selection of facts, gossip and speculation.

Your next best friend is "reportedly": "J Lo has reportedly been seen with..." Now you're not asserting the fact of the affair, you're stating the fact that the fact has been asserted by someone else’s report. If needs be, you can create that report yourself by having a friend post something on Facebook.

“Reportedly” has a couple of good mates you can rope in to help you out:

“Speculation is growing that …” means you heard a couple of people chatting about it at the bus stop.

“It is thought that …” means you dreamed it up in the shower.

If you’re struggling for subject matter then helping people with their first world problems is always going to be a winner. Here are two good safe fall-backs to get you started:

Health and wellbeing. At first glance, this looks like dangerous territory because you don’t actually know anything about medicine. But look harder. We’re not talking about home-tonsillectomy instructions here, just general advice on imaginary problems. The same basic tips (drink more water, eat more fruit and veg, get some sleep, get some exercise, don’t smoke and drink) can be presented as ways to treat all manner of ailments: office stress, low libido, depression, obesity, feeling unpopular or a little bit ugly.

Office etiquette / career help tips are also good. You work in an office so just find the things that annoy you most about your co-workers and broaden them out into general advice. It would appear that there are a great many people out there that need constant reminding that picking your nose in public, eating garlic sausages at your desk, sending rude messages about your boss on the company email system and/or stealing other people’s lunch from the fridge are bad for your reputation and standing in the company. You can always trot that one out.

And people are suckers for lists. Headline your work “Top 7 tips for …” and you’ll get thousands of clicks from the huge number of us that consume bullet points like ecstasy pills.

Don’t worry about reader feedback too much. Almost all of your stuff will be published online these days and 95% of your readers are just trying to fill the day by reading ‘news’ articles because it looks slightly more like work than playing Tetris, and the company’s firewall has blocked access to their usual research material. You’ll find that most most people don’t actually read each word that you’ve written, they just take in the general gist, so any feedback you get will be so far off-topic that you can safely ignore it. In fact, you can ignore it all anyway. Web 2.0 with its blogs and message boards and Twitter feeds has always been about giving people the impression that someone is listening to them when, in fact, articles go from “open to comment”, through “closed for comment” to “comments ridiculed over staff drinks and then deleted” in the space of twenty-four hours.

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Cage hunting - a cowardly act

I’m sorry sir, you’ve taken unfair advantage of the situation to force that young lady into a conversation. I’m going to have to cite you for a breach.

Fellas (and, to some extent, ladies) , if you want to try it on with younger members of your preferred gender, hunt in the wild where the prey has an even money chance of escaping. Hunting caged animals is unsportsmanlike and will result in a citation.

The following case studies will help you understand and apply the regulations:

The French back-packer waitress at the café brings you your coffee. If you’re really lame you’ll bait the hook with a French “merci”. Even if you don’t, holding her there with an opening line like “this time twelve months ago, when I was in the south of France” is not allowed. She has to smile at you – so you can delude yourself that your repartee has earned you a smile from a bronze skinned European beauty – and she has to listen politely. Beautiful young ladies listening to you and smiling, yes, that’s rare these days, but there’s no way that this conversation is going to end with her sitting down to coffee with you and exchanging bodily fluids later in the evening. Because she has a chance of wriggling free by the simple expedient of moving off to serve the next customer, I’ll let you off with a warning this time, but don’t do it again.

Your daughter’s friends (assuming of course that your daughter is at least 18, otherwise click here to summon a constable) are a protected species. This isn’t American Beauty.  When they’re staying over at your place, bailing them up over the dinner table with an endless list of apparently caring and paternal questions and thereby prying into their lives is fish-in-a-barrel material. You aren’t the first bloke to try that one on. No warnings for that one, there’s a hefty fine in the mail. Oh, and I’m confiscating those rose petals too.

