Tatt-ooh ... that's a weird one
Sun Herald
Sunday March 27, 2011
I HAVE seen some weird and wonderful tattoos in my travels but this one was right up there. In Melbourne on Thursday I spied a young woman with a particularly bountiful chest, wearing a low-cut blouse. And that was not the end of the near-nakedness. For though I seriously tried not to look - no, really - on each breast was the tattooed image of two more near-naked women in bikinis, leaning across the canyon between them to have a bit of a chat, and becoming ever more animated as the woman walked. Mind-boggling.Pell the plumber?AFTER TFF's intemperate rant at Cardinal George Pell last week - for his colossal presumption in attacking the professional work of climate scientists with a lifetime of learning behind them - I received an enormous amount of correspondence. Amazingly, most of it was positive, and of the negative ones, some of them weren't even written in crayon.One response that bears repeating, though, came from Professor Andy Pitman, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. He writes: "It's odd. Legally, I need a licensed electrician to change a light switch. I need a licensed plumber to do my plumbing. My solicitor needs a law degree. A Qantas pilot needs a licence. If I see a doctor, they have to have a qualification and if I see a surgeon, I want one that has loads of on-the-job experience, not one that has merely written a website."Yet in climate science, which is about as complex as any area of science, you can apparently be qualified if you have read some blogs. My question to Pell would be: 'Which papers in Nature, Science, Journal of Climate, Journal of Atmospheric Science, International Journal of Climatology - say in the last decade - does he find contrary to the consensus that humans are primarily responsible for global warming over the last three score years and 10?' There are none, by the way. Proving humans have not caused the warming over the last half-century would win you a Nobel Prize. The reason there are no papers proving global warming wrong is because there is simply not the vaguest hint that it is."Sobering, isn't it? The part about Jonesy, Cardinal Pell-Mell and Tony Abbott being in line for a Nobel Prize, I mean.The story beginsBRAVO Clover Moore. Why? Well, this week, in her capacity as Lord Mayor of Sydney, she handed over 25 grand to the Sydney Story Factory as seed funding to help open a kids' writing centre in Redfern later this year. Based on novelist Dave Eggers's hugely successful 826 Valencia project in the US, the SSF will be a place where any child - though particularly kids from indigenous and non-English-speaking backgrounds - can get free, one-on-one help with English homework or any writing project they can imagine from a variety of writers, publishers, editors, teachers, graphic designers and so forth. Pioneered here by Sydney Morning Herald journalists Catherine Keenan and Tim Dick, you'll be hearing more of it.Joke of the weekMAN is a woman's best friend. He will reassure her when she feels insecure and comfort her after a bad day.He will inspire her to do things she never thought she could do - to live without fear and forget regret.He will enable her to express her deepest emotions and give in to her most intimate desires. He will make sure she always feels that she's the most beautiful woman in the room and will enable her to be confident, sexy, seductive and invincible.Wait, sorry, I'm thinking of wine.It's wine that does all that.Sorry.They said itPIERS MORGAN, the heir to Larry King on CNN, saying he had banned the likes of Madonna on his show: "Lady Gaga is half her age, twice as good-looking, twice as talented and twice as hot."CLIMATE Change Minister Greg Combet demanding Opposition Leader Tony Abbott more formally dissociate himself from banners held up by protesters at Wednesday's rally saying such things of the Prime Minister as "Ditch the witch" and "Bob Browns [sic] bitch": "I really think he needs to do that in a decisive way ... he needs to apologise for being associated with it."It was, indeed, a shocking look for one who would be prime minister himself. It is unimaginable that Tony Abbott's hero, John Howard, would ever have done the same.OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott on the Prime Minister: "I'm not a doctor, but I tell you what, we are in the presence of a chronic condition - TDD, truth deficit disorder. It's almost like she's trying to earn frequent liar points."QUEENSLAND Premier Anna Bligh accuses Mayor Campbell Newman of abandoning flood-stricken Brisbane, after he announces that he is going to make a run to be premier: "Today as we see these extraordinary events, events that in my view undermine and make a mockery of our parliamentary democracy." TFF was in Brisbane on the day he announced, and the smart money seemed to be going on him to do it.Faction actionTHANK Gawd that is over. Has there been a duller election in Australian history? As I wrote a few weeks ago, this was less an election than a mercy killing, putting a moribund government out of its - and our - misery. Whoever takes over as ALP leader would be advised to begin by establishing among the survivors a simple rule: no more factions. Pin this message to their foreheads: "The people of NSW have had a gutful of us putting so much energy into our internal machinations, and the first step into getting back their trust will be to announce that the factions are done and dusted, and we now begin again."
© 2011 Sun Herald
