TONGUE OF THE DAY

From the letters page of “The Age”, July 22nd, 2015 …

The last time I took a helicopter to a Liberal Party function was during the Vietnam War. – Les Anderson, Woodend

Ouch.

BEFORE I FORGET

Item 1.

Dullness of mind had me neglect to mention that this blog received a shout-out a few weeks back from podcast “Something Wonky”.

“Something Wonky” is a weekly political podcast presented by Dave Gaukroger and Jeremy Sear, who previously wrote the “Pure Poison” blog at Crikey.

You can subscribe or download the podcast (it’s free) from their website, or via iTunes. I have a suspicion that alcohol is freely consumed during its recording, and I understand perfectly.

Item 2.

The vile treatment afforded the Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs this week moved me to shoot off a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. It was not published, which did not surprise me, as the subject drew a great deal of correspondence, most of it in a tone similar  to my own …

“The contempt shown to Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs by Tony Abbott, George Brandis and the chap with the “man’s voice” who thought he should be heard is matched only by my contempt for them. Their cowardice, their ignorance, their obfuscatory tactics, their bellowing bleats of confected outrage, and violently worded assaults on an individual who was hired to do a job and did it. And did it well, if the noisome vapors of their empty protestations are anything to go by.

I would not trust these so-called “men” with a box of crayons in a public toilet not to deface the walls, as it would seem hey have an uncommon knack for defacing not only human rights, but common decency and responsible adult behaviour as well.”

Item 3.

Jason Wilson of The Guardian believes Tony Abbott is becoming ever-so-slightly unhinged …

“[T]hese days, Abbott sits for much of the day in his office in Parliament House pondering national security, Islamic State and reading Winston Churchill”.

John Lyons’ report in the Weekend Australian gives an unmistakable hint that Abbott is becoming ever-so-slightly unhinged. As his government comes down around him, he’s indulging in reveries of statesmanship, burrowing into Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War and polishing up his speeches.

I strongly disagree. Mr. Abbott is not “ever-so-slightly unhinged”. He is barking off his fucking trolley batshit insane.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Via Buzzfeed …

Sir Anthony Hopkins sends Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston a letter. The letter has been confirmed genuine by Hopkins’ publicist …

Dear Mister Cranston.

I wanted to write you this email – so I am contacting you through Jeremy Barber – I take it we are both represented by UTA . Great agency.

I’ve just finished a marathon of watching “BREAKING BAD” – from episode one of the First Season – to the last eight episodes of the Sixth Season. (I downloaded the last season on AMAZON) A total of two weeks (addictive) viewing.

I have never watched anything like it. Brilliant!

Your performance as Walter White was the best acting I have seen – ever.

I know there is so much smoke blowing and sickening bullshit in this business, and I’ve sort of lost belief in anything really.

But this work of yours is spectacular – absolutely stunning. What is extraordinary, is the sheer power of everyone in the entire production. What was it? Five or six years in the making? How the producers (yourself being one of them), the writers, directors, cinematographers…. every department – casting etc. managed to keep the discipline and control from beginning to the end is (that over used word) awesome.

From what started as a black comedy, descended into a labyrinth of blood, destruction and hell. It was like a great Jacobean, Shakespearian or Greek Tragedy.

If you ever get a chance to – would you pass on my admiration to everyone – Anna Gunn, Dean Norris, Aaron Paul, Betsy Brandt, R.J. Mitte, Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Steven Michael Quezada – everyone – everyone gave master classes of performance … The list is endless.

Thank you. That kind of work/artistry is rare, and when, once in a while, it occurs, as in this epic work, it restores confidence.

You and all the cast are the best actors I’ve ever seen.

That may sound like a good lung full of smoke blowing. But it is not. It’s almost midnight out here in Malibu, and I felt compelled to write this email.

Congratulations and my deepest respect. You are truly a great, great actor.

Best regards

Tony Hopkins.