On any form of public transport where you’re on the aisle side of the prey, you have no hunting rights at all. Don’t even think you’ve got a whiff of a scent let alone the right to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. This is the worst kind of cage hunting. In that situation, her defences only amount to headphones, the advertorial-badged-as-journalism on new Australian wines in the in-flight magazine or gazing in fascinated concentration at the featureless sky. Forcing her to listen to your worn-to-threadbare stories and come-ons disguised as jokes in that environment is the in-public equivalent of tying her to a chair in a darkened warehouse with water dripping on her head.  Poor form! Not only will you be getting a fine in the mail, but in future the airline will always seat you, three across, with two other offenders, both of whom are models for Mr Big clothing and walking proof that deodorant is not for everybody.

These case studies should serve to inform you of the scope of the regulations. If you have any difficulty understanding them, please call our helpline.

Global Warming - it's all a hoax

In fantastic news for neocons, newspaper columnists and the fossil fuel industry, it has been announced that global warming is a hoax.

Professor Henrique Salvados, in an interview recorded at his hospital bed just before his death, confessed that the whole thing had been a con job right from the beginning.

Professor Salvados' confession will come as a bombshell for the many soft-hearted, lily-livered, namby-pamby liberals out there who had fallen hook, line and sinker for the story.

The conspiracy started, apparently, at a side event to a meteorologists conference in the late 1970s. A group of weather-men, tired of being ridiculed for being wrong about the rain for the footy and wanting revenge on the world for those many years at school when they were being bullied as maths nerds, had a few cleansing ales and then decided to try to convince the world that it was warming up.

"I don't think we really believed it would take off", commented Professor Salvador, "after all, it was one of those ideas that only swim into sharp focus through the bottom of a beer glass and, by the morning after, it seemed like a 'gnaw your own arm off' kind of thing."

However, it did take off and the number of people involved grew from an initial six or seven to several hundred by the middle of the 1990s.

"We had no shortage of recruits; have you ever met a popular, socially well-adjusted weatherman?" said the Professor. "Keeping it secret was no big deal either because no-one listens to or believes the weatherman anyway, except other weathermen - and they were all in on the secret."

Once the meteorological community had accepted the modeling, it was time for the conspiracy to escalate into getting broader acceptance.

"It was no easy feat", said the Professor of this second phase, "getting the public on board. The first thing was that we needed some pictures, some art for the media to use."

In what is now recognized as the hardest work done by university students in history, the team responsible for the Crop Circles hoax in England were brought on board to mobilise up to 3,500 undergraduates to cause Arctic sea ice melt.

"Incredible to watch!", said Professor Salvador, "Thousands of spotty youths running around the Arctic Circle with industrial heaters, blow torches, hair driers and even cigarette lighters in some cases, making sure that the ice melt appeared worse every year. Of course it cost us something in kegs but it was worth it and there's nothing an undergraduate won't do for beer."

"It was even easier in Africa and South America. If you were willing to pay American dollars, half the population of the country would get involved and whole mountains, like Kilimanjaro, could be denuded of snow in an afternoon - just in time for Al Gore to turn up and take a few photos."

Another group from Australia was paid off to build a few basic huts in the shallow seas off places like Tuvalu.

"We just let the cash slosh around like the water and the natives were happy enough to go along with it. For a tenner and a box of Lego, you can always get an eight year old to stand ankle deep in some water, looking forlornly at a TV camera. In the end Tuvalu got some more aid money out of it and the kids got some toys so everyone was content."

Once the media had bought into the story, the conspirators had few problems ringing in other willing scientists.

"Frankly, all scientists want publicity. They got into it as wide-eyed youngsters hoping to be the person famous for building the warp-drive or discovering the cure for cancer. Then reality set in and they had to content themselves with smug smarter-than-thou articles in obscure journals and even more self-serving presentations at academic conventions. The only hope they had of even a moment's fame was to get something published in Scientific American or to be the talking head on some news program. And the only way to get those things was to be doing research in areas that the public were at least tangentially interested in. So they all got on board with Climate Change."

"Of course, there were always the David Suzuki, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox types who already had the publicity they wanted - bastards - and one or two around the place who insisted on seeing real evidence for themselves and that's where the hard work really started. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make enough fake ice-core samples and tree rings to convince that many people? We really had our work cut out for us."

"For the rest, we just kept the papers difficult to understand, full of lots of complicated mathematics and stuff like that. Many scientists don't understand half of what they pretend to and just nod along with the rest so that they don't look too stupid."

