..a television for a week we had no idea what it meant. My French is adequate enough to cause confusion, invite strangers to go roller skating or to admire the buttocks of my neighbour’s goat, but collapses entirely when the speed goes above the very slow and deliberate pace which one uses when addressing the…

..me over for the holiday weekend until I could arrange for another visit from the plumber to fix it properly. That evening I decided to pop down to the local Red Rooster as I’d absolutely nothing in the fridge. As I arrived home there were lightning flashes as the predicted change swept over Melbourne, so…

Currently we have state and federal government where advertising is seen not only as the most appropriate and almost certainly the only activity to solve a problem. The billboard struck me as the equivalent of Speed Kills advertisements which are seen as a substitute for proper driver training and a way of eliminating the gross…

Well, for one thing he’s usurped a traditional Rudd family name. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was named Minchin Rudd and my father still carries Minchin as his middle name. OK. In fact, I couldn’t give a fig about happenstance like that. It’s his talent I resent. M couldn’t have been absolutely riveted to…

Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. David packing. (Or so the story goes – David’s recently been giving my brother and me unsolicited hints that there’s another side to the story). Jump forward forty years and I’m holidaying in NZ and stopping off in Rororua on the way to see mum in Auckland. To my…

..rampant sodomy and a political career. If there is a difference. As a consequence of a life in a chilled climate body surfing in Victoria seems almost like dipping in thermal springs. As a society we have transitioned from sports players to sports voyeurs. With the rise and rise of sport as entertainment more and…

..whip like appendages slaying the peaceful denizens as they listen to the passing traffic in the early morn. They only thing that I am sure of is that they will be flowers. In fact there are a lot of surprises at the moment as one forgets where one has planted bulbs and tubers and, at…

..writ large on it, followed by the Australian Government logo and the various logos of the sponsoring medical-type partners along the bottom – or maybe the sponsoring is on the other foot, it being a government project. I guess I’m inclined to do the poo test. My sister Ann was on my case last time…

..and make the final report up. “Totally clear apart and medically sound apart from some wreckage from the Lusitania” Given that, prior to this procedure I have been taking peculiar and powerful drinks whose only role in life is to turn the one and a half metres of my colon into a pristine wasteland by…

..even a craze. Remember crazes? I was gardening in my garden that could pass for a jungle the other day and The Ballad of Davy Crockett infiltrated my brain and I started to sing the story of Davy Crockett so well known to every American and Australasian child of the era; Born on a mountain…

Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. Fortunately, the musty halls of every single-sex (male) secondary educational institution that ever was, haunted as they inevitably are by variously amusing and resentful, but universally misogynist masters, taught us impressionable acne-faced boys that we could exact a subtle, but satisfying revenge on womankind, employing the very weapon our mothers…

..where you might be going. A period, or even a singularity, when one realises that this is as good as it gets. When you have achieved the right balance between youthful folly and the wisdom of age – a brief moment in time – such as when Goldilocks found the best porridge, chair and bed…

..smile and a good word for everybody does not qualify, I’m sorry. I’m talking about real charisma, the sort that makes a room fall silent and the hairs rise at the back of your neck. Politics is a fertile ground for charismatics – and, of course, now that I’ve used that particular derivation of the…

Bearing in mind this is taken out of context, here’s what Michael Marissen had to say on the subject in his discussion with John Kleinig and Robin Leaver – I think you’ll get the gist: I mean there are two kinds of texts that people are uncomfortable with these days, no matter what their background….

.. is a Canadian citizen and Matt Canavan is an Italian citizen, claim that they did not know that had dual citizenship. Waters was born in Canada and moved to Australia as an infant. After Scott Ludlum, also another Green Senator discovered that he not actually given up his ability to carry both and Australian…