Can’t argue with that.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Julia Gillard, it’s all your fault. If you had been married instead of partnered, we would not have disrespected your relationship. If you had partnered someone who was not a hairdresser, we would not have made the obvious conclusion about his sexuality. If you had not deposed Kevin Rudd, we would still have a person in a blue tie in command. If you had not managed to keep a minority government going the distance, we would not have had to resent a woman being in power all this time. If you had been decent enough to resign in abject apology for doing so badly in the polls, we would not have had to hound you. If you had not repulsed Rudd’s two attempts to replace you, we would not have had to abuse your dead father. If you had not changed your mind on the carbon tax, we would not have had to call you a bitch. Let’s face it, Julia. It’s all your fault. Just as it is the fault of the ”slut” who is gang raped or who brings out the basest instincts in us men. Just as it is the fault of the rape victim who wore provocative clothes and was out alone at night. It’s all your fault for being a woman. – Tom Perfect, Richmond

Perfect, Tom.

HYPERBOLLOCKS

From the Sydney Morning Herald letters page of February 4 (my emphasis) …

“People worry about hunting in national parks while Uzi submachine guns are freely available on the streets of Sydney (”Gun crime becoming an evil disease – police”, February 4)?” – Paul Haege, Darling Point.

In the 54 years I have been on this earth and resident within the borders of this country, I have walked the streets of Sydney, the streets of Melbourne, of Brisbane, of Perth, of Adelaide, and of Hobart, and have never found a single, solitary gun.

There are no stallholders in Hobart’s Salamanca Markets, for example, who sell guns, let alone Uzi submachine guns.

There are stalls where you can buy a scallop pie, but scallop pies are not freely available from these stalls, you have to fork over some cash to the nice folk who run them, and they will hand you a pie in return, and possibly a napkin. Your pie will not come with a gun. Sauce maybe, but no gun.

Nobody has ever tried to sell me a gun, or even made the slightest inquiry of me as to whether I would like to buy one.

Not from a pie stall, or the back of a truck, or a pub, or even a kebab bar in southwest Sydney, though I must confess I’ve never been to a kebab bar in southwest Sydney, so I could be very, very wrong in that regard.

I do not want a gun.

As I am not a criminal, and do not move amidst the short and shifty denizens of the criminal world and never have; and because I do not know any property developers, or bikies, or tattooists, and have never met an *****, let alone an associate of an *****, a gun is not something I shall ever come across, unless I happen to be in the very wrong place at the very wrong time (a kebab bar in southwest Sydney, for example), and some cunt shoots me in the head because I got in the way of the cunt they really wanted to shoot (for selling them a gammy kebab perhaps), a gun shall not, and never will be a part of my world.

So.

What are we to make of Mr Haege’s tiny missive?

Mr. Haege appears to embody everything I have come to expect from the modern 21^st century Australian citizen …

Reactionary, over-dramatic hysterics.

Paranoia. About anything. Everything.

It’s the worst of times, the end of times. Mole-hill to mountain hyperbole.

These, sir, are not the barrios of Mexico.

Calm the fuck down.

You’re giving me the shits.

Again.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Gerard Henderson submitted another job application to the ABC yesterday, which drew this response from one correspondent …

As Gerard Henderson is calling for a more balanced ABC by employing more ”conservative” hosts and commentators, may I nominate him as the next host of Media Watch? I am sure he will be able to bring to the ABC the same unbiased, reasonable, balanced and rational insights that he provides for the Herald.

I think Henderson would be more bearable at the end of the day rather than the beginning.

Lee-Ann Groblicka, Turramurra

Nasty.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

At this …

Gerard Henderson needs to have Mark Scott’s email address so he can send his job application for ABC presenter direct to the source and save the rest of us from having to read it every Tuesday in the Herald.

Tony Coote Hunters Hill

… I did giggle.

SHUT. UP.

I have just sent this to SMH letters, although it probably won’t make the cut, as I didn’t get it off until after midday. So I’ll put it here (as I can) …

Dear Editor,

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all those in the Canberra press gallery, opinion writers, et al, who keep insisting I should regard what Julia Gillard did or did not do twenty years ago as important to me and the country at large, even though I still don’t quite understand if a crime has been committed and what that was. While I am encouraged that the (mostly) middle-aged white men and women of the gallery have such wild enthusiasms for vague bits of unsubstantiated gossip, I feel I must confess I cannot share these enthusiasms, as I am an adult who lives in the world, a world in which real things happen, some of which are important. Sorry if this is a disappointment to you all, but at least you have a hobby, which is nice.