"It was going really well for a while. Ever time there was a hot day or a cyclone or something, people would say 'Well, that's climate change for you'. By the start of the 21st century, though, some of our projections were starting to look a little silly and some members of our group were starting to get nervous about how long people would continue to believe us. So we started to ease off on the temperature growth a bit - to make it all look a bit more credible. You'll see it in the graphs."

"Were we only in it out of a sense of childish revenge? Mostly, yes. We knew what would happen in the end. People would have to pay more for petrol and more for electricity and we just wanted to screw over every hard working family on the planet - stuff 'em, if they wanted to mock us then we'd get the last laugh. Of course, there were other factors. We got billions in research dollars and the like from the powerful solar-and-wind lobby. You know what they're like; they can buy anyone and anything with the money they have available to them. And finally, good old fashioned jealousy. It's all about bloody particle physics these days.  Big expensive tunnels in the Alps, endless funding for ever more powerful computers and grants to pay for attractive PhD students to work in their labs for years at a time. Pricks! And no-one even understands what the hell they're on about with their quarks, and their spins and their bosuns. We wanted in. We needed something complex and really, really important - like the PPs and their 'first few seconds after the Big Bang' - so we came up with Climate Change."

The Conservative Union of Newspaper and Television Specialists put out a one line press release on hearing of the news

"Let the fun begin!"

Take home a Geek today

Take home a Geek today.

(read 'Geek' as mathematician, physicist, computer programmer, aspie etc if you like)

You'll never regret the decision to take a Geek home.

Geeks are always useful. Worried about the stories you hear from others about how their spouse doesn't do things around the house? Never have that fear when you have a Geek. They know how everything works and, if they don't know, they'll find out. Need the dishwasher fixed, the computer defragged, the house rewired? Your Geek will have it done in no time and will be standing there with a proud smile on his face, having not only fixed the appliance but added infrared remote functionality and a time travel widget as well.

Has the family car or your kids' space shuttle run out of fuel? No problem when you have a Geek, a large bottle of vinegar and a blow torch.  The outcome will blow you away!

Don't ever worry about your spouse spending too much money on clothes and hair care products and jewelry when you have a Geek. They just don't care what they look like. They'll have the same pair of jeans for a decade and the t-shirt will be holier than Pope Francis before it's retired. Hair cuts will be an annual event and Dunlop Volleys are appropriate for everything other than the most formal weddings. Note for new owners: you may need to thrust your Geek in the direction of the bath from time to time, especially if they have become absorbed in a programming problem that has had them in thrall for three days or so.

And it's a benefit for you too. They won't notice what you're wearing so you don't need to try too hard. Get around in whatever makes you comfortable and come to bed naked. It's all good.

How many women are embarrassed to take their husbands out to parties because they'll tell inappropriate jokes or make passes at other women? Those happy women who've taken home a Geek never fear these occasions. Mostly because the Geek is unlikely to even be there - they don't like people very much and they certainly don't like crowds, noise and small talk. If they have managed to get a matching pair of shoes on, their faces shaven and through the door into the party venue, they won't be there telling inappropriate jokes - they probably don't know any jokes that don't involve logarithms - and they won't be making passes at women because they won't be circulating; they'll be in the kitchen or a quiet place somewhere, engaged in a deep, fact-based conversation with someone they've only just met. They'll only notice she's female if she actually takes her clothes off so, unless you're going to some spectacular parties where women strip naked at the first mention of Fermat's Last Theorem, then you're probably OK.

Communication problems in your relationship can be a thing of the past. Your Geek will communicate directly or not at all. You will have to state exactly what you want - hints are no good - but what is good is that your Geek will then go to the ends of the Earth to get it for you. He will tell you exactly what he wants too. There will be no easily misunderstood innuendos or hidden half-suggestions to make your domestic life into Hell. It's all out there. The only time you will need to develop a suspicion about your Geek is if he answers the question "What are you thinking about?" with "Nothing." He must be lying. His brain never switches off. What he's thinking about will probably surprise you - most people don't lie naked after sex trying to figure out spherical trigonometry - but he won't be thinking about nothing.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. Possibly true of the Greeks but never of your Geek. Indeed, you can be sure of your Geek, even when he's not bearing gifts. For other women, if their husband hasn't told them "I love you" in a while, they're worried that he's having an affair. For the happy wife of the Geek, she knows that it's not that he's stopped loving her, it's just that he told her eighteen months ago, on a Sunday, at 8pm, over dinner and he's working on the assumption that the emotion persists until further notice.