Regards,
Ross Sharp

MY DILEMMA

Dear Network Ten,

I realise this letter is a little late in the coming, and for that I do apologise, however it has not been ‘til quite recently that I have become fully conscious of the cumulative impact a few of your scheduling decisions have come to have upon my person these last dozen months or so, and I felt it necessary to inform you of my dilemma, hoping, as I do, that the gentler angels of your better natures may pay them some heed and be receptive to my plea.

I’m having trouble with the vacuuming.

It’s not getting done.

Typically, my Sunday mornings had once been spent zipping around the unit attending to duties of a domestic nature, a series of (admittedly) tedious chores made far less so at the time by the unobtrusive and rather innocuous musical accompaniments of “Video Hits”, the long running clip program you axed late last year, an often bland blancmange of unevolved teen-pop tinkling to be sure, but diverting enough to make the housework tolerable (due also in no small part to the female host being unspeakably cute).

I found it a  very useful and productive time.

You then went and replaced it with “The Bolt Report”.

I don’t HAVE to watch it. I know. I don’t. I never have. I’ve seen snippets, a promo or two.

But just the fact, the idea, that this programme is airing right at this very time, at 10.00am on a Sunday morning, VACUUMING TIME, that a television somewhere is screening it, in a lounge room, just like the lounge room I’m in, the one I so desperately need to vacuum, is causing me to flee my (now disturbingly and increasingly shabby) home in confused frustration and run up the pub instead.

I’m drinking BEER in the pub at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, for God’s sake, and reading the Sunday Mail. A NEWS LTD paper. They put copies on the counter.

… Then I have another beer, and read another paper, and then I have another beer after that, and maybe I get some lunch from the bistro, a schnitzel, ten bucks (with chips and salad) and then I go home, but it’s 12.30 or 1.00pm by then, and vacuuming time is over, that’s something you do IN THE MORNING, DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?

A SUNDAY morning.

Now, I just slump down on the couch, half-tanked and bleary-eyed, staring forlornly at my discarded old orange Hoover in the corner, itself gathering the dust it should be sucking away at, and I feel life becoming a grotty downward spiral of beery farts and burps on mid-Sunday afternoons, motes in the air, unemptied ashtrays and unseemly rings on the coffee table, peanuts under the couch.

You’ve taken a perfectly inoffensive programme and more than easy-on-the-eyes host off the air, my incentive to clean, and replaced them with Rupert Pupkin on a set that looks like an underground torture bunker from a “Hostel” movie.

I can’t vacuum to that. It’s off-putting.

I had a ROUTINE going before. A habit, a good habit, one of the few good habits I have, or had, and you had to go and bugger it all up.

So I thought it only fair to let you know the difficulties I’m facing, the difficulties you are, in large part, responsible for, because I’m all at sea.

I’m not sure whether I should seek counselling, or just get someone in and pay them to do it all from hereon.

What do you think? Can you recommend anyone good?

Sincerely Yours,
Ross Sharp

GO *#!@ YOURSELF, GINA

Upon learning this fine morning of Gina “Richest Woman in The World” Rinehart’s passionate pearls of inspirational guidance to us all, I was, naturally, moved to fire off a brief missive to the Sydney Morning Herald, my only regret being that I was somewhat constrained by the rigors of civilised discourse expected by the publication …

What I take Ms. Rinehart’s exhortations to we of the underclasses to mean is that if we all spent far less time in the company of our families and friends and more of it making money, we would all become more like Ms. Rinehart.

Ms. Rinehart would do well to observe that there are many of us on the lower side of life who would far prefer to have a drink with their family than sue them.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

From today’s Sydney Morning Herald …

“Paul Sheehan says that ”Obama came to the White House in 2008 with a meagre legislative record”. Obama sponsored 137 bills and had two bills passed in just four years, and his successes were substantive ones at that: the ”Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006” and ”Mercury Export Ban Act of 2008” (he was, of course, absent from the Senate for much of 2008 while campaigning for the presidency).

Paul Ryan represented Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district for 13 years. In that time, he amended the American tax code in 2008 to change the 12.4 per cent tax on arrows to a flat 39¢ per arrow shaft. And in 2000, he had the name of the post office in Janesville, Wisconsin, changed to the ”Les Aspin Post Office Building”. That is it – his entire legislative record. His Democratic equivalent, Joe Biden, on the other hand, sponsored nine successful bills in 2007-08 alone.

Aside from Ryan’s slight accomplishments, the only meagre thing on show here is Sheehan’s commitment to balanced reporting.” – Andrew Taubman, Queens Park.

Ouch.

ISN’T IT ROMANTIC? (REFRAIN)

Here is a letter from today’s Sydney Morning Herald …

Malcolm Turnbull says for many years he gave little thought to the question of redefining marriage. He needs to think a lot more.

The essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and each other – this is why it has been a feature of all societies, even pre-religious ones.

The primary business of government is justice, and because children cannot be autonomous and independent, their most basic rights – to know where they come from and have a relationship with their biological mother and father – must be protected.

If Turnbull was less sanctimonious he might remember this voiceless section of our society rather than the romantic wishes of adults who already enjoy the same voting rights as everyone else.

If it really is ”all about commitment”, I would choose to marry my dog, Prince, which will be very possible if marriage is redefined.

Angela Sumners, Forestville.

Note the language, the total absence of any word or words describing marriage as a thing two people do when they’re in love.

That marriage is a device by which people “attach” themselves to each other, and little else.

That Turnbull is “sanctimonious”. Kettles. Pots.

That “romantic wishes” are irrelevent.

I’d marry a dog too, if I were given a choice between it and this woman.

DEAR EDITOR

A couple letters I sent to the Sydney Morning Herald last week. First one (sent the day after the Budget) didn’t make it, but the second (sent the day after Abbott’s reply) did …

I like it when that happens.

I understand our country is on the verge of complete collapse. It’s economy is ruined, business no longer functions, supermarket shelves are barren, and an increasing number of people, possibly millions, now spend their nights desperately searching skip bins for discarded hamburger wrappers hoping for a little leftover cheddar, or, God willing, a pickle. Not only that, but people are now in such desperate straits they have resorted to selling their first-borns for a Scotch-Finger biscuit and a scratch lottery ticket.

The price of electricity is such that vast numbers of our population will never know the simple joy of a lightbulb or a quick game of Grand Theft Auto on the Playstation. The nation is gripped by such destitution, tragedy and dysfunction that I understand tens of thousands of Australians are now planning to emigrate to more fortunate nations. Haiti, and Zimbabwe, for example, or Greece or France or Ireland or Iceland or even the United States, where one may earn a spectacularly rewarding living on a minimum wage of about $7.00 an hour as well as take advantage of their overly generous healthcare system and unemployment benefits. If it weren’t for the $2.00 a week for a year flood levy, the carbon tax, and the price of bananas, we’d probably be punching well above our weight by now. But no. How very sad it is to be an Australian just now, the most miserable, most deprived, most trouble and strife-stricken nation on the face of the planet.

Oh, woe. Oh, me. Oh, my. And so on.

And this is the one that got in …

A ”class war”? How precisely does this ”class war” manifest itself? Hordes of the unemployed and low-income workers storming the streets of Vaucluse armed with flaming torches and pitchforks, hurling petrol bombs through the dainty, stained-glass windows of random mansions? What utter nonsense.

I’ve also noticed that, since Obama made public his support on the issue of same-sex marriage, the usual arguments against are popping up in letters pages and comment threads …

Such as this one …

“OK, Why not have polygamy? Or Why not marry brothers to brothers? Or sisters to sisters? How about Dad and daughters? A hot granny and her grandson?”

Hell, I live in fucking Queensland.

From the sight and sound of it up here some days, I think they already do.