And finally you need never be ignorant. If you have a question, he can answer it. He's probably read a book about it or watched a documentary or written a thesis on the topic. Raise even the most abstruse of topics and you can be sure your Geek will be able to give you the most up to date information. (Note that this warranty does not hold good for anything to do with people, emotions, intuitions or any other girly stuff like that).

Take a Geek home today! You won't be disappointed.

Notes:

Dunlop Volleys are canvas shoes, worth about $20 a pair, that have been popular as give-a-shit shoes in Australia for generations.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes - Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. More correctly, "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts"

"Abstruse" means 'difficult to understand or obscure'. The word most people use in this case is "obtuse" which means 'greater than 90 degrees but less than 180 degrees'. This is the sort of thing your Geek can tell you - and your life will be better for it.

If you've enjoyed this recommendation and have a friend that needs a Geek in their lives, share this on Facebook or another social media of your choice. Geeks love computer stuff!

So I'll control that

You get the feeling, listening to the increasingly hysterical and silly policies that governments are coming up with to control illegal immigration, that they're trying so hard to exercise control in that area because they're politically incontinent in more or less every other way. They can't make us all Christian, they can't get us all to live behind a white picket fence, they can't control drug use, the economy, the exchange rate, the traffic or even the prevalence of dog poo on our footpaths but, by God, they can control those illegals!

It's like a disappointed highway cop who pulls over a Harley rider, convinced that he's got himself a bikie kingpin only to find an inoffensive science teacher and father of three on his way to grandma's house with a pannier full of goodies. You can bet your driver’s license that the big bad wolf will find a bald tyre or malfunctioning blinker light in there somewhere.

As a parent, I know how this works.  I want to control what my daughter wears, how she dresses, what music she listens to, who her friends are and at what rate her interest in boys develops.  What I actually can control, sometimes, is her room.

“While you live in this house, young lady, you will keep that room tidy; you will respect my authority!” (yes, read it Cartman-style if you'd like).

By the way, the answer to your question about why fathers want to control boyfriends, young lady, is that I was a teenage boy once, I know what his libido is thinking and my attitude to him doing that with you is exactly the same as your attitude to me doing that with your mother.

Note the repetition of the condescending “young lady” there. It was deliberate. It helps reinforce my illusion of authority and control.

The problem of controlling something to cover for your general level of incontinence is well worth understanding.  Every so often, there comes a point when you know it’s time to brush up the CV, don the life-jacket and jump overboard before the skipper drives the company you work for onto some long-since-charted and clearly visible rocks. You know that point? The early warning signs of that are when the managers start issuing guidelines about appropriate footwear for the office, corporate standards for the Christmas decorations or safety instructions about how to cross the road or walk down a flight of stairs. At that point, the board has lost control of everything important and the proverbial is just gushing out of them. Man the lifeboats!

You can tell the same thing about governments. When they have completely lost control of the budget and can’t rein in the billions being wasted on submarines that leak, fighter planes that don’t exist, small business incentive programs that are funding drug cartels and law and order initiatives that are filling the jails with parking fine defaulters, it’s time for a crackdown on welfare fraud. As we all know, it’s single mothers and paraplegics who are the biggest drain on our economy. Tax payers dollars being wasted, ten bucks at a time, on overpayments to people who could have made do on just the one can of baked beans this week rather than rorting the hardworking people of this nation for two cans and a loaf of bread. At this point, it’s time for an election; let the other guys have a crack at running the place for a while because the current mob has lost it completely.

They’ll be cracking down on illegal immigrants next.

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A course in advanced hieroglyphics

This course is designed for people learning to drive and who need to demonstrate an understanding of road signs.

Module 1: parking restrictions

Recent changes have removed the need to differentiate between No Parking, No Standing and No Stopping. All these categories have been replaced with a simple S with a line through it. No one is really sure if that means you can't park, can stop but not park or can't stop at all, even if your life depends on it.

Whichever interpretation is correct, many councils have adopted a range of symbols to indicate such variations as

"No stopping except for emergency vehicles",

"No parking unless you have a resident's permit except on Tuesdays between 7:30 and 9am", and

"Clearway on even numbered days for vehicles longer than 2.3 metres, unless they're Australian made and/or are driven by someone at least 5'10" with legs that go all the way up under the short dress they're wearing".

And you're expected to be able to decipher all that from a moving vehicle while not rear- ending the Merc in front or running over the "I just double parked to get my coffee but look I put the hazards on" guy running back to his car.

4P isn't a bra size, it's an indication that you can park for four hours. A sign reading "-2P" doesn't seem to make sense against that logic but, at a guess, you were probably in trouble before you even left home.

Module 2: Freeways

Reading road signs while traveling at 110 kph (unless the sign above is blacked out or special event conditions apply) presents its own set of challenges.  Exits are generally numbered in random order and the final destination of the road that the off ramp leads to is the only one on the sign.

If you realize after the event that you didn't line up the overhead arrows with the correct exit lane, you'll need to continue up the freeway to the next exit, unless your vehicle exceeds the height restrictions or the exit is closed for the morning peak hour, all of which are explained on an A4 sized sign, partially hidden behind a tree branch.

Speed limits are also linked to the weather in some places; 90 kph if it's raining and 110 kph otherwise.  How much water constitutes rain is explained in the fine print on the side of the sign facing away from the driver.  In some places a splash from the badly aligned windscreen jets of the car in front is enough to trigger the regulations, in other places rain that would, if the current rate continued, deliver 20mm in the next 24 hours is required.

And watch out for the overhead X which indicates that all previous signs are null and void and you now have a suburban bus on-coming in your lane with a mad Scotsman sitting in the back yelling  “I canna give ya any more, Captain”.

And if you can take all that information in while keeping to the speed limit, watching out for other drivers, checking to make sure that your passengers are all wearing seat belts, double-checking to see if the thing that looks like an electronic road-works sign is a critical warning or just an advertisement for tyres (to keep your family safe on the road this holiday season) and controlling your cravings to check your phone as soon as it beeps, you can have a drivers licence.

Not suitable for the sane

The Australian Classifications Agency (ACA) has introduced a new rating for TV shows – “NSS” or “Not suitable for the sane”

The introduction of the rating follows public complaints that the plot lines of US police TV shows have gotten to the point where only insane people would see them as a form of entertainment.

In a statement, the ACA summarized some of the complaints they’d received from members of the public:

“We couldn’t go a week without someone complaining that the criminal in one of these shows had abducted a 12 year old, exacted revenge against everyone that had ever harmed them – using kitchen implements and leaving mysterious “come get me” messages written in blood at the crime scene, held a woman slave in a basement for twenty years, or spent months breaking into people’s homes and strip mining the occupants for parts. Quite how any of this was entertaining was increasingly bemusing to the Australian public.”

The College of Australian Psychologists supported the move by the ACA:

“Treatment for paranoid complaints has gone up ten-fold in the last decade. People watching these shows were becoming afraid to go outside, befriend anyone who wasn’t able to produce a police badge on demand or develop any kind of meaningful relationship. Three electricity meter readers were stabbed to death last year – not for the usual reason – but because people had formed the belief that they were there to abduct them and attach their genitals to the mains.”

Tourism New York’s spokeswoman, Nellie Carne, also welcomed the news:

“People had stopped coming to New York for fear that they wouldn’t make it out the airport, let alone into a taxi cab without the protection of a handsome cop and a weirdly sexy forensics expert. Judging our city based on our cop shows, you’d think psychopathology was our only growth industry. Anything that helps us counter this image is a good move.”

The Minister for the Arts, responsible for the new ratings, commented:

“It’s gotten to the stage where it’s worse than the ancient Romans. Gladiatorial contests at least had the benefit of honesty of purpose and being a fair fight. Modern crime dramas are apparently trawling the forgotten corners of asylums for the criminally insane to come up with a show that has some hope of holding the viewing audience. We, the citizens of an allegedly civilized society, are being asked to accept, as the evening’s entertainment – enjoyed over a glass of wine – the actions of some of the most depraved minds on the planet. Most people have only just had their dinners.”