NOISE AND PEACE

Years ago.

John Howard’s war on refugees is in full swing, there are children in camps, the foreigners are muck, they’ll kill us all, and our very own blackfellas want to take our backyards from us and barbecue our pasty, pure white babies on the Weber.

What country is this?

The Sydney Morning Herald run an edition with a wrap-around cover featuring thumbnail photographs of the refugee children we’ve shoved into camps, their ages range from baby to teen, and I sit on the train to work, seething, looking at these pages and feeling like I’ve just been punched in the face.

I get to work, and fire off a letter to the editor, the first time I’d ever sent a letter to a newspaper, and they publish it. It was sent from another computer, I don’t have a copy, but it went a little like this …

“If my objections to the institutionalisation of child abuse in this country as a so-called “security measure” mark me a Howard-hater, then I’m just fine with that.”

… It becomes a regular habit over the next few years, this writing of letters and their occasional publication, not so much now.

But it’s the NOISE.

Every day it seems, some new loudmouthed halfwit slouches into view to proudly bellow it’s bogan pride at all and sundry, “We’re just sayin’ what people are ‘fraid to say”, which is, in essence “We hate niggers and we hate wogs and they should all fuck off and die and if they don’t we’ll kill ‘em”.

Alan Jones approves.

Stan Zemanek nods his agreement.

He’s dead, Zemanek. Brain tumour.

One night, all these many years ago, I’m standing outside the cinema complex in George Street, Sydney, saying goodnight to a friend after we’ve caught up for dinner, I hail a cab, one pulls over, I get in.

Two things strike me.

The driver, his skin is indistinguishable from the night.

And he’s listening to commercial talkback radio. Stan Zemanek.

Why, I have no idea, but it strikes me as … incongruous, to say the least.

Blah, blah, blah, goes this vile noise in the background, “Boats! Refugees! Terror! Illegals! What’s becoming of our country! Send them all back!” Blah, blah, blah, I’m not listening to this shit, I start talking to the driver.

Small talk. “How’s work?”, “Busy night?”, that type of thing.

He tells me he is from Somalia, maybe somewhere else, but some hellhole, and has been here a little while now.

I wish he’d turn the fucking radio off. The NOISE.

I ask him what he makes of this place so far. What is it he likes, if anything.

“The peace”, he says, “Very peaceful here. I like that.”

I have been given perspective.

“Very peaceful here”, he said.

I suspect he would know what peace is, this man.

The rest of us? Not so much …

THAT GREAT AUSSIE SPIRIT

From the letters page of today’s Sydney Morning Herald …

“… If you choose to live on a floodplain, or next to the sea, or in a desert in a global warming world then you should be prepared to accept the consequences or move to an area of lower risk. You should not expect your fellow Australians to bail you out every time a catastrophe occurs in what is now a high-risk environment. Such an attitude will wear the Aussie spirit thin” – Greg Watts, Narooma

There is a land, a land at the end of the rainbow, a magical land where the sun shines “just so”, a magical land where the rain falls “just so”, a land where all the rivers run just right, and the oceans never swell, a place of magical calm and order and peace and beauty where the winds never whip themselves into anything stronger than a sweet, cooling breeze, where the only fires that ever rage are the ones upon which we pop our “shrimps” at a weekend barbecue with beloved family and friends, and pixies gambol in the sweet green fields picking chocolate daisies as they la-la-la along on their way to make sweet, glorious love under the marshmallow mushroom cups beneath a fairy-floss sky.

And then there’s Narooma, where gobsmackingly stupid little ignorant bastards like Greg Watts live, the type of people who would think nothing, nothing at all, of leaning over a terminal cancer patient in a hospice and whispering in thin, weedy voices through thin, bloodless lips while their eyes narrow to mean little black slits and say, “Ya must’ve done sumfin’ to deserve it, so it serves ya fuckin’ right”.

Where the great Aussie spirit of which he speaks runs about as deep as a puddle of camel piss in the Saraha.

Let’s all move there, then, shall we?

(Cross-posted from Groupthink).

STALIN LIVES!