The lone voice of concern over the new move has been raised by the Hollywood Police. Lieutenant Dave Olford noted that, given that they were all employed as consultants and script writers, the police knew where to find the criminally insane that were out on parole. If moves to restrict their work led to a diminution in demand for their services, they may well retreat underground and play out their sick fantasies for real rather than in the studios of Tinseltown.

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The Dawkins- Hitchens Awards

The Dawkins-Hitchens Awards

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the inaugural Dawkins-Hitchens awards.

Prior to the evangelical work of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, smug believers throughout the world lived warm in the comfort that their unappreciated good deeds not only gave them the right to feel a holier-than-thou glow now but also accrued frequent do-gooder points that could be redeemed later; great would be their reward in heaven.

Thanks to Dawkins and Hitchens we now know that there is no heaven, so tonight's awards are a secular opportunity for a bit of sanctimonious gloating.

Our first recipient tonight is Mr Reginald Hawk. Reg's loyalty to his company through all the vicissitudes of a forty year career is exceptional as is the fact that he has never taken an unnecessary sick day - a fact of which he never tired of reminding his fellow workers. Well done Reg!

Mrs Emily Christopher takes out the inaugural Perfect Mum prize - sponsored by Australia's leading brand of toilet cleaner. Emily is being recognized for her twenty years as an at home mum - when other irresponsible women dumped their kids in those daycare places. During that time Emily's kids have never handed an assignment in late, never been without a handmade costume for book week and her house has never been anything less than cleaning-product-ad spotless. Emily has been excluded as insufferable from every gathering of mothers for the last five years. Please give Emily your applause.

Miss Joanne Plumber receives the award for volunteer organisation. Joanne has, over thirty years, served with many volunteer organisations. Joanne was that person who staffed every fundraising BBQ, sold the most raffle tickets and always stayed late to help pack up the hall. As time went on, Joanne made everyone feel as though their contribution was never going to be as valued or as important as hers because she had, personally, single-handedly and with great sacrifice, shouldered the burden of keeping the club together – using only sticky tape and string. Gradually people, feeling devalued, drifted away and the clubs became defunct while Joanne grumbled about their lack of commitment and loyalty. Joanne is recognised for causing the demise of six clubs over the last ten years. Ladies and gentlemen, Joanne Plumber!

Let’s take a moment to recognise our up-and-coming youth. Dean Anderson wins this year’s Children’s Award, sponsored by our favourite toothpaste company. Dean is a cheerful young man, always does his chores and keeps his room clean. Never a worry to his parents, he’s first ready in the mornings and makes a point of showing his brothers how he’s helping him mum to the car with her bags. At school, Dean’s socks are always pulled up, his shirt tucked in and his bag shows no sign of graffiti or profanity. He’s never had a detention, never gotten less than a B and looks around proudly to make sure everyone sees that his hand is the first one up to answer a question in class. A great example to all! You’ll have to give Dean a moment has he comes up the stairs with his crutches; last week at school, teachers and students alike joined together to beat nine kinds of crap out of the little twerp.

And finally tonight, our major prize goes to Jenny Brown and Rupert Nicholson. Jenny and Rupert are recent graduates from the Australian National University and columnists for a Sydney newspaper. They are white, middle-class and belong to no vilified minority and yet they are ceaseless in taking offence on behalf of other people and sermonising about it in the paper. Even the mention of the word “aboriginal” or “gay” in an article or on TV is enough fodder – they can always find some way in which it denigrates the relevant group. Rupert and Jenny can even take umbrage on both sides of a case: when Australia didn’t have a specialised indigenous TV station, they launched a nation-wide campaign to have one instituted. After it was launched, they lambasted the government of the day for putting indigenous culture on a “special” station and not in the mainstream media. It’s a good thing they never get off their high horse because they’d be dull company in the pub; they’d never be able to tell a joke. Please stand and congratulate our major prize winners for this year, Rupert and Jenny.

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