Busier than a maggot on a corpse right now, but not so busy I could let Gerard Henderson’s paranoid dickheadery of today go unremarked upon, and so …

Dear Editor (SMH),

The more that commentators like Gerard Henderson continue to insist the Greens are a party of proto-communist Stalinist despots just champing at the bit to sell gay whale heroin to the kiddies and mandate compulsory worship of the green fairies under the magic mushrooms, the more I’m inclined to vote for them. Thanks for the heads-up, Gerard.

Regards,
Ross Sharp

For Gerard’s next trick, something about Green “death panels” perhaps …

DICKHEAD OF THE DAY

From the Sydney Morning Herald in response to the recent Spencer Tunick photo shoot …

How many people were arrested for indecent exposure in a public place? From the lack of media reports, none. That the police allowed this disgraceful display calls into question their ability to enforce the law. Are they afraid to do that? That the citizens of this once great city appear not to have protested calls into question their level of support for immorality in their midst. This was not art, it was grubby voyeurism at its worst – David Stevens, Sunnybank Hills (Qld)

What a fuckwit.

UPDATE – I’ve been moved to fire off a response …

Dear Editor,

Re yesterday’s letter from David Stevens of Sunnybank Hills, Queensland protesting the “disgraceful”, “grubby voyeurism” and “immorality” of the recent Spencer Tunick photo shoot, I would like it be known that I am not native to Queensland, I only work here. 

Regards,
Ross Sharp

A LETTER FROM ONE MADMAN TO ANOTHER

Tim Anderson and Paul Wiegard,
Managing Directors,
Madman Entertainment,
PO Box 1480
Collingwood. VIC. 3066

February 22, 2010

Dear Tim and Paul,

Whilst I am most appreciative of the eclectic nature and quality of the films Madman choose to distribute within Australia, there is one aspect of many of them that (to borrow a phrase from Joseph Heller) is beginning to give me the willies.

And that is, the absence of English subtitles on English language films.

I’ve seen three of your titles recently that have no such option – Haneke’s remake of “Funny Games”, Tavernier’s “In the Electric Mist” and our very own “Wake in Fright”.

There are several million Australians who have a hearing impairment of some sort, ranging from mild (as in my own case) to severe, but this does not mean they have no interest in cinema or culture in general. In other words, it’s an impairment, not mental retardation, and people who are so afflicted don’t spend their waking hours shuffling about in ever-decreasing circles, dribbling down their shirtfronts and playing with their own poo for entertainment.

Yet even people with no such impairment will often resort to a subtitled option in order to understand an impenetrable accent, a mumbled line of dialogue or a conversation lost in a welter of background noise.

And whilst the amount of time and effort that went into the recent restoration and re-release of “Wake in Fright”, surely the best film ever made about Australia, is to be applauded, surely a little more thought could have gone toward providing subtitles so that a couple million more people could have access to it.

It’s bad enough that the deaf and hearing impaired have to scratch about in this day and age of technological wonders for that rarest of rarities, a subtitled cinema session, but there are many of us who would happily hand over our hard-earned cash to own a copy of some of these films on DVD, yet we’re not doing it if there are no subtitle options.

You see, essentially, it’s a lose-lose situation here, a “failure to communicate”, one might say. We lose the chance to see the film, you lose the opportunity to sell us a copy.

So, maybe you should give some consideration to making subtitles on English language films a standard feature on all future releases from now on, and have a re-think about including them on your back catalogue as well.

And that will ensure that otherwise even-tempered people like myself will not, when we pick up a copy of a movie in a rental outlet or store, be inclined to exclaim out loud, “Oh, for f**k’s sake, not again”, when we notice the absence of subtitles on something we’d really like to watch.

Just a thought.

Otherwise, keep up the good work.

Kind Regards,

Ross Sharp

A TONGUE, BRIEFLY

From Tongue, a dummy spit in atheist minor over at Groupthink.

And I had to laugh at this letter in today’s Sydney Morning Herald at the news of poor, put-upon Pauline’s imminent departure to the Mother country …

I dunno, these people – coming over here, taking our jobs … – Nick